"These fringe beliefs... are no longer confined to the fringe"
January 5, 2022 7:00 AM   Subscribe

One year later, a more complete picture of the January 6th rioters has been uncovered by detailed research into 700 arrestees. "[O]over half of those who have been arrested are business owners, CEOs from white-collar occupations, doctors, lawyers, and architects.... 52 percent are coming from counties that Biden won in the 2020 election.... The No. 1 feature of the county sending insurrectionists, aside from simply the size of the population overall, is that these are the counties losing the most white population in the United States.... When you ask questions about their belief in “the great replacement,” you see that that is head and shoulders the No. 1 belief that’s driving the difference between being in the 21 million versus being in the rest of the body politic." [SLSlate]
posted by clawsoon (215 comments total) 62 users marked this as a favorite
 
In my opinion, the "economic insecurity" trope is mostly due to middle-class and upper-middle-class white centrists/liberals trying to pin the blame for neofascism on their perceived social inferiors, rather than doing the work of acknowledging and addressing the rot in their comfortable suburban communities.

This is not to say that there's not a serious problem with neofascism in struggling white working-class and rural communities as well, but that is hardly the only place that we see the problem and to frame things that way is psychological displacement and classism.
posted by tivalasvegas at 7:34 AM on January 5, 2022 [77 favorites]


In my opinion, the "economic insecurity" trope is mostly due to middle-class and upper-middle-class white centrists/liberals trying to pin the blame for neofascism on their perceived social inferiors, rather than doing the work of acknowledging and addressing the rot in their comfortable suburban communities.

I tend to think it's more that "economic insecurity" in the United States now applies to almost everyone who isn't insanely generationally wealthy. We assume that some dude making 65K a year and living in a suburban 3-2 doesn't feel insecure but I have no fuckin' idea why we think that, because he almost certainly is, and very justifiably, afraid of losing everything at any time.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 7:37 AM on January 5, 2022 [131 favorites]


The media class--being composed largely of people from wealthy backgrounds because the pay is shit and you have to work for free for a fuckin' decade before you get a paid job--hears "economic insecurity" and assumes we're talking exclusively about displaced mine workers, so that's the story that gets told, and then they're like "but hey turns out these people are like, customer sales account reps, so I guess economic insecurity ain't it!"
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 7:39 AM on January 5, 2022 [25 favorites]


21 million American adults agree with two radical beliefs: one, that the use of force to restore Donald Trump to the presidency is justified, and two, that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election and is an illegitimate president. That is, 21 million don’t hold just one of those beliefs—they hold both of those beliefs. It’s 8 percent of the body politic, but that’s really significant.
I can't decide if 21 million is a really big number here or a really small one, but Trump got 74 million votes in 2020, and 21m is about 28% of them. For comparison's sake, Alan Keyes got 27% of the vote in 2004.
posted by box at 7:43 AM on January 5, 2022 [12 favorites]


I always got the impression that the great replacement was believed to be some kind of plot by the (((left))) to replace whites.

These people are actually self-aware enough to understand that it's just demographic trends and instead of either going home to make more babies or working to enshrine protections for minority rights ahead of becoming minorities themselves they're trying to burn everything down?

A plot by villains can be defeated, but this is some King Canute shit.
posted by The Monster at the End of this Thread at 7:45 AM on January 5, 2022 [20 favorites]


I always got the impression that the great replacement was believed to be some kind of plot by the (((left))) to replace whites.

That's the where the pipeline goes, not where it starts. I'll refrain from linking to the Atwater interview on the Southern Strategy for the zillionth time.
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:49 AM on January 5, 2022 [15 favorites]


The Oligarch Right have done a great job of teaching their base to punch down.

Punching down seems to work better than trickle-down, the idea that if you just believe in the benefits of cutting taxes for the rich, you'll be bathed in money any second now. Sure gets people angrier, anyway.

On a different note, the interviewer asked Pope a legit question about diversity within this new movement, which Pope is a good position to answer and indeed replied that his surveys were more powerful than anecdotal observations, but punted on answering.
posted by Dashy at 7:53 AM on January 5, 2022 [5 favorites]


52 percent are coming from counties that Biden won in the 2020 election.

52% Biden vs 48% Trump is statistical noise. I can't really tell if that 48% Trump won are also losing white population, but drawing conclusions from 52% is not really correct or useful.

We assume that some dude making 65K a year and living in a suburban 3-2 doesn't feel insecure but I have no fuckin' idea why we think that, because he almost certainly is, and very justifiably, afraid of losing everything at any time.

Well $65k is barely at the US median wage, but $85k is within one deviation up and why would you think they would be afraid of losing everything all the time? The US is not anywhere near that economically precarious, and if you think it is (whatever your concern is - medical bankruptcy, job loss, whatever) your concern is wildly overstated. Medical debt- only 19% carry any and the median is $2k. That's not going to break the budget of the majority of the US.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:54 AM on January 5, 2022 [3 favorites]


On a different note, the interviewer asked Pope a legit question about diversity within this new movement, which Pope is a good position to answer and indeed replied that his surveys were more powerful than anecdotal observations, but punted on answering.

That was infuriating.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 7:54 AM on January 5, 2022 [5 favorites]


Well $65k is barely at the US median wage, but $85k is within one deviation up and why would you think they would be afraid of losing everything all the time?

Because I make 85K and am terrified of losing everything all the time.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 7:55 AM on January 5, 2022 [141 favorites]


Because I make 85K and am terrified of losing everything all the time.

I'm scared of roaches but that doesn't mean that I'm in danger of losing everything to one.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:58 AM on January 5, 2022 [2 favorites]


I tend to think it's more that "economic insecurity" in the United States now applies to almost everyone who isn't insanely generationally wealthy. We assume that some dude making 65K a year and living in a suburban 3-2 doesn't feel insecure but I have no fuckin' idea why we think that, because he almost certainly is, and very justifiably, afraid of losing everything at any time.

Hard agree. I am not a dude, but I am a single, middle aged, middle class women who owns a comfortable home and makes a solid middle class salary. I still live basically hand to mouth. It would take precious little for me to lose everything. I try not to let this keep me up at night every night.

As to the article, it is not surprising, but probably important for a lot of people to understand. The most vocal Trumpists in my greater sphere are all college-educated, suburban white people with "good jobs" and "nice houses" living in metro areas. The actual down-at-the-heel Appalachian, "economically insecure" folk that the greater liberal population has scared up as boogeymen are mostly too busy trying to survive to try and dismantle democracy. I am related to these people. I have worked with this people. I have lived among them. And what I can tell you is that, by and large, the fascists are not coming from the hovels and the hollers, they are coming from down the block and across the street. We continue to underestimate and mischaracterize them at our own peril, and then act surprised when they succeed. And to make matters worse, this undermines our own supposed ideology by using the presumed politics and allegiances of poor people to further alienate a more-heterogenous-than-we imagine population of actual poor people.

