It's not economic anxiety, it's people who've always been cruel finding a guy that makes fun of all the people they hate and worshipping him for it.
I feel like that 'economic anxiety' shit is given to them too much of an excuse. Sure, it may agitate things, but these are by and large people who were already innately hostile to anyone different.
It's sad, but that's what it is.
Yeah, I’m very skeptical of the theory that people who are cruel to the homeless act like that because they “know they’re a paycheck or two away” from being down here with me.
There are two reasons.
- That just sounds like one of those ignorant disingenuous things people say about people they don’t like, i.e. “Feminists support abortion because they’re jealous of stay at home moms” or whatever, and not a genuine analysis.
- These people are masters and mistresses of cognitive dissonance. They do not care about anything you or I have to say. They are cruel because they know they can get away with it.
Similarly (?) I grew up in a time when there were plenty of homophobic guys who weren’t gay at all. (Some of them were).
Actually there is a material basis for "the cruelty is the point." Its about the enforcement of hierarchies. Thats why the petty boug are the base of fascism. The big material problem for them is not really that they are economically precarious - its that their class position is precarious. If they loose the jet ski dealership they'd have to get a job!
Same goes for how rascism has been used to divide the workers. The "White Wage" is alive in well and they want payment in perfomative cruelty. That's what Jim Crow gave them back then, and Trump is what they get now.
Econmic anxiety is a bullshit excuse that is given to fascist USians to pretend like they have a point other than cruelty.
Yeah the cruelty is a manifestation of the enforcement of the superstructure ( specifically hierarchies based on class, race, gender, etc.) as it has been shaped by the base (capitalism)
I don't really understand this comment, you seem to be saying they're not economically precarious, it's just that they are economically precarious and thus are materially incentivised to enforce the hierarchy, and finally conclude that the point of that enforcement is cruelty and not economic anxiety. It feels very self-contradictory.
There is no material basis for being cruel for cruelty's sake. They're cruel because the system incentivises them to be.
I feel like this explanation gives them a lot of excuses and leeway.
Maybe I'm not getting you? I don't want to think anyone here is giving reactionaries any sort of leeway.
I think people are sometimes just innately hostile to things they perceive to be different.
I mean, sometimes people are just racist dude. Because of stupid shit like they don't like the way black people look or something else ridiculously petty.
People are not innately hostile or racist, their attitudes are products of their life circumstances. Not because of their genes or because they just decided being a racist would be fun or whatever.
Doesn't mean they're not assholes now, of course they are. But it also means you shouldn't write them off as if their souls are cursed and unsaveable or are just genetically sadistic. They, like we, are just apes doing what they learned to do.
Hierarchy and bigotry has been going on since before capitalism was even a thing. The Anglo saxons called the celts "wealas" or "foreigner" and treated them far worse than other germanic people in old Britain. (Where the name "Wales" comes from, the welsh today preferred to be called cymru or "fellow countrymen")
Sometimes people are just inherently hostile to those different from them.
I don't think it's in the genes, but it's also not solely because of 'economic anxiety'.
A lot of red browns like to make your argument so I'm wary of it and it always feels like it's not realized how disgusting these people can truly be towards their other humans. There was a video the other day of some fascists in Tennessee sitting there watching black kids walk to school and calling them "removed" and all kind of shit. Fuckin gross dude.
Edit:https://x.com/WUTangKids/status/1815132233969332395
If only we could appeal to the better nature of these guys, right?
I think regardless. I'm not too worried about "saving reactionaries souls". That's pretty low on my list compared to anti racist and anti fascist activism.
And? Adverse material conditions have been a thing long before capitalism, too.
I'm not going to watch the video, I'm very well aware that racial abuse and fascism is awful.
I'm frankly wary of speech that writes people off as "inherently" bad as basically being eugenicists by another name. If someone doesn't accept that material conditions are at least the most significant cause of most social behaviours, then I don't see why they give a shit about collectivism, just accept that capitalism is "innate" human nature and call it a day.
That's pretty low on my list compared to anti racist and anti fascist activism.
We absolutely agree on this.
