paulkienitz
paulkienitz's JournalWhen the right wing attacks "government", what are they mad at? Is it actually... democracy?
The GOP leadership has constantly attacked government and wanted to cut way back on what the government is able to do, and this has largely been for plutocratic reasons... but the GOP base has been strongly on board with this and also likes to attack government. And now both of those groups are finally getting what they wanted as they cripple and shut down department after department, hollowing them out so they cannot function properly. And what will the result be? Probably a good amount of economic misery and a whole lot of preventable mishaps and disasters, all affecting red states more than blue states. People who depend on a well functioning government to maintain the infrastructure of an orderly and prosperous society are going to find out what they get without that.
And while acknowledging the tough outcomes, I bet most of them won’t acknowledge that undermining government was a bad idea. They will either stick to their guns and say this is just a painful transition to a better future, or (as many have already started doing) they will blame Musk while excusing Trump, as if the two were any different in policy. They’ll somehow still think that "government" is what they're against.
Why is that? Why has it been like that back to the time of Reagan, and in some circles long before that?
I, along with many others, said the last time around that Trump didn’t transform the GOP, he revealed what it already was. And this time around, I think I'm finally understanding what Trumpism reveals about the history of attacking "government".
Most of this anti-government resentment specifically arose out of the Great Society era’s social welfare spending. What they specifically resented most was taxes being spent to help the disadvantaged. Particularly because the disadvantaged often weren’t white. What the Reaganoids resented most about "big government" was any money that went to people of color. And after that, anything that went to gay people, or the sorts of fringe bohemian white people often found in gay company, such as those in modern art or adacemia or any kind of underground noncapitalist space. They resented the government supporting people who were not Real Americans.
The Reagan conservatives didn't resent having a big government, the resented having to share a big government. They were mostly fine with big government when it was contesting with the USSR for control of the developing world, doing whites-only GI bills, and trying to land on the moon. I think their real problem was not that the government was too big to function, but that it was too big to keep to themselves.
The essence of democratic governance is that we all have to compromise with each other and share with each other. Nobody gets everything and everybody gets something. I think that’s the part they never liked, and like even less today.
Another thing that I was saying the first time around is that the right wing is never ever honest, either with us or with themselves. They can never come out and actually say what it is they really want — they always have to pretend the real agenda is something other than what it actually is. And only the most self-aware of them does this lying in a fully conscious way, while the rest internalize it as doublespeak. So when Musk’s Nazincel beige-shirts attack things like the CDC or the IRS or Medicaid, they get confused, and either think this actually is what they wanted, or they understand that it isn’t what they wanted but can’t articulate the difference. Like "I didn’t mean the government, I meant ‘The Government’, dang it."
I think what would satisfy them is not a government that’s smaller, but a government they don’t have to share. One that is not democratic except for their own kind. An apartheid government — one divided between Real American citizens and nonvoting residents. And for some of them, not even that much democracy. For some of them, the resentment of compromise and sharing also extends to each other, so they’d rather have a feudal system of local gentry instead of any kind of bureaucracy that’s able to function on a national scale, and genuinely lose the government and the constitution. Most of them don’t want to go that far, but in sharing the desire to attack "government", I’m now thinking both of these groups are driven by the same hostility toward accepting democracy, which is founded on the idea that everyone gets as much of a voice as they do, since they are no better than anyone else.
A lot of them really don’t like being no better than anyone else. It’s been said that the unifying idea of right wing ideologies across all times and cultures is the principle that some people should be above other people. True democracy is founded on rejecting that bogus principle. I think the right wing has been dancing around the idea that they don’t really like democracy for a long time now, and with the emergence of Trumpism they’re starting to bring that idea more openly from the fringes toward the mainstream, because they’re now facing a future without a white majority to outvote people of color.
The Musk-Trump regime has been operating on two fronts: one (Musk’s) has been the attack on the functioning infrastructure of civil society, trying to undo or sabotage the workings of national-scale governance. The other (Trump’s) has been a series of symbolic attacks on everyone who is not a Real American, in order to establish a social message that says these people stand above those people. Sometimes these attacks are truly just symbolic, like “the Gulf of America”, and other times it’s very real for the people targeted yet has only symbolic value for Trump’s supporters, such as all the deportations. And though most of them don’t support the Musk half very much, they really like the Trump half, even if they get no actual benefit from it. What they want is to live in an America that values themselves and people like them, and does not value people unlike them — an America that cheers Real Americans and bullies everyone else, to show that they are on a lower social tier. And it can’t do that as long as it remains truly democratic. They want at best the pseudo-democracy of "we voted and decided that you don’t get a vote."
I think this is what actually satisfies these people — not less government, but a less fair government. And a lot of them probably support Muskian cuts as long as they are cuts to things that serve minorities or general equality, and are puzzled why he would cut things that serve Real Americans, because that's not what they meant by asking for a smaller government.
The guy used to contribute. Reduced global warming. Then I guess he took a lot of drugs.
Now he's become such an immediate threat to the United States that even Trump himself is a back-burner concern. Elon needs to be in handcuffs pronto. Trumpsky mostly talks a big game and doesn't do much, but Eloon is indulging every oligarchic fantasy of obliterating the government, so his fellow plutocrats can see that golden path opening up toward being an umimpeded ruling class. Of course, they never appreciate that the society they want to rule over has only become so valuable a place to try to rule because it has those laws and institutions that keep monsters of privilege in check, and that without them they will be back in the bronze age, ruling over a nation that can no longer provide modern conveniences such as, for instance, absence of bubonic plague.
Philip Low finally clears up Elon for me.