Sorry to use the "we" here. I even do it. And I fucking know better
posted by thivaia at 7:59 AM on January 5, 2022 [111 favorites]



I'm scared of roaches but that doesn't mean that I'm in danger of losing everything to one.

I mean literally all it would take is for me to lose my job and get sick in rapid succession and I would be flat out of money very rapidly. I watched my father lose his job and get sick in rapid succession, and go from "solid middle class job and nice apartment" to "in hospice paid for by Medicaid" within 6 months. I watched relatives lose their comfortable middle class homes after they lost their comfortable middle class jobs during the 08-09 recession.

I have no idea why someone would argue none of these things actually happened/actually could happen. We had mefi threads about them happening! To lots of people! All at once!

Now, why does that terror turn me into a socialist and not into an insurrectionist? Who knows. It's not because I'm an inherently good person and they aren't. But it also might not be for any reasons that we can easily reproduce across a generation.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 8:07 AM on January 5, 2022 [198 favorites]


they are coming from down the block and across the street

I live towards the eastern edge of LA County, and Nextdoor here is full of rabid Thin Blue Line Let's Go Brandon Where Has the Neighborhood Gone shitposting. Anything not starting there will attract it in the comments.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:09 AM on January 5, 2022 [27 favorites]


21 million American adults agree with two radical beliefs: one, that the use of force to restore Donald Trump to the presidency is justified, and two, that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election and is an illegitimate president.

I believe that Donald Trump stole the 2016 election and was an illegitimate president, and that the use of force to prevent Donald Trump regaining the presidency would be justified.
posted by Faint of Butt at 8:12 AM on January 5, 2022 [40 favorites]


I live towards the eastern edge of LA County, and Nextdoor here is full of rabid Thin Blue Line Let's Go Brandon Where Has the Neighborhood Gone shitposting. Anything not starting there will attract it in the comments.

Same in my wealthy Chicago neighborhood. The folks posting this stuff are technically much more secure than I am, in that they could afford to retire and to own property, but they're typically isolated older folks on fixed incomes. They know they're one bad property tax hike away from having to pull up stakes and move in with their kids somewhere.

I guess my point is you can decide these folks don't "deserve" to be afraid, or don't "need" to be afraid, but they're still afraid anyway, and scared people do scared people shit, which the rest of us ignore at our peril.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 8:16 AM on January 5, 2022 [20 favorites]


Well $65k is barely at the US median wage, but $85k is within one deviation up and why would you think they would be afraid of losing everything all the time? The US is not anywhere near that economically precarious, and if you think it is (whatever your concern is - medical bankruptcy, job loss, whatever) your concern is wildly overstated. Medical debt- only 19% carry any and the median is $2k. That's not going to break the budget of the majority of the US.

Apart from the rest of your comment being factually inaccurate, saying "whatever your concern is...it is wildly overstated" is certainly a conversational tactic that will elicit a reaction.
posted by lazaruslong at 8:17 AM on January 5, 2022 [59 favorites]


On a different note, the interviewer asked Pope a legit question about diversity within this new movement

Regimes from East to West, from the poles to the equator, attract supporters. Whatever name is attached that secret sauce (authoritarianism, patriarchy, complementarianism...) it's attractive to people from all over the world.
posted by otherchaz at 8:23 AM on January 5, 2022 [2 favorites]


With respect to the annoyance people are expressing about Pape "punting" on the question of the relative whiteness of the insurrection mob compared with the median Trump rally crowd: He didn't "punt." He just wasn't rude about calling the writer's impression of the mob "anecdata."

Also, Pape's data set is people arrested for being in the Capitol mob. Pape doesn't have data on the composition of the typical Trump rally to compare with that. So he very sensibly does not express a position on the question.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 8:23 AM on January 5, 2022 [11 favorites]


As with all these analyses of the situation, I'm still left with the question: so what shall we do about this?
posted by PhineasGage at 8:23 AM on January 5, 2022 [8 favorites]


thivaia: The most vocal Trumpists in my greater sphere are all college-educated, suburban white people with "good jobs" and "nice houses" living in metro areas. The actual down-at-the-heel Appalachian, "economically insecure" folk that the greater liberal population has scared up as boogeymen are mostly too busy trying to survive to try and dismantle democracy.

It reminds me of racism being pinned completely on the South during the '50s and '60s, and progress on civil rights being brought to a crawl at precisely the point where it started threatening the privileges of suburban white northerners.
posted by clawsoon at 8:24 AM on January 5, 2022 [43 favorites]


The folks posting this stuff are technically much more secure than I am, in that they could afford to retire and to own property, but they're typically isolated older folks on fixed incomes. They know they're one bad property tax hike away from having to pull up stakes and move in with their kids somewhere.

From the article:
If you look at their ages, two-thirds of those arrested for Jan. 6 are over the age of 34. They’re concentrated in their 40s and 50s.
They aren't fixed income retirees.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:25 AM on January 5, 2022 [7 favorites]


OK but...I wasn't speaking of the insurrectionists? I was replying directly to a comment about Thin Blue Line/etc. posters on Nextdoor and their demographics.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 8:35 AM on January 5, 2022 [13 favorites]


Its not just racism fueling the radical right, its also the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Areas in the US with more war fatalities had higher rates of right-wing radicalization:

They’re Still There, He’s All Gone: American Fatalities in Foreign Wars and Right-Wing Radicalization at Home

"What explains right-wing radicalization in the US? Research shows that demographic changes and economic decline drive support for the far-right. We contribute to this research agenda by studying the elusive early stages in the process of radicalization and highlighting an additional factor that contributes to right-wing radicalization in the US: the impact of foreign wars on society at home. We argue that the communities that bear the greatest costs of foreign wars are most prone to high rates of right-wing radicalization. To support this claim, we present robust correlations between participation in the far-right social media website Parler and fatalities among residents who served in the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This correlation holds at both the county and census tract level, and persists after controlling for the level of military service in an area. The costs of the US’s foreign wars have important effects on domestic US."
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:37 AM on January 5, 2022 [21 favorites]


Another threat on the horizon: the inevitable cryptocurrency crash radicalising a cadre of younger participants to fascism:
Crypto, a portfolio of inherently worthless online tokens, is already sustained almost entirely by myth. Its value proposition is so inscrutable that when it melts down, almost any narrative could be crafted to plausibly explain it. It was the Fed! The government! The leftists who hate entrepreneurialism! It was the dark and devious forces of the shadowy deep state! Anything will do. It will enforce the priors of those who placed their faith in crypto as a good substitute for the American dream — a crowd of Barstool Sports readers and tech libertarians and the types of people who used to buy silver bars from Alex Jones before they turned to Bitcoin. The crypto-evangelist population skews heavily towards a sort of New Age libertarian, anti-government right wing-ism, and when they see their financial dreams evaporate, they will likely set their sights for revenge on the things they already despise. The broad effect will lead to a large number of newly angry, bitter, disillusioned, hopeless people who are too steeped in the culture wars to turn towards working class solidarity, and instead turn towards hate.
posted by acb at 8:43 AM on January 5, 2022 [51 favorites]


so what shall we do about this?

