Interesting opinion piece in The Guardian by Kieth Kahn-Harris, a sociologist (link). Executive summary: One of the key features of the populist wave is a certain proud incompetence. .... They are uninterested and incapable of conducting policymaking and government in a systematic, productive way. They make a virtue of their lack of understanding; they cause chaos and delight in destruction. They are a kind of taunt, in the same way as Trump is: we have no idea what we are doing, we will destroy .... ... [W]hat these people offer their supporters is a guarantee: we will make sure that however much your life degenerates, our power as degenerate white men should reassure you that there is still hope. Yes, you are better than we are, but you don’t have to be. In a bewildering, chaotic world, this is immensely reassuring. Excerpts: Online and offline, there is a rich and growing milieu of radical racist thinkers and activists. .... However, white supremacy, as used to describe a belief in the racial superiority of white people, may not be the best concept to help us understand what is going on here. It’s not that there isn’t a barely concealed attempt to rehabilitate the long and clearly documented history of white racism in “western” democracies. The issue is that I’m not sure that it’s “supremacy” that is the goal here, so much as a licence for a perverse kind of degeneracy. Consider the contrast between Barack Obama and Trump. Obama is not a perfect human being, nor was he a perfect US president. But it’s impossible to deny his qualities. He is intelligent, competent, witty, plain-speaking, empathetic and has a loving relationship with his family. Obama is also a man who was not born into wealth and power, and worked hard to make something of his life. Trump is the reverse: incompetent, mendacious, rude and seemingly incapable of non-instrumental relationships. The only way he has made anything of his life is through being born into privilege, with sufficient reserves of family capital to allow him to build a “business” based on little more than bragging. Aside from his politics, Trump is simply a man who falls short of any moral code you could care to imagine. Politicians are often cynical, cruel or corrupt, but a complete absence of human decency is rare. But for millions of Americans to choose Trump and to continue to support him cannot simply be dismissed as voters “holding their noses” and selecting the individual who could best forward their agenda, regardless of his personal qualities. For a significant proportion of his supporters, it was a deliberate choice for moral degeneracy, even a celebration of it. It is also a reproach to the Obama years and to Obama personally. A bad white man will always be better than a good black man, regardless of the political platforms they support. The degeneracy of Trump tells us something about changing trends within white racism. Social Darwinism, and “scientific” attempts to prove the superiority of the “white race” still have a presence on the far right. But I don’t think that this is the dominant ideological driver behind the resurgence of white racism. .... What I think we are seeing is something rawer, a lust for power, coupled with an unvarnished hatred of non-white others that sees little need to disguise itself. This is a white racism that is predicated on nothing other than a desire to dominate and subjugate. .... This is not white supremacy as we have understood it. It is a move to demonstrate that whiteness can be as morally degenerate as one wishes it to be and still prevail. At the heart of this proud degeneracy is an insecurity. A fear of “white genocide” has become normative on the far right, based on conspiracy theories about the likes of George Soros encouraging mass immigration as an attempt to replace the white race. Trump has come very close to trying to validate this myth. At the now infamous rally in Charlottesville in August 2017, the marchers chanted: “You will not replace us”. This suggests an awareness that white power cannot rest on justifiable foundations. Indeed, outside the old-style far right, the very concept of whiteness and race itself is given limited intellectual justification. All there is left is assertion and hate. Degeneracy is not confined to the openly racist far right – it is a theme that runs through the populist right more generally, even when racism is absent or not emphasised. One of the key features of the populist wave is a certain proud incompetence. There are of course still competent rightwing populists around, but it is frequently the likes of Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage or Matteo Salvini who prevail. They are uninterested and incapable of conducting policymaking and government in a systematic, productive way. They make a virtue of their lack of understanding; they cause chaos and delight in destruction. They are a kind of taunt, in the same way as Trump is: we have no idea what we are doing, we will destroy, we are contemptible human beings and still you love us. Some analyses of the rise of Trump and the populist right claim that they draw their popularity from those who feel “left behind” and see their own flaws gloriously reflected in them. This is only true to an extent. If even a tiny fraction of Brexit-supporting Sunderland was as blithely destructive as Farage, the city would be a smouldering ruin. No, what these people offer their supporters is a guarantee: we will make sure that however much your life degenerates, our power as degenerate white men should reassure you that there is still hope. Yes, you are better than we are, but you don’t have to be. In a bewildering, chaotic world, this is immensely reassuring. If white racism and populism now rests on nothing more than naked power and self-assertion, there will be no need to wade through the academic verbiage about “bell curves” and black crime rates before we can tackle the problem. And perhaps the very degeneracy of Trump and the rest will begin to pall after a while. Most people – “white” or otherwise – are simply much better human beings than the leaders of the populist right. Maybe wallowing in the muck of white degeneracy will become such a sordid experience that an eventual realisation that it is better to be an Obama than a Trump will take hold. Maybe the best approach to resisting white degenerate leaders is to point out to their supporters that, far from being “deplorables”, they are usually better than those who lead them.