Mr. Low has known Elon for a long time, and has cleared up what it is that Elon really wants, and why he thinks throwing Nazi salutes will get him there. What he wants, apparently, is power — specifically, to have more power than Trump. He's competing with him while pretending to support him. And he was thinking that the way to come out on top was to do to Trump what Trump did to the other Republicans: steal the right-wing base by out-Naziing the competition. But he may have found that even for the GOP base there is such a thing as too much Nazi, and Trump was the one who correctly judged just the right amount.
https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid05Rbj3qGVVYzmtinHsCv36egJvfSac1tBxYSydGNAGv6xaT33ewdvbiU67xotkUYSl&id=1686015532&_rdr
What I have come to understand about the republican base is that it all runs on doublethink.
Most of them are perfectly capable of behaving kindly and decently. But inside their minds the dots are left unconnected, and they don't understand, or don't let themselves understand, that what they're voting for is in conflict with the way they like to treat people around them on a personal level. They think they're voting for freedom when they're supporting oppression, they see themselves as embodying kindness yet they enable cruelty, they identify themselves as upholders of the law while they break it, and they have no idea why anyone would ever think they were racist. The people in the Jan 6 insurrection seem to have mostly been wrapped up in some Walter Mitty heroic fantasy; many of them came to a horrible realization later on when they comprehended what they had actually done. (Being dragged into court and charged with a felony does help encourage this realization.) There's always a disconnect, always an element of self-delusion. You'd think that this would only affect a minority but it seems to be the norm among them. I'm guessing that for a lot of them this comes out of being raised with the kind of religion that demands to be believed in without evidence, so their minds are primed for believing lies in any area where the truth would create any conflict with their community. They end up supporting oppressive authoritarianism, yet if the day ever comes when they find themselves subject to authoritarian oppression, they'll be astonished and shocked and have no idea how it could have happened. They won't let themselves understand what they are doing.
on calling weirdos weird
(something I just posted on farcebook)
Branding today's GOP as "weird" may seem like simple schoolyard namecalling, but I think it highlights how the party has gone off the rails in the wake of Тяцмр. It used to be the party for the rich, the reactionary, and the religiose, and as such did genuinely represent a lot of the mainstream... now it's the party for klansmen, conmen, and crypto-bros, for AI evangelists and billionaire stans, for scared xenophobes and terrified gender-scolds, for racists and rapists, for monarchists and militiamen, and for those who just can't deal with the fact that there are women. In short, all of the most hopeless types of dysfunctional outcasts who you least want to spend any time in the company of. The Trumpified Republican party is sending all of these antisocial factions the message that their time has finally come, and if they want the world they've dreamed of, all they have to do to get it is overcome the power of normal people to vote.
There was a time when being weird was kinda cool. But now that society has learned some positives from weirdos of the past, the weirdos we've got left are getting uglier and uglier.
the strange thing is that it's getting worse
It seems to me that advances for feminism peaked a generation ago, and since then misogyny has been regaining mindshare in a way that can't be explained by the inheritance of traditional patriarchal values. Red pill creeps have been forced to invent a whole new ideology of their own to justify it, because they're growing a new base of misogyny instead of just preserving what came before. And it isn't just them -- other indicators are going backwards for how positively women are being seen and treated. For instance, the number of women in IT jobs peaked around 2000 and then started dropping. The anecdotal stories I hear from women about, for instance, poor medical care have gotten worse rather than better over this last generation.
Why do even the most authoritarian right wingers keep using the words "liberty" and "freedom"?
This is the paradox of the US right wing which baffles non-Americans trying to observe our country, plus Americans in the center and left trying to understand the weirdos who keep messing things up for us: the fact that the fascist wing in our country, and all their right-of-center allies, keep pronouncing how much they believe in liberty even as they destroy it. It cannot be made sense of in logical terms, or "libertarians" would be staunch foes of fascists instead of all too often being their friends and allies.
As far as I can see, the answers vary -- there are nuances that differ based on the particular flavor of right winger in question. For instance, those who belong to religious cults define freedom in a narrow specific way: freedom from government authority which competes with the religious authority they want to establish. Their internal rules might be downright totalitarian, but when the government interferes with their ability to impose such an authoritarian way of life, out comes the rhetoric of freedom.
Capitalist types, of course, define it as freedom to make money without the government causing problems when their profits come at a human cost. Small-government types focus on freedom from paying taxes. And racist types may define it as freedom to not associate with minorities, or freedom from being expected to meet some basic standard of decent civil behavior around people they don't like.
The common ground is that they all believe in "freedom for me and mine, but not for you and yours".
If nothing has changed, why is Ye back on? ...and how is Twatter even going to survive?
All the other Musk ventures, no matter how much you dislike his bullshitting and worker abuse, have an upside that some of us can be enthusiastic about. But not this one. This looks like the first Elon company where his involvement consists of 100% fuckup and 0% genius.
And it's gonna stick to him. Twitter is going to collapse at least partially, maybe entirely, and his responsibility for the collapse will be remembered for the rest of his days.
contrast Florida's behavior with California
California may well be getting a larger total of refugees and undocumented immigrants than Florida gets, yet we don't dump them anywhere. In fact, we get dumped into, because most states other than New York like to ship their homeless population here. They call it "greyhound therapy" in the social assistance trade. So we end up taking care of half of the entire country's homeless population, and on top of that most of the immigrants and refugees from the Pacific side. And nobody needs to be sent anywhere else.
Zero excuses for Florida and Texas.
So which is more fascist, Parler or Gab?
I took a peek. Parler had the likes of Newt Gingrich and Tulsi Gabbard prominently featured, and lots of right wing fantasy retellings of recent events... but Gab led off immediately with Trumpsky himself, and only took six more posts to feature someone saying the Jews are behind it all. And RT is on there, acting as bad as the domestic conspiracy theorists. Gab wins — if you're a Nazi, that's the place for you.
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