Is answered here:

the fascists are not coming from the hovels and the hollers, they are coming from down the block and across the street. We continue to underestimate and mischaracterize them at our own peril

We need everyone -- media and politicians alike -- to identify and address the fascists for who they are.

I think there's a media bias from both sides at play here: the mainstream hokey interview-at-the-small-town-diner, which is such low-hanging fruit, reinforces the puppet idea of who the problems come from.

The right certainly has an interest in that puppet idea -- so they can call the left condescending liberals, and mischaracterize *the left* as elitists out of touch with real people's problems.

Both of those are pointing the camera away from the real problem, for their own reasons.
posted by Dashy at 8:43 AM on January 5, 2022 [12 favorites]


Recently I discovered the podcast "The Hidden Brain" which is hosted by the Edgar R. Murrow award winning journalist and writer Shankar Vedantam. (As an aside this is a fantastic podcast, well produced, tightly edited, no meandering chitchat, thoughtful and well-researched - I highly recommend it.)

One of the things that pissed me off about Vedantam, though, is that in the few episodes that discuss politics, he's constantly telling his expert guests and his interview subjects not to "fall back on the superficial narrative" that people who voted for Trump are racist. Even when the subject of that episode is literally a new manner of evidence which does show this. For example, there was one episode in which the expert guest was discussing surprising insights data scientists can glean from aggregate Google search statistics, such as the capacity to identify serious health issues at a population level. And the expert who was being interviewed said, "Oh and hey, here's another remarkable fact, we can also see that counties which have the most blatantly racist search terms have a high chance of having voted for Trump, and blatantly racist searches are much more predictive of Trump voting than other search terms."

And to this, Vedantam goes, "Wait, wait, it sounds like you're falling back on the superficial narrative that Trump voters are racist."

The expert seemed taken aback for a second and then he went, "Yeah... yeah, that is what the data shows."

I could have cheered! Because UGH, VEDANTAM, WHAT ARE YOU SO AFRAID OF. Just because conservatives believe that being called a racist is a horrific slur and a dehumanizing label (i.e. they equate being called a racist with being called racist slurs), doesn't make it true! Being anti-racist means understanding the value in accurately identifying & labeling racism for what it is, no more and no less than it is: not pretending that racism is done by inhuman monsters with literal horns and twirly moustaches, not "othering" racists as belonging to a different species, not disavowing the ordinariness and banality and utter normal-human-ness that characterizes most forms of racism.

So, yeah, it's not a caricature to say Trump supporters are racists. All? Yes, all. For all practical purposes, anyway. Because how much more evidence do we need? How much longer will we continue to be in denial?

Its not just racism fueling the radical right, its also the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We can't keep saying this like the last part of this sentence somehow falls outside the umbrella of racism.
posted by MiraK at 8:44 AM on January 5, 2022 [72 favorites]


OK but...I wasn't speaking of the insurrectionists? I was replying directly to a comment about Thin Blue Line/etc. posters on Nextdoor and their demographics.

Going by posts and also by what I see around the neighborhood, it starts as young as early 30's -- sometimes earlier. Basically, old or precocious enough to have a mortgage. It's part of how gentrifying works. The big distinction is between owners and renters, and after that race and religion.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:44 AM on January 5, 2022 [9 favorites]


Sorry Dashy, "We need everyone -- media and politicians alike -- to identify and address the fascists for who they are" doesn't say what what we should do to then change things.
posted by PhineasGage at 8:47 AM on January 5, 2022 [5 favorites]


As with all these analyses of the situation, I'm still left with the question: so what shall we do about this?

Sadly, I'm not sure there's anything substantive that can be done now. The time to counteract this far-right movement in the US was roughly 30-40 years ago when they started the slow work of mobilizing and spreading roots throughout the culture. But, they were largely brushed-off as edge-case whackjobs.

Now, today, we're faced with the consequences of decades of relative inattention. These are people who have been indoctrinated to arm themselves and get ready for a shooting war. Jan.6 was as much a proof-of-concept as anything else. The 1.0 release gets rolled-out over the next two years, and it's shaping-up as a win-win for the extremist right. Either they take over the federal government (and enact all of their wet-dream, anti-democratic wishes), or they don't win and bring their guns to town and do what they've been practicing to do for 4+ decades. Quite honestly, the next two years don't end well for the US or democracy. I just don't see how we avoid it now.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:47 AM on January 5, 2022 [25 favorites]


The idea that poor uneducated people are the real threat goes back a ways. I don't know about earlier, but there was this idea in the civil rights era that racists are poor stupid people with bad teeth. Yes, southern.

I'm not sure whether this was a strategic move to make racism lower status, or whether it's just easier to attack low status people. In any case, the real threat was from people who were high enough status to be making laws or who were connected to the government.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 8:51 AM on January 5, 2022 [10 favorites]


The US is not anywhere near that economically precarious.

I'm not sure I agree. There are a lot of people who are doing ok, but are not necessarily stable long-term. Medical debt is a real issue: 56 million people struggle with medical debt each year. About 8.9% of these people could not afford to pay anything towards these medical debts and 11 million of them ran up high interest credit card debt to pay their medical debts.

So is retirement: If you're in your mid 40s, you should have about 4x your salary invested and earning income. The median amount for Americans in their 40s is $63,000. (The average amount is higher, but skewed by thop wage earners.)

This is not to say that economic uncertainty is the root cause, but we've all witnessed the decline of manufacturing in exchange for a service economy, the rise in education costs. 1 in 8 people in their 40s and 50s are still paying student loan debt.

It's not surprising that those who see a decline of the American empire turn to Christian nationalism in hopes of restoring some mythical glory. It's precisely the average (white) middle class that's seen the decline. The middle class earned 62% of aggregate income in 1970, now it's only 43%.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 8:51 AM on January 5, 2022 [12 favorites]


52% Biden vs 48% Trump is statistical noise. I can't really tell if that 48% Trump won are also losing white population, but drawing conclusions from 52% is not really correct or useful.