No, it isn't. It's routine. Just as it is routine to ascribe high competence and governing capability to Trump. White supremacy, in other words. This guy doesn't seem to understand what supremacy means to the Republican base - it means being on top, dominating. It's fundamental to white supremacy as others have understood it. What they chanted was: "Jews will not replace us". The occasional use of "you" also meant Jews, in origin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_Evropa The American ones don't see themselves as incompetent. They already know politicians are morally inferior. They expect nothing else - and they project that moral inferiority unto "both sides". Meanwhile: you cannot point out anything to the Republican base. They aren't accepting information from you. They aren't listening. This Guardian article reads as if written by a European - it's common to read European intellectual analysis and commentary that fails to grasp the nature and depth of American racism, its profound and systemic influence.
Trump knows that he can not lead the intellectuals of the USA. He knows he is incapable of leading any one with a sound education. So of course he chooses the base he can lead and those who are smart in the Republican Party will take advantage of his limitations. Destruction of the Republican party as we know it is inevitable if Trump is allowed to continue. IMO We are currently seeing similar with the imminent wipe out of the Australian Government LNP on the same grounds. Dropping the smarts for the sake of popularity just doesn't cut it. People deserve better.
[#WhatTheyVotedFor] Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Click for Mr. Fish. To note at the outset that Kahn-Harris publishes through an explicitly conservative publishing house (founded by British Conservative politicians) is not to specifically discredit; rather, it lends to a question of perspective. In the question of holding their noses compared to best forwarding the agenda, to the one, and celebrating moral degeneracy to the other, it is those voters who were not celebrating moral degeneracy or white supremacism we ought to wonder about. In the sense that nothing ever begins, we can go back a long way. If we go back nearly forty years to the Reagan Awakening, certes 'tis a milestone; so is Roe v. Wade seven years before that; and nine years prior, "The Pill" combined with other trends and factors in Western society, including technology, affluence, and education, ended what has since become described as the "Long Decade", and sparked the Sexual Revolution. The Second War, itself? Well, what of the First? Not only did Britain deign that women had earned the right to vote, there is always the evolution from Sylvia smashing windows in protest to Christabel standing for Parliament on a generally conservative Women's Party platform including formal criticism of women wearing too much makeup. Still, though, '62 as a milestone works for a number of points, including the idea of equality and "special rights". Roe, in '73, adds another element, which is reactionary insistence. Like the special rights thing; the people arguing against equal protection by calling it a special right were actually demanding the authority to delegate who gets rights or not according to their own personal aesthetics. Or the 2017 admonition against Sen. Elizabeth Warren, that, "nevertheless, she persisted", is tragically hilarious considering the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe, its declaration that the Court would not that day settle the question nobody else could figure out about when "life" (i.e., personhood) begins, so the conservative response has been to spend the next forty-five years loudly insisting, even promoting actual medical quackery along the way, that life begins at conception, meaning that legal personhood is assigned at the time of cortical reaction, or, at the latest, fusion of the secondary oocyte. The whole point was to make enough noise to justify greasing one's own squeak. Reagan changed the political landscape by tapping an evangelical cohort previously preferring to stay home on the pretense that between the Devil you know and the Devil you don't know a good Christian does not vote for the Devil. The point at which we begin, reminds Barker, is arbitrary; to the one, I don't know the pathways that make Sylvia and Christabel so specifically relevant; to the other, sure, '62, '73, '80—the arbitrariness is philosophical, conceptual, compared to a presupposed nihilist