first off, i nominate this for the greatest image of 2021: https://twitter.com/reezels/status/1351732376632586240
TLDR: Warren-voting blue checkmark accounts are mad about people doing Marxist science and not simply saying “qanon are evil because of their essential nature”. These smarmy anti-dirtbags did cultural appropriation of comrade dril’s tweets to mock the idea of looking at how our environment shapes our ideology and worldviews. Libs who think covid denial is evil are doing capitalist denial by obscuring the material base of alienation which generated the mental superstructure which qanon parrots.
https://twitter.com/dbessner/status/1351705165485641730
This guy from Dissent ("if I was your editor" if I was your Red Guard, your cringe ass nerd account would be deleted) agrees with the Warren libs that historical materialism is not worth talking about. Very weird to see someone reduce their cognitive dissonance by getting aggro and shrieking that something "doesn't matter!!!" and "isn't important!!!".
Perhaps these 2 Woke 2 Empathy radlibs want to obscure the material effects of capitalism because they are privileged PMC class traitors? In any case, they're actually in the same category as Qanon: they lack a scientific explanation of political economic history. Which is why they desperately need to reaffirm their idealistic worldview by demanding certain groups of others to suffer because they’re "bad people" (racists, conspiracy theorists, Amber):
https://twitter.com/AlbertTappman/status/1351682508484702210
Idealists believe cultural issues matter more than our material struggle to survive under late capitalism. Marxism is a “bad analysis” because it doesn’t simply categorize people with childish superhero movie labels.
https://twitter.com/dbessner/status/1351692059812352001
These progressive Warren voters need to differentiate themselves from "evil unscientific fascists" because they believe themselves to be good people (their Reaganite politics are, like qanon, claiming to be "saving the children" despite destroying the American family unit for profit). Apparently you’re antifa if you never say such "embarrassing" things like talking about Jeffrey Epstein's friends and bourgeois business partners. Talking about the endemic sexual abuse in the ruling class is apparently a tenet of fascism to these anti-dirtbags. That's why Obama let his daughter intern with that Hollywood rapist, it would be impolite and rude not too!
Okay, so where does fascism come from then? It's not like a bunch of people just sponaneously got together one day and decided to do a fascism. As Marxists, we have to look beyond individual actors and address the conditions that led to fascism taking root in the first place. A material analysis doesn't justify their behavior or keep us from punishing them, but it does help us find ways to stop the disease of fascism from spreading. Wouldn't you agree that this should be our first priority?
The whole point of what I said is that it IS where fascism generally comes from but it's not a good argument.
A lot of people are doing super lazy analyses that basically boil down to "well these people are just angry at the 2008 crash or something" which overlook many aspects of ideology, and they're not scientific because they have to cherry pick examples to make it fit their narrative. But when you look at qanon, it's overwhelmingly white boomers who are usually retired and not struggling financially. There's many reasons why these theories gain so much steam in a declining America but you're not gonna find them by just going "oh, it must be because they're mad at the recession and struggling" or whatever because it's just not where these people are coming from usually. It's not material analysis, it's just a shortcut to "explain" more complex issues.
It's also kinda silly how people confuse different forms of fascism and think they must come from the same place just because they are broadly "fascism". The rise of fascism in Italy is much different from the fascist regimes in Latin America, and these are much different to qanon, they're not the same phenomenon.
I haven't read the article yet; but i've noticed that whenever i see these arguments about the origin of fascism they tend to leave out the elephant in the room: That America was from it's conception a system that thrived in oppression and that little fact hasn't changed throughout its history. With this in mind it's natural to think that a fundamentally fascist system will create fascist subjects.
In this case both the argument that Q-anon are fundamentally evil and the argument that they are poor victims of material circumstances feel like they are trying to ignore this fact on purpose. It's easy to punish or try to rehabilitate the individual, but it' is a far larger task to recognize the oppression inherent in the system and fundamentally change it.
All people are shaped to one or the other degree by material circumstances, it doesn't make someone more or less evil. But most qanon people are bigoted and reactionary as fuck. Most were already kinda like that, some of them had their brains broken by the internet. The question is why so many of them are so susceptible to that sort of thing, and yes, it does have to do with the fact that the US used to be segregated, it has to do with the prevalent ideology in the US and the values that are promoted, it has to do with religious fundamentalism, it has to do with growing mistrust of institutions as the empire is declining, all sorts of things. All these things have a material basis and origin but it's not so simple as "oh it's poor people blaming their problems on something else/they're mad at the recession" or whatever. It's just simplistic economism and it shouldn't pass as "marxist science" because it isn't very helpful or convincing.
Like, the article was talking about how you will find people with all sorts of backgrounds in qanon. Yeah, if you look hard enough, you will find SOME people from every kind of background. But just look at any random shot of the people storming the capitol, it's a mayo fest.
Thank you for putting it so succinctly. This is basically the point I was struggling to put into words.