Descriptive statistics are not noise (or error if that is what you mean). They are not inferential. They simply are what they are. I do agree that they shouldn't draw conclusions from simply these descriptive stats though. They should find out what drives those statistics by doing finer grained work.

They could do a more informative analysis like say a regression analysis and find out what factors uniquely load in order to determine what drives the relationship but that is generally beyond layman journalism and definitely beyond Slate rabble rousing style. As near as I can tell using Google Scholar Robert Pape has not yet published in any academic journals on this yet. This paper that cites him may be interesting: Race war or culture war: the diversity in right-wing extremism by Thomas McCauley but I don't have access (the whole special issue on the Capital Breach that it is in might be a good read)

Personally, I suspect the major loading factor for the caught insurrectionists is likely to be sufficient disposable income and job autonomy enabling a trip to Washington DC to do an insurrection. That likely correlates with blue counties which are almost always richer than red. I also suspect more participants came from places close to major airport hubs making travel easier - also typically blue. Plus proximity to DC would also probably lean blue. I think there will be a lot of unsexy factors contributing to who went and who got caught (though admittedly some of the factors in being caught are great low comedy like bumble bragging or asking an FBI boyfriend-in-law for advice) rather than more ideologically driven ones. I do still think that by and large it was an extremely racist white rage moment but there are probably at least hundreds of thousands of those in America and the vast majority didn't show up on Jan 6.

As for the economically insecure it is the people who are middle class who are insecure. They have some status and wealth and could lose it. The poor are not insecure. They have almost nothing to secure. The genuinely poor are trying to get something rather than trying not to lose something. The economically insecure are trying not to lose something. That's why BLM protests were about protecting against the permanent loss of lives (something even the poor still at least temporarily have) rather than status. The Trumpists, on the other hand, acted out about losing some relative status, as signaled in temporarily losing some political power via an election, by doing a nationally televised rage filled "I'd like to speak to the manager of America" moment.
posted by srboisvert at 8:56 AM on January 5, 2022 [26 favorites]


I mean, call me crazy but isn't it totally fucking ridiculous to make the case that people earning 85,000 US dollars per annum have a legitimate claim to "economic anxiety"?? Unless you redefine that term to the point of meaninglessness, in which case 99.9% of all people in the world suffer from economic anxiety, and if you do that, then economic anxiety has lost all explanatory power as a hypothesis for why people vote for Trump.

Note that I'm not invalidating the real struggle and precarity of every working class person. I'm just saying, this isn't what the term is being used to describe in popular parlance vis a vis recent elections & political uprisings in USA.

Economy anxiety is and has always been a red herring as a hypothesis for Trump support. How much more hard evidence do we need before we admit IT'S THE RACISM, STUPID!
posted by MiraK at 8:56 AM on January 5, 2022 [17 favorites]


So, yeah, it's not a caricature to say Trump supporters are racists. All? Yes, all. For all practical purposes, anyway.

Exactly - for those who may not have read this, here is: "The Cinemax Theory of Racism" by MeFi's own jscalzi.
posted by rozcakj at 8:57 AM on January 5, 2022 [36 favorites]


So is retirement: If you're in your mid 40s, you should have about 4x your salary invested and earning income. The median amount for Americans in their 40s is $63,000. (The average amount is higher, but skewed by thop wage earners.)

There was a great chart I saw showing that millennials, on average, were on track to get their historically expected share of national wealth. Then there was an asterisk.

The asterisk linked to a note that said it was almost entirely driven by a single outlier: Mark Zuckerberg.
posted by srboisvert at 8:59 AM on January 5, 2022 [67 favorites]


As with all these analyses of the situation, I'm still left with the question: so what shall we do about this?

This is a tricky question, but I think there are a few things that can be helpful:

1) Get to know your neighbors and do your best to build a strong community that supports the marginalized, including unhoused people who are at great risk of violence including from fascists. Work with your community to provide aid and normalize supporting each other -- there are more of us than there are of them and lovingly building inclusive community creates safer places and networks for supporting each other if and when hard times come and scary people threaten the vulnerable. The pandemic makes this much more difficult but, when possible, stuff like organizing block parties and potlucks can be a really strong and fun way to build community, get to know your neighbors, and have important (and sometimes difficult) conversations to make sure that community includes everyone (except fascists) and, at a minimum, get to know which of your neighbors will have your back when shit hits the fan.

2) When fascists are coming to your city, make sure they are opposed! There are a lot of ways to do this, but to my mind the best option is a combination of tactics -- I think the response in Boston in 2017, shortly after the Unite the Right rally, was a good example of this, and the response in DC to protest the United the Right 2 rally was also incredibly strong and effective (I helped volunteer for that response! It was a huge moment for me and I've since gone on to do much more activism and gotten additional training to support leftist protests and counterprotests in various ways). Basically, the more people who turn out to oppose fascism the safer everyone is -- if you can get thousands of liberals/progressive/leftists to take to the street to oppose white supremacy and fascism that sends a really strong message that these will not be tolerated by the community and it provides protection in numbers for vulnerable people, including protecting them from both fascists and the police. Organizing and bringing together as many people as possible to counter fascists keeps marginalized people safer, plus these can be fun! You can create spaces for joy and music and dancing in the face of a fascist threat (I also think punching Nazis is good, I believe in a diversity of tactics). These kinds of responses build community and are so rewarding! Consider becoming something like a Care Bear and passing out water and/or food and providing emotional and logistical support! You get to know great people, you get to fight fascism, and you get to show vulnerable members of your community that you have their backs.
posted by an octopus IRL at 9:10 AM on January 5, 2022 [36 favorites]


I mean, call me crazy but isn't it totally fucking ridiculous to make the case that people earning 85,000 US dollars per annum have a legitimate claim to "economic anxiety"??

Whether or not you think the claim to anxiety is legitimate, the anxiety is real. And I dunno if you know about anxiety but the main thing it doesn't give a fuck about is logic!

in which case 99.9% of all people in the world suffer from economic anxiety

As articulated excellently above, the insecurity in fact does apply to almost everyone but the anxiety mostly applies to people who have something to lose, or were raised with expectations they cannot meet. Anxiety is a feeling; insecurity is a fact. In the United States, it is very difficult to attain lasting, unshakeable financial security if you were not already born to it.

Is racism why someone else takes their economic anxiety to the Capitol with a taser, while I take mine to the campaign for a socialist alderman? Maybe! But it does no good to simply say, "well, these people with a security they know, based on facts and personal observations, is potentially an illusion just ought to feel different about it."
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 9:12 AM on January 5, 2022 [33 favorites]


"We need everyone -- media and politicians alike -- to identify and address the fascists for who they are" doesn't say what what we should do to then change things.