tabula rasa. There are reasons why certain aspects seem relevant, but how deeply do we wish to dissect? But the combination of the elements I've noted, which are hardly definitive of the milestones, but, rather, mere elements, has particular relevance to Kahn-Harris' article. Some might remember, over the years, various rumblings from conservatives about elitism, and how liberals were ignoring people, and so on. Those predictions of a retort proved true; many underestimated the magnitude because they did not really believe so many of their American neighbors, who insist they aren't supremacist, would vote for supremacism. Which brings us back to Kahn-Harris: "For a significant proportion of [Trump's] supporters," he writes, "it was a deliberate choice for moral degeneracy, even a celebration of it." This is an interesting point, because when framed in any other context than coddling those who throw in with something they apparently or purportedly don't want, we hear those rumblings about elitism and badmouthing Middle America, and family values, and all that stuff they kept saying wasn't about supremacism. Yes, that last sentence reads like a pile of words, but that is what happens when we try to sum up the behavior; after this many years, they are that deeply into the cycle. Which, for some, is a difficult concept to understand. There is a saying about insanity, repetition, and expectation, and at some point it really ought to apply in these questions. The problem with coddling populist supremacism— Perhaps there are opportunities here for anti-racism and opposition to the populist right. If white racism and populism now rests on nothing more than naked power and self-assertion, there will be no need to wade through the academic verbiage about "bell curves" and black crime rates before we can tackle the problem. And perhaps the very degeneracy of Trump and the rest will begin to pall after a while. Most people—"white" or otherwise—are simply much better human beings than the leaders of the populist right. Maybe wallowing in the muck of white degeneracy will become such a sordid experience that an eventual realisation that it is better to be an Obama than a Trump will take hold. Maybe the best approach to resisting white degenerate leaders is to point out to their supporters that, far from being "deplorables", they are usually better than those who lead them. —is akin to another old idea that has slipped out of vogue, the nefarious and mythical thought police. It's true, what one thinks is what one thinks; the problem, like the old argument disdaining political correctness, isn't a matter of thought police, but, rather, that you cannot bring those thoughts to living effect inflicted against others. In the question of coddling white degeneracy, the same challenge remains. The best we can do is hold their hand and nod sympathetically and say, "Yes, I know it feels bad to not get your way, but, no, you can't refuse to hire them simply because they have dark skin." More recent decades haven't gotten any better: "… but no, you don't get to enforce an arbitrary standard based on an assertion of your religion that you have not enforced in the past and even you violate repeatedly." Or, "… but no, she doesn't need your permission, sir, to receive medical treatment." How about, "… but no, you can't imprison them just for being hispanic and seeking refuge", or, maybe, "… but no, you can't perform ad hoc medical experiments on children held at internment camps." Thing is, sure they can think their supremacist thoughts and dream their supremacist dreams. They have been pissed off at the thought police, though, for decades, and it's always the same fallacy: It isn't really about thought and belief, but, rather, bringing those beliefs to living effect. They can't figure out how to logically justify their arguments, so they simply insist, and resent being told no. That is the offense, for instance, coastal liberals committed against Sarah Palin's flyover country in Middle America: Dark skin isn't saying, "Yes, Massa"; women aren't hushing up when the men are talking or, at the very least, saying, "Yes, sir, as you say," whenever they dare speak; nor are they presenting their genitals for inspection on demand; gays are out of the closet and raising kids. Like the thought police concept, so also this white degeneracy populism. But, at the same time, it's not just white supremacism/degeneracy; it's about supremacism in general. The thing with confectionary bakeries, for instance, is about more than