- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Across the coalition, some supporters who once viewed Trump as MAGA’s greatest asset are beginning to question whether he’s become its biggest liability.
The midterm losses amounted to more than a repudiation of Trump. They were a referendum on the political and cultural movement he built. A defining force in American politics that began as a campaign slogan during Trump’s 2016 presidential run now faces a potentially existential reckoning after voters disillusioned with soaring fuel prices, the Iran war and Washington corruption delivered Democrats decisive congressional majorities.
I’ll respond to both of you here.
I have considered myself anti-authoritarian since I was a teenager in the 80’s. I was a “punk” who associated with a group of people who called ourselves SHARPS or Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice. I cringe at how silly that sounds now as I type that out, but I think it illustrates where our hearts were at the time. We absolutely did not think it was silly at the time. It was a violent response to a problem we had with racist skinheads being absolutely everywhere we wanted to be. I think this ideology saved us from a much worse fate, because we really did turn the tables over time by becoming a very violent problem for the racist skinheads.
I am from the south, just outside of a major city, but this ideology/response actually started somewhere up north and just spread overnight to us through punk shows (where racist skinheads were kicking everyone’s asses). My best friend at the time had his leg broken when he was attacked by skinheads outside of a club downtown one night, and that was the beginning for us. We were 14 when that happened, lying about our age and begging for rides from friends to get into punk shows. My group of friends would have become violent in response to the racists whether the SHARP ideology became available to us or not. Sadly, a couple of those friends grew up to become conservatives somehow. They are fucking dead to me and it hurts my soul to say that. But back then, we just absolutely overwhelmed the racists at shows and at school. We picked on them and bullied them every chance we could and when we could, we jumped them just as they jumped us before. It got to a point where they stopped showing up to punk shows entirely by the early 90’s
Anyway, that’s a lot of words to say I have always despised fascist bullies and I admit I may have a bit of a warped sense of what constitutes a “nazi”. I have given this so much thought that I may be guilty of overthinking it all. But, in 2020, watching my conservative colleagues become complete dickbags, I felt all that rage coming back. That is when I think I began to see all conservatives as nazis. It seems extremely obvious to me that nazism in the 40’s was just unchecked conservatism. Social distancing led me to retire from my career to just get away from conservatives. And things have only gotten worse with conservatism/nazism since then.
I have more to say, but this is already a really longwinded comment.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. Fuck conservatives. They are all nazis in my book.
I’ve read Altemeyer’s book, but I’d forgotten that his figure was also pretty much 30%. I hope the other fella is right, and all you need to get authoritarian personalities on the same page as us societally is to make sure leadership is thoroughly and vocally prosocial. In a society like that, I’d still hate conservatives and the religious right, but things would definitely feel more politically sustainable.
That said, billionaires are outspending for conservatives everywhere and mostly getting what they want from everyone who isn’t a conservative, and capitalism makes that the likeliest outcome. The Nazis have to be fought from every direction, top-down and bottom-up - and yes, that means also punching sideways. I’ve tearfully shed a few dear friends who can’t get with the program myself, and one who outright went insane with incel racist shit after too much 4chan. Each one of them does need to change and grow, but it’s deluded to think they’re our job to fix.
Even walked away from a friend of 20 years. I still have a pretty complete mental model of him in my brain. I haven’t needed to talk to him to know what he’d say for years, and nothing I could think to say was changing his mind. So I gave up. Fuck conservatives, authoritarians, and billionaires forever.
So yeah, longwinded comment to say I basically agree, but I haven’t given up all hope yet.
I’m sorry about your loss of friends. Your comment about knowing exactly what your friend of 20 years would say in any situation and realizing he cannot be saved really resonates with me.
I also hope the other commenter (and Altemeyer) are right, although I have not read the book. I have a glimmer of hope for us, particularly after seeing the results of the midterms. But the fact that we’re having this conversation suggests we all know the fight is nowhere near done. Esoecially as long as billionaires exist.
Stay strong. You are not alone, as much as it may sometimes feel that way. The more people I talk openly with about these subjects, the more common experiences I find, even with people I would not have suspected felt similarly. All the advice to “find community” seems to be pretty accurate, albeit challenging.
Bob Altemeyer’s The Authoritarians book is the one thing I would recommend to someone like yourself, they demystify the mindset of these people in a way that doesn’t condone them or sugarcoat anything, but still manages to make them back into comprehensible human beings. The author’s passed away but his site offers them for free, super recommend. I should reread them, apparently I haven’t digested everything.
Unrelated tangent about another book in the same mental category for me (transformative, reframes some of my life’s struggles in a way that makes it easier to process, clear and concise professional writing style) is Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. These two books had all the tools I need to begin to heal from the sorry predicament of being me, in this time and place. Maybe you’d feel the same? Pardon the random too-familiar sidebar.
Thank you for the excellent recommendations. I’ve been looking for a new line of books, and these sound like a good fit. It’s hard for me to imagine forgiving any conservatives right now. I think my anger for these overt comic book villains makes it hard to see alternative views of them, but I’d love to find some glimmer of hope that there is a peaceful solution to all this.
More importantly, you can’t really process things emotionally without understanding why they happened, if you’re anything like me. Knowing why society is fucked helps me get to a better place mentally and - in my wildest dreams, puts me in a position to make any changes that leave the world better than I found it. By the same token, learning why I grew up too early and always felt emotionally lonely can hopefully help me raise my kid so he doesn’t have that issue. These books help. <3