Of course. But identifying the actual problem people, and problem issues, is a huge start.

The problem isn't coal-mine jobs in Kentucky. It's the economic precarity that we all share, the sword of Damocles of any given medical crisis that can ruin any one of us.

Which we knew, but ... more manufacturing jobs aren't going to solve it. The solutions are along the lines of what role government has in regulating and supporting society. And fascists have been led to misunderstand how that works, in general and for their own lives. The answer lies in addressing that understanding and the insecurity, not in ... creating factory jobs in Ohio.

Why do the fascists want to crown TFG king? They see him as the answer to their precarity. He's not promising factory jobs.
posted by Dashy at 9:12 AM on January 5, 2022 [5 favorites]


I don't support Trump in the slightest, but I make, and my family makes, significantly more than 85,000 a year. Yet still there is economic anxiety. Part of that is what people have said above, I know it is real easy to lose it all.

Plus, with my debt load, what I have and what I make are sort of two different things. I'm not blameless in my situation, but I'm not alone either. I know a lot of folks making very respectable amounts of money who are also paying out very respectable amounts of money and one-two hiccups in my life and it all goes away.

That's actually one of many reasons not to support Trump or the current set of Repblicans in general. Their overriding philosophy is fuck you, I got mine.
posted by BeReasonable at 9:12 AM on January 5, 2022 [25 favorites]


We assume that some dude making 65K a year and living in a suburban 3-2 doesn't feel insecure but I have no fuckin' idea why we think that, because he almost certainly is, and very justifiably, afraid of losing everything at any time.

I know someone making more than this who is terrified to lose her job, which she needs to pay for the home she hates living in.

On the other hand, there is a Latin proverb to the effect of "Travel light and you can laugh in the robber's face." I am kind of cash-poor these days but I have a nice home and pretty decent friends and family. I have some debt, which I am steadily paying down. I am surrounded by more books than I can read in a lifetime, and I rarely miss a meal. I consider myself a wealthy man, though I make a twentieth of what some of my friends do.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 9:15 AM on January 5, 2022 [14 favorites]


Whether or not you think the claim to anxiety is legitimate, the anxiety is real.

Sure. And the anxiety is even legitimate outside of the context of it being an explanation for why people vote for Trump. I said so in my comment, so I hope you're not misunderstanding this point.

Economic anxiety is being put forward as an explanation for the motive of why someone might vote for Trump. But as you describe it, economic anxiety is something *literally everyone who does not own a yacht and two holiday homes* suffers from. (Some of them have anxiety too! It's very real though it isn't legitimate like yours and mine.)

You can't use this economic anxiety as a hypothesis for Trump votes anymore, is what I'm trying to say. Once you've defined the anxiety as something 99% of us share, it loses explanatory power.

Exactly - for those who may not have read this, here is: "The Cinemax Theory of Racism" by MeFi's own jscalzi.

That's a brilliant analogy, thank you for the link rozcakj. Now I want Scalzi to write an addendum 5 years later:

"Oh hey! I was just thinking about you. Take a look at this study about HBO subscribers: it turns out the single largest predictor of whether a given person will get an HBO subscription is ... if they spend a lot of time watching Cinemax!"

"What are you trying to say? I have never watched Cinemax in my life! How dare you!"

"Okay, sure, I believe you. But here's another statistic for you: it says 90% of people who say they love HBO spent most of their time watching Cinemax. Wow."

A passing hipster interrupts the conversation. "Have you considered that it's not that people like watching Cinemax, but rather, that people who purchase the HBO-Cinemax package are suffering from anxiety about cable being displaced by streaming services, and that's the real issue? These people don't feel it's fair to cable companies, that's all. Even I, a hipster who hates all forms of television, feel anxious about streaming companies taking over. I can empathize with the HBO subscribers' anxiety, don't you understand how evil Netflix is??"

Scalzi tries for a minute to understand what the fuck this has to do with all the hundreds of studies about HBO subscribers secretly loving Cinemax, but the conversation has been thoroughly derailed, as the hipster intended all along. Scalzi shakes his head, and bids the hipster and the HBO subscriber adieu.
posted by MiraK at 9:22 AM on January 5, 2022 [10 favorites]


Well $65k is barely at the US median wage, but $85k is within one deviation up and why would you think they would be afraid of losing everything all the time?

Because I make 85K and am terrified of losing everything all the time.


I make 100K now. But I started making more like $30K and in debt.

Retirement advisors say by age 50, if you plan to retire at 65, you should have 5-6 times your yearly gross income saved up. I almost have 1X. What really scares me is that our prescription drugs, as of right now, would be $5K a month without insurance.

And what scares me more is my situation is not bad compared to a lot of peoples'.

That said, racism and insurrection obviously don't fix that.
posted by Foosnark at 9:23 AM on January 5, 2022 [24 favorites]


I'm not sure why $85K salary is being called out as some sort of plateau where "economic anxiety" becomes a fiction.
$85K is $40.87 pr hour. (@ 2080 full time 40 hr/52 weeks) - I fully comprehend that the argument for $15 an hour is just a first (teeny tiny istly bitsy) step towards $20 per hour (roughly $40K per year)

BUT - I'm in my late 40's at this point and it's taken me 20 years to get to just slightly LESS THAN $80K p/y. I'm aware I have the privilege of being a college educated white male, but I'm also still paying off student loans, I'm still watching the 11% inflation, I'm still afraid of losing my job at a whim of corporate decision to "increase the bottom line for investors" - I'm still in need of medical insurance that even with a corporate job cost me $4K per year in addition to the corporate match.....

I get very frustrated by the idea that there's some very specific cut-off number at which we all become "economically secure"
posted by djseafood at 9:23 AM on January 5, 2022 [22 favorites]


I'm still left with the question: so what shall we do about this?

this Great Replacement finding isn't new to me. I first heard about it months ago here.

A New Study Shows Us the Single Biggest Motivation for the Jan. 6 Rioters | Amanpour and Company

So what to do? Fix our focus on the comparatively small but virulent minority of mostly white, mostly male, mostly rural-suburban individuals who earnestly believe such codswollop.