just cakes. Where some intend to segregate the workplace, such as manipulating health insurance according to company conscience, the thing with baking cakes is about segregating the marketplace. Those weren't about white and black; they were about male and Christian supremacism, and also feed this populist degeneracy. The answers will remain consistent: No, you can't stop them from barbecuing, or kick them out of the swimming pool, or stop them from entering their homes. No, you can't just grab 'em by the pussy, and her contraception is her contraception, not yours. Yes, they do have human rights, despite having brown skin and speaking Spanish and coming from a country somewhere south of us. However, white supremacy, as used to describe a belief in the racial superiority of white people, may not be the best concept to help us understand what is going on here. It's not that there isn't a barely concealed attempt to rehabilitate the long and clearly documented history of white racism in "western" democracies. The issue is that I'm not sure that it's "supremacy" that is the goal here, so much as a licence for a perverse kind of degeneracy. This is very nearly the proverbial distinction without a difference; the supremacism licenses the degeneracy. Kahn-Harris' conservatism can seem important in this context; his point about racial superiority is acknowledged after the fact, and as a criticism of others. His larger point is conservative apologism and justification. That they are usually better than those who lead them does not necessarily mean they are not deplorable. They hid this part behind other excuses, turned it loose when they thought they had an opportunity, and need absolution for doing so. Kahn-Harris is whitewashing. ____________________ Notes: Kahn-Harris, Keith. "'White supremacy' is really about white degeneracy". The Guardian. 28 November 2018. TheGuardian.com. 4 December 2018. http://bit.ly/2UfvdAI
From the other side, much of the degeneracy is performative - a demonstration, a proof, of the supremacy. If they can't abuse people and violate norms of decency etc , how do they know they're on top? By public degeneracy without consequences , Trump demonstrates that he's a strong and dominant leader.
What's a "sound" education? Trump won the white, undergrad vote. Since 1980, every presidential winner has won the 'high school educated only' classification. Millions of Obama voters, especially in the blue wall states, voted for Trump.
White supremacy is a bogey man of the left. The irony is that white leftists feel intellectually superior, to those of not only in their own race, but anyone (all races) that's not a leftist.
A white supremacist murdered a protester this year. White supremacist violence is on the rise - they were directly responsible for 18 out of the 34 U.S. extremist-related deaths in 2017. Trump calls white supremacists "fine people." It would be fun to see you try to tell the family of Heather Heyer that white supremacist violence is all a made up story.
Not so much. There were a few. They were (according to the stats) far outnumbered by the Trump voters who claimed to have voted for Obama, but in fact did not vote in that election. That kind of bs is characteristic of Trump voters - they are full of shit, by and large. Nothing they say matches what they do. That's not an irony. That's a side effect of a biased encounter sampling in the US - the nonleftists leftists encounter most frequently are Republican voters and their media handlers, and those people are intellectually inferior to almost anybody.
Chortle. I'm not chortling at the heart attack that killed Heather Heyer, by the impact of the car driven by a white supremacist, I'm chortling at your number of 34 extremist related deaths in 2017. The South Side of Chicago would call that a 'good' weekend. BTW, link to your data about these "extremist related deaths".
Wrong. http://www.centerforpolitics.org/cr...many-obama-2012-trump-2016-voters-were-there/ Approximately 8 million voters (13%), who voted for Obama, voted for Trump.
White supremacists don't even move the needle in America. You could put them all in the Univerity of Michigan's football stadium , and you'd still have room. Did you know that the KKK membership (5 K according to the SPLC ) is roughly the same as the Communist Party USA ( according to Wikipedia). Both groups are irrelevant.
I should be asking you. Why do you think that white supremacists, who make up .00005% of the population, have any impact outside of the hysteria on the left?
