I mean, yes, the US is a white supremacist settler colonial nation. But it seems like just in the last year that all over the country at school board meetings white folks are getting whipped up into a frenzy over the idea that maybe the US isn't quite so perfect, and that white people just might happen to have had some historic advantages that POC were never given. These meetings are something else. White folks getting into fights and making threats over it.

So what has changed? Is it just a reaction to BLM? I don't think material conditions for white folks have degraded all that significantly in the last year to where there's a materialist answer (though I'm open to hearing it). Is it manufactured outrage from conservative media? I genuinely don't know. But this social phenomenon fascinates me - meaning how white people are reacting to relatively minor attacks on white supremacy and the fact that demographics are shifting and will create a more diverse country in the future.

  • MarxMadness [comrade/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Conservatives have literally less than nothing tangibly to offer anyone through the political process

    And yet they manage to be successful not only in the U.S. (where the federal government is set up to allow certain types of minority rule), but elsewhere, too.

    It goes to show that material conditions are only one factor in forming people's political opinions, and probably a shrinking one in the imperial core. Standards of living have been so high for so long that they're part of the status quo and no one gets credit for them. Major political change seems impossible, so a promise to improve conditions doesn't carry the weight it theoretically could. And then there's the whole conservative propaganda project, which is largely designed to decouple people's political opinions from material reality.

    We can't rely on deteriorating conditions to drive people left, and accelerationism is completely nonsensical in this environment. Deteriorating material conditions make people more receptive to leftist ideas, but we have to put in the work of guiding them in the right direction and fleshing out those ideas.