The Great Replacement (French: Grand Remplacement), also known as the replacement theory,[1][2] is a white nationalist[3] conspiracy theory,[4][5][6] disseminated by the French author Renaud Camus. It states that, with the complicity or cooperation of "replacist" elites,[a][4][7] the white French population—as well as white European populations at large—is being demographically and culturally replaced with non-European peoples—specifically Arab, Berber, Turkish and sub-Saharan Muslim populations—through mass migration, demographic growth and a European drop in the birth rate.[4][8][9]

It started in France, it's caught on across Europe and really, everywhere in the so-called West.
posted by philip-random at 9:25 AM on January 5, 2022 [4 favorites]


They simply are what they are. I do agree that they shouldn't draw conclusions from simply these descriptive stats though.

But they did draw conclusions from them, hence my question --> did red areas where 48% of them came from lose white population or not? If they did not, then that 52% of them did is meaningless statistically. It could be equally true that the number of chain restaurants fell, or that chain retail stores closed, or that traffic got slightly worse, of that white participation in school awards got slightly worse while the schools got better, or that home values increased more dramatically. But they aren't aligning any of those factors into the 'great replacement theory'.



I get very frustrated by the idea that there's some very specific cut-off number at which we all become "economically secure"
There is not and I never insinuated that. However, 'economically secure' people do things that indicate their economic security and 'economically insecure' people do things that indicate their economic insecurity (IE: their actions, not their surveyed feelings) and there is no indication that people are feeling particularly economically insecure above US median income, especially upper income white Republicans.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:30 AM on January 5, 2022 [1 favorite]


Just think how much of the economic insecurity issue would be fixed by eliminating student debt and — especially — having a health insurance system that wasn’t rotten from the ground up.
posted by gottabefunky at 9:31 AM on January 5, 2022 [37 favorites]


This is a tricky question, but I think there are a few things that can be helpful:

Oh, another thing!

3) Listen to your local antifascists and see if there are actions in which you feel comfortable taking part. For example, we all knew that something was going to go down on January 6th so beforehand I called a bunch of local hotels (I'm in the DC area) asking that they not let right-wing assholes stay there/provide discounts or blocks of rooms for these groups/whatever (obviously this did not work in this case but perhaps they've learned their lesson?). If there are known fascist bars or hangouts call them and see if you can get them to shut down when there's a right-wing action planned. If you know the fash are congregating somewhere, get people to call the venue and let them know and see if you can get them kicked out (often restaurants will not realize that the group attending is fascists or white supremacists and will be legitimately horrified when they are informed). There are a lot of ways to fight fascists and make life difficult for them and if you're not comfortable punching people or being out in the street there are still things you can do, from making phone calls to providing food to making posters.
posted by an octopus IRL at 9:34 AM on January 5, 2022 [22 favorites]


> I get very frustrated by the idea that there's some very specific cut-off number at which we all become "economically secure"

> No. Especially not if you have young children, aging parents, or expensive health condition. If your take-home pay is $5000 a month

Listen. This is not about whether someone is allowed to feel economically secure or insecure at [insert income level]. It's not even abkjt whether someone genuinely is economically secure or insecure at [insert income level].

I did not INTEND to invalidate any working class person's exonomic precarity, AND NOR DID I.

Please try to understand what I'm actually saying:

You cannot use "economic anxiety" as the hypothesis for explaining why people voted for Trump, if your definition of economic anxiety applies to every single person in the country.

So you can either keep saying economic anxiety explains the behavior of Trump voters by using a different definition of economic anxiety from the one you are proposing on this thread - which btw is what the media has been trying (and failing) to do all along, because they wanted to pretend that only poor (i.e. below median earnings) white people voted for Trump and that, of course, was not true. As proven by this post and much much else besides. In this hypothesis, economic anxiety is limited to actual definitional poverty, not worker precarity and not your feelings of anxiety.

OR you can stop trying to cling to the false economic anxiety narrative and admit that the evidence shows RACISM is what explains Trump voters, not economic anxiety.

But you cannot have it both ways. You can't say that economic anxiety explains Trump votes AND ALSO say that economic anxiety is something literally every American suffers from. That is not a coherent stance, because economic anxiety would no longer be a coherent explanation for why people vote for Trump. You might as well say "Having hair on your head explains why people voted for Trump" or, to be much more literal and less of an analogy, "Not owning a yacht and two holiday homes is what makes people vote for Trump."

See?? This is only about defining economic anxiety in a way that makes a coherent theory of Trump voters, because that's what economic anxiety is being used to explain. None of this is invalidating towards your or my economic anxieties or struggles.
posted by MiraK at 9:41 AM on January 5, 2022 [22 favorites]


...and there is no indication that people are feeling particularly economically insecure above US median income, especially upper income white Republicans.

I disagree. First, the US well-off have a vested interest in blocking any change. There's a deeply-held belief that those who've achieved success deserve it, while those who haven't just haven't tried hard enough. So a risky, wild-west economic environment is a feature (pronounced opportunity), not a bug.

The US system rewards financial risk-taking and depends on high levels of consumption and spending to keep the party going. So yeah, it's probable that many Americans earning what seems like a comfortable middle-class salary are leveraged to the hilt, with a big low-interest mortgage on too much house, and a garage full of toys. Which all could be toppled by a layoff, economic downturn, or a medical crisis. That's definitely financial precarity too, and to some extent existential. Comments here seem to support this.

And given the fiercely polarized US political landscape, it's easy to paint the Democrats as spoilsports threatening to end the party by increasing taxes, and giving it to the "undeserving" poor. Even though the US tax collected is already far below what other well-off countries collect.

So, if you're faced with choosing one of two seemingly polar opposites, and one of those choices threatens your economic beliefs AND your material success... you go with the other, no matter how loony-tunes they appear. Since the well-off are disproportionately white, racism is baked-in, of course, but I don't think it's the primary cause.
posted by Artful Codger at 9:43 AM on January 5, 2022 [3 favorites]


Economic anxiety is being put forward as an explanation for the motive of why someone might vote for Trump.

No that's a slightly separate argument from the one being made here. It goes:

"Economic anxiety is why people vote for Trump!"
"But these people arrested at the insurrection have jobs and incomes! Ergo, no anxiety! The anxiety must be a complete red herring!"

We are merely arguing that the having of some arbitrary sum of money does not mean the absence of economic anxiety. It's still almost certainly not the primary driver. But it seems foolish to think that it's completely, utterly unrelated. When you look at the things the insurrectionists write, say, do--they're not secure people. They don't feel optimism. You might argue, well, they should. But they don't. (And I would argue: they shouldn't.)

