Blogger is having a day, I guess; I usually have no trouble posting comments places, but today it's just doing a weird thing where it shows the comment as posted, but then when I come back it was never posted. I assume that, like other similar tech errors that crop up from time to time, this will pass in a while. YouTube was being completely impossible to use with Blogger about a year ago, and that went away completely until last week, when I began having very similar issues with the HTML editor on Blogger crashing. (If that happens to you, the only way I know to fix it is to log into Blogger with an iPhone rather than anything running Windows, and force it to change back to Compose View instead).
So anyway, James' post linked to a post by AVI on Authoritarian Populists. He is also wondering where this intense fear comes from, given that in fact mostly people on the right are anti-authority. Certainly it is true that, were I somehow to come into authoritarian power, I would use it chiefly to dissolve the systems of power that currently are being misused. I might dissolve the entire Federal bureaucracy; or perhaps the entire Federal government, except for a Constitutional rump that ran the Navy (and not a standing Army), involved no other bureaucracies, and complied with the 10th Amendment by doing nothing whatsoever that the Constitution doesn't explicitly assign to the Federal government. I might dissolve the state governments, too, shifting to a voluntary model of government such as I have discussed here from time to time. Grant me this tremendous power -- which I don't actually seek in any way -- and I would use it to dissolve power, not to impose my will upon other people. Not even on abortion, which I believe to be philosophically indefensible in most cases (barring things like intertubal pregnancies, which will kill the mother as well as, inevitably, the child). Not even on armed robbery or murder, where I would license people to form self-defense leagues and militias to protect their communities, but would prefer to dispense with law enforcement officers and courts that operate as a separate class from the people. This might be called populism, since it returns power to the people; but it is not properly authoritarian in any way (especially since, contra hypothesis, I seek no power whatsoever but merely try to persuade people that this would be a good way for us to go together).
However! It is not me, or you, that these people fear. The issue is merely that they cannot distinguish us from the ones they fear. This is normal when you are really completely separate from another class of human beings: most of us could not easily explain the difference between various Hindu castes nor some of the more novel LBGTQ+ categories. Social distinctions are often very complicated, and impenetrable to outsiders.
The people they are afraid of do exist; there just are almost none of them. They are people like Mencius Moldbug, whom I've never met, nor have I met anyone who has met him as far as I know. They supported Trump, and being unable to distinguish, the left thinks that everyone who supported Trump in any way and for any reason must be somewhat like them.
They really can't distinguish between them and the people who showed up in Charlottesville, nor between them and the KKK (who did not), nor between them and the broad class of anyone who would consider voting for Trump. They cannot distinguish between those who believe the election was conducted in an unconstitutional manner in 2020 and those who believe the wilder tales being promulgated about election machines and servers in Italy. They cannot distinguish between those who came to the Stop the Steal Rally to hear the President speak, and those who marched on the Capitol; nor, easily, between those who marched on the Capitol and protested peacefully outside of it and those who went inside with flags and facepaint. Nor can they distinguish between those and actual fascist insurgents, who would have brought guns.
Your average Trump supporter is none of those things, in my experience; he or she is an ordinary American who was disengaged with politics for decades since Reagan left, increasingly seeing no one in either party who had his or her or America's interests at heart. Republicans and Democrats alike, they sold out their country for personal profit, sent jobs to China or Mexico, maximized corporate profit but let the American economy wither. Suddenly, in Donald Trump, they found a guy who really wanted America to succeed -- to become great again -- and who spoke a language they understood about doing the simple things like building walls (both physical ones to prevent mass immigration that depressed their wages, and economic tariff ones to restore the domestic economy).
Those people aren't like me, or most of you, either. They are somewhat like my father, who was the most decent and upright man I ever knew. They do not fear democracy, but they do fear corruption; democratic forms mean nothing if they are corruptly prevented from expressing the true will of the people. They do not desire to be ruled by authoritarians, but by leaders they chose for themselves, who share their ideas about right and wrong, truth and falsehood, and other basic values. They may sometimes be wrong about those values, or not; but they wish to govern themselves, as a people who do have shared values, according to those values.
This is in fact a very democratic notion, a Federalist notion that allows different values to exist in different parts of America; but to see that it is you have to be able to make all these distinctions. That requires coming to know these people on their own terms, and well enough to see how they differ from others who may also be on the right.
4 comments:
"However! It is not me, or you, that these people fear"
The fear, I think,is mostly a fear of people who are rural, non-college educated, Christian (especially Evangelical), and Southern, and particularly if the fit in several of these categories. I hypothesized about the reasons for this fear in my post The Phobia(s) That May Destroy America:
https://ricochet.com/548927/archives/the-phobias-that-may-destroy-america-2/
I appreciate your concession to the Hall's community standards of capitalizing "Southern" here, even if not at Ricochet.
Your thesis sounds like Joe Bob Briggs' in his documentary film "How the Rednecks Saved Hollywood." Actually that ties together the two posts nicely, because it's about how dramatic narrative influences expressed visceral politics. His point was that movies need villains, and by the late 1960s the Native Americans were less and less available, and Nazis were less and less believable, and Communists were beloved by Hollywood. Nevertheless, structurally stories require villains a lot of the time.
The solution? Rednecks! They became the all-purpose villain in movies from Easy Rider and Deliverance to Tank!. Even Smokey and the Bandit obeys the model, by making the redneck heroes Snowman and the Bandit be pursued by an even-more-redneck sheriff.
They could be the bad guys in movies about racism (any number of these), oppression of women and/or workers (Norma Rae), and on and on. For decades, if you saw a Southerner in a movie you knew he was probably the villain, and it was going to be because of that nexus of things you identify -- being too rural, too traditionally Evangelical Christian, too Southern. Hollywood could make movies about them as unambiguous bad guys in all these ways, and nobody had to feel guilty about hating them.
Turns out that, just like guns, getting to know them in real life undermines a lot of the narratives. But if you never do, the drama is all you have to go by.
Excellent points, both the related cultural rather than intellectual fears and the exposition on the underpinnings of non-authoritarianism of many populists.
I do not engage Zachriel anymore, and his response at my site is why. He is clearly an intelligent person, but starts from default beliefs of liberals as facts and has proved unable to move even 1% on those. He does better on things that don't require assumptions from that group in the 1990s. His response was instructive as an illustration, however, and I recommend you catch it if you haven't already.
One must stop trying to reason with unreasonable people, but I suppose it’s worthy as a kind of footnote to what they were determined to believe.
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