It's not, but reactionaries are pretty fucking cruel. But you could easily argue that their role in the economic system requires that they be fine with exploiting others, especially the marginised. You could bring settler or protestant history into it if you want to expand.
Exactly...
I just feel like sometimes certain sects of the left, are prone to giving these shitbags excuses. Or trying too hard to explain why they are the way they are.
The contemporary reactionaries are actively trying to con camp and get rid of anyone they deem to be a 'freak'. If they had their way, 90% of us hexbears would be fuckin dead and gone.
I've spent the last 20+ years with the life philosophy of "think exactly the opposite of the reactionaries" and it's never failed to be correct.
Tends to work well for me as well. I don't like laying my head down at night thinking I've treated someone like shit
Toss a "false consciousness to distract the working class from their oppressors" in there
Was waiting for someone to pop in with this. I don't really care if it Is or isn't.
it probably is materialist btw, the system molds people into becoming willingly cruel. Human nature under capitalism is one that thinks greed and cruelty are good things.
It's not one or the other, the question is what percentage of these things and other factors make a chud a chud.
A lot of it is the cultural history and echoes of Calvinism expressed by people who have no clue who John Calvin was or what he thought. Settler-collonial meritocracy mindset divorced of any historical materialism. Might makes right. "Fuck you, I've got mine" as a foundational maxim applied to an ever-shifting definition of in-group/out-group expanding idea of "real Americans" and whiteness.
Are you talking about the scotch irish presbyterian/methodist/baptist colonizing stock?
That seems to be who you are describing more or less.
Even my bill Clinton loving father who was a hippie back in the day, was of scotch irish ancestrt and he was pretty damn racist. against black people. His family were from the Ozarks areas mostly and presbyterian and baptists.
It was also calvinist scots irishmen who formed the kkk
Is there something intrinsic to the calvinist branches these people follow that instills bigotry?
Just curious.
Is there something intrinsic to the calvinist branches these people follow that instills bigotry?
I really think it's the material conditions of descendants of white settlers having an economically advantageous position over people of color and immigrants that leads them to being more disproportionately petite bourgeois than those demographics and deeply fearful of encroaching proletarianization as a result, and that economic relation driving cultural superstructure phenomena that reinforce and solidify those bigotries.
Anecdotally, my grandpa sounds pretty similar to your dad in ways. He was a WW2 vet that was on Omaha Beach that lied about his age to enlist young because his family was broke after the Depression and Dust Bowl in the Midwest and wanted to get out, fucking hated Nazis and anything resembling capital-F Fascists his entire life, fell in love and married a Japanese woman and started a family with her after being stationed there after the war and then fighting in Korea and getting honorably discharged after getting a purple heart in service, went home and settled down in Kansas after he got out, but still was a zealous anti-communist cold warrior and soft racist despite having biracial children and being "a good democrat."
My aunt told me a story of them eating dinner with him once at his house when they had the TV on, and the local news had some story about a local Klan march that had a scuffle with protesters and cops, and when the Klansman was interviewed about it, grandpa said something like "well I don't like them but he's making some good points about the races all being better when they're with their own kind," and my aunt was just like "what the fuck dad, mom's Japanese and me and my siblings are mixed race and you always say we're the love of your life" and he was just kind of dumbfounded for awhile. He was personally a really sweet person and the kind of old lib that liked to talk up any opportunity to describe a person of color he interacted with at a job or something as "what a nice guy" and "really professional" as a way of showing his "not-racist-but" bonafides but betrayed a lot of his own prejudices unknowingly in doing so. There were and still are a lot of those kind of people in America.
That's a big factor, but the Anglos and German immigrants played a big part historically, and it shifted eventually to eastern-European immigrant groups and Latinos as the moving target of "American" shifted from the late 19th century to the post-WW2 era to the current day. I'm far from an expert on it, but from what I know, a similar thing has kind of happened on the right in Brazil in Bolsonaro's base of ex-Catholics becoming born-again Evangelicals because of their relative comfort and economic security becoming at odds with Francis's more collectivist/soft-left messaging meshing with Lula's platform.