We will never ever be looking at/talking about the right people if we can't escape the narrative that this economic fear belongs only to the actual, legitimate dirt-poor. We will forever be talking to the displaced miner at the small-town pancake house and never digging into the motivations of the suburban dad picking up a Chipotle order. But that dad's the one who goes to the Capitol.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 9:43 AM on January 5, 2022 [13 favorites]


On this anniversary of last year's Festival of White Anxiety and Macho Authoritarian Cosplay, let's be sure to acknowledge that second factor, the "GOP's masculinity panic," as astutely analyzed by Vox's Sean Illing in conversation with anti-Trump conservative David French.
posted by PhineasGage at 9:45 AM on January 5, 2022 [16 favorites]


Is economic anxiety a derail to the OP that white middle class professionals were willing to storm the nation's Capitol to put a fraud in charge?

i.e. the anxiety is related to the lack of ontological certainty. citation in next comment
posted by infini at 9:49 AM on January 5, 2022 [2 favorites]


No that's a slightly separate argument from the one being made here. It goes:

"Economic anxiety is why people vote for Trump!"
"But these people arrested at the insurrection have jobs and incomes! Ergo, no anxiety! The anxiety must be a complete red herring!"


Nope it's the exact same argument. The conversation goes:

"Economic anxiety is why people vote for Trump!"

"But these people arrested at the insurrection have jobs and incomes! Ergo, no anxiety WHICH COUNTS AS AN EXPLANATION FOR THEIR SUPPORT OF TRUMP! The anxiety AS AN EXPLANATION FOR THEIR SUPPORT OF TRUMP must be a complete red herring!"

The part in all caps is obviously implied. I'm sure many of the insurrectionists had economic anxiety (in the sense that it's being used in this thread!) The question is, does that count as an explanation for why they acted the way they did? Was THAT the motivation for this insurrection? Obviously not, because that's an incoherent explanation, because all Americans experience that same anxiety and we did not insurrect a goddamn thing, nor did we all support Trump.
posted by MiraK at 9:50 AM on January 5, 2022 [5 favorites]


It sounds like the evidence is stronger for Great Replacement anxiety.
posted by clawsoon at 9:50 AM on January 5, 2022 [12 favorites]


the evidence shows RACISM is what explains Trump voters, not economic anxiety.

My personal belief (without much evidence) is that economic anxiety makes many people (particularly white people) susceptible to racist arguments. "You have less than you want/need/deserve or are in danger of losing it, and The Other is to blame", where The Other is non-whites, immigrants, Islamic terrorists—whatever gets traction with that particular person.

And once a person has absorbed this racist thinking it's very easy for them to vote against their own economic interests. Their politics becomes about punishing/restricting/harming The Other in the belief that their own prosperity will follow. Voting directly for their own economic interest can't possibly work, since that might benefit The Other, and in a racist's mind it is impossible for both they and The Other to prosper.

You can see how Trump's appeals to economic uncertainty, outright racism, and continual reinforcement of politics and economics as a zero-sum game in which violence is not only justified but often necessary combined to make the insurrection happen.
posted by jedicus at 9:52 AM on January 5, 2022 [34 favorites]


> Is economic anxiety a derail to the OP that white middle class professionals were willing to storm the nation's Capitol to put a fraud in charge?

Very much so. It seems like much of it is coming from a sincere desire to not have economic concerns of the working class erased, but there is definitely a "do we need to have that conversation now, in this thread" dynamic that seems to repeat itself any time racism is cited as a motivating factor in why people believe the election was stolen and were willing to travel to commit crimes in order to change the outcome.
posted by tonycpsu at 9:53 AM on January 5, 2022 [2 favorites]


Yes, anxiety often exacerbates racism, whether direct economic anxiety or 'loss of perceived status'. There was a study (which I unfortunately can't find right now) that found strong correlation between Trump support and the amount of ethnic change in a county.
posted by PhineasGage at 9:53 AM on January 5, 2022 [1 favorite]


It wouldn't be very surprising if racism and middle-class suburban economic anxiety fed into each other - especially in those suburbs where many white people are really anxious about being in a Good School District, by which they mean a white school district, and houses in the Good School District are so expensive that either you can't afford to live there at all, or you can just barely afford to live there but you end up with a bunch of credit card debt (which just gets worse when your kids are going to school with kids richer than they are, and whining about wanting to be in the country club all their friends are in.)

If you're already predisposed to think that your kids going to an integrated school is a bad thing, then that puts you in the position of being anxious that you've failed to give your kids the life that you "should" have been able to give them. It feels like economic anxiety but it's economic anxiety that comes from the belief that you're entitled to have enough money to buy an exemption from integrated schools, integrated neighborhoods, etc.
posted by Jeanne at 9:53 AM on January 5, 2022 [14 favorites]


We argue that the main affect that the nation state tries to manage, in relation to the pandemic, through the ontology of war is anxiety. We show that the nation state tries to alleviate anxiety by framing it through the ontology war,this leads to the appearance of a potentially racist and nationalist affective climate where the“enemy” is no longer felt to be the virus, but members of other nations as well as minorities. We argue that the pandemic reveals both the political ontology of war central to the foundation of our political communities, and how this ontology is used by the nation state to manage feelings of anxiety and insecurity. Ultimately, as we will discuss at the end of this article, this leads to failure.
posted by infini at 9:55 AM on January 5, 2022 [5 favorites]


I think the disconnect here is coming from the idea you seem to have that these people are operating along straight and rational lines with logic that holds up to scrutiny.

They are not.

They are terrified, they are scared people doing scared people shit, and scared people shit MAKES NO SENSE. IT SOLVES NOTHING. IT IS OFTEN DIRECTLY OPPOSED TO THE STATED AIMS OF THE SCARED PERSON.

When someone is coming from a baseline of racism, and they get deeply, existentially scared, their scared people shit is gonna be racist shit. Someone with a different baseline gets scared, they do different scared people shit.

My thinking is that the FEAR isn't a fear of people of color. It's a fear of literally, starving! Of losing your home, of losing the respect of society, of being cast out. But because our culture is so deeply racist, this fear gets expressed through a hatred of the identified other.

The part in all caps is obviously implied. I mean, are you really suggesting that people are trying to prove that workers in America as a whole do not experience any precarity by .... showing that insurrectionists have decent jobs?! Like, what?

it makes no sense because that's the complete opposite of what I said. I said that workers in America as a whole experience precarity INCLUDING the insurrectionists who have decent jobs. It is incorrect to think that they do not experience precarity just because they wear a button-down shirt to work instead of a polo with a nametag.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 9:57 AM on January 5, 2022 [12 favorites]


We are merely arguing that the having of some arbitrary sum of money does not mean the absence of economic anxiety. It's still almost certainly not the primary driver. But it seems foolish to think that it's completely, utterly unrelated. When you look at the things the insurrectionists write, say, do--they're not secure people. They don't feel optimism. You might argue, well, they should. But they don't.

Which Mira isn't denying - what she's pointing out is that they are quite bluntly telling you what they're anxious about with things like the Great Replacement, and it isn't economics. These are people who have lived in a worldview that has said that they are the top of the heap and others were expected to bow to them, and now that's changing and they don't like it. They don't feel optimistic because they want to go back to where they could tell the people they saw as beneath them to know their place, but know that the door is open and they can't go back.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:57 AM on January 5, 2022 [13 favorites]


And I'm going to once again try to derail this conversation back to "So WTF are we supposed to do about this?!" Upthread an octopus IRL offered some local, direct action ideas. What else can all of us do to address the threats that surround THIS YEAR's election and the one in 2024?
posted by PhineasGage at 9:59 AM on January 5, 2022 [8 favorites]


These are people who have lived in a worldview that has said that they are the top of the heap and others were expected to bow to them, and now that's changing and they don't like it.

yes. I can't find the citation but it relates to the ontological certainty of knowing 'white was top of the heap' and it isn't anymore and will never be again. hence the maga birdwhistle

btw, that indian name podcaster terrified to mention racism might just be afraid of righteous rightwing backlash
posted by infini at 10:01 AM on January 5, 2022 [2 favorites]


Thanks for posting, clawsoon. I try not to read too much about the insurrection, Trump, etc., but this was good.

It's wild to me that fully 27% (OK, I made that up, but) of MeFi and AskMe threads at least touch on U.S. economic insecurity, housing issues, and medical costs, including direct impacts on MeFites middle class and up, and yet in this thread there's serious questioning about whether economic instability or anxiety exists for people who are not subsistence farmers. Or should even be considered, in light of wealth inequity something something. I hope we can try to remember to have some empathy for others -- anxiety and insecurity suck, wherever you are on the income brackets.

The stuff about Great Replacement theory is fascinating and creepy, but not surprising. In general, I think the sight of a Black president was just too much for a lot of the insurrectionist-types to bear, and I think we're living in the aftermath of their reaction(s).
posted by cupcakeninja at 10:03 AM on January 5, 2022 [7 favorites]


this leads to the appearance of a potentially racist and nationalist affective climate where the“enemy” is no longer felt to be the virus, but members of other nations as well as minorities.

I know you're trying to make the opposite point, infini, but yes, thank you for quoting this as your main thesis.

People of color must contend with this reality, you see. This is the fact of life we live under: in our country, the enemy is no longer felt to be anything other than racial minorities.

Whatever the underlying reasons for this feeling, whoever the puppet masters are who orchestrate this feeling, whatever the mechanism used to generate and manufacture this feeling, and regardless of who is ultimately profiting from it, THIS IS THE REALITY THAT PEOPLE OF COLOR MUST LIVE UNDER, RIGHT HERE AND RIGHT NOW.

Denying the existence of this reality is bullshit.

Minimizing its impact by insisting that this reality is not as important and nor as real as the underlying machinations and profiteers is bullshit.

Turning every conversation about the evidence for the existence of this reality into a conversation about underlying machinations is bullshit.


> I think the disconnect here is coming from the idea you seem to have that these people are operating along straight and rational lines with logic that holds up to scrutiny.

> They are not.

> They are terrified, they are scared people doing scared people shit,


So let's interrogate that. By your own admission, their terror is exactly the same as your terror and my terror. The economic anxiety they experience is no different from yours or mine.

My anxiety causes me to do... a bunch of things I do. Their anxiety makes them do .... that. Supporting Trump. Attempting an insurrection. Why the difference? Let's interrogate that, because that's what's worth interrogating, and that's what we've just uncovered the freshest hit of evidence for. There is more of a method to their madness than you seem to be willing to admit.
posted by MiraK at 10:03 AM on January 5, 2022 [23 favorites]


I wonder how many other examples there are from history of violence from a gentry class that feels its privileges being threatened.
posted by clawsoon at 10:05 AM on January 5, 2022 [3 favorites]


As for why we go back to economics - I think it's because it's easier to answer than actually dealing with bigotry. If the problem is "economic anxiety", then all we have to do is make people less anxious. But dealing with bigotry goes deeper, and requires confronting a lot of cultural sacred cows that a lot of people don't want to, like the fact that we routinely tell minorities and other dispossessed groups that they have to live with hate directed at them for the "greater good" because we hold the right for a bigot to spew that hate higher than the right for these people to, you know, exist.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:08 AM on January 5, 2022 [13 favorites]


FWIW - my post above was intended to acknowledge the straw man "economic anxiety" angle of this - I've watched the bigotry and racism ratchet up significantly since oh, I'd say right around the election on our 44th President.

(it was always there, it just became more okay to say it aloud)
posted by djseafood at 10:10 AM on January 5, 2022 [5 favorites]


I'm a Marxist. The evidence against racism is twofold. Racism cannot explain itself, other than circular reasoning (racism because human nature is tribal, this is the white liberal ally's reduction). Second, political polarization happens in nations much more homogeneous than the U.S. as explained in Thomas Picketty's books.

Like, I'm Asian American, I'm LGBT, and a couple other marginalized categories. But the racism-classism false dichotomy comes from bad theorizing and if you read a bit of contemporary Marxism (I did it through David Harvey's lectures), it makes a lot more sense. We wouldn't say feudal societies did terrible things only because they were racist, it was also because they were feudal societies and the social relations that arose out of that social order. Today's isn't that different, other than the capitalism. Power corrupts and racism is one face of that.
posted by polymodus at 10:11 AM on January 5, 2022 [9 favorites]


I know you're trying to make the opposite point, infini, but yes, thank you for quoting this as your main thesis.

People of color must contend with this reality, you see. This is the fact of life we live under: in our country, the enemy is no longer felt to be anything other than racial minorities.


MiraK, don't tell me to see what its like to be a PoC in America. its the reason I cut up my green card and tossed it in the trash 15 years ago. My point was exactly my point.
posted by infini at 10:12 AM on January 5, 2022 [3 favorites]


If you're going to bring up Trump voters acting irrationally based on fear or whatever, you can't just brush aside the media's culpability in it.

I think I read it here, but maybe not. It was something to the effect of "Can you blame these people for voting for Trump? The vast majority of them have been subjected to military grade psyops for decades."

The fear is obviously and visibly there. It has been almost entirely fabricated by the media. It used to just be FOX and the other low rent AM radio types fanning the flames of racism and fear, but now it's CNN, NYT and MSNBC, because if we learned one thing from the Trump presidency, it's that drama sells.

The more we learn about FOX's direct input into the insurrection/coup attempt, the more convinced I am that if we don't take drastic measures soonest, we're in for more and more of this. I also think that we're probably past the point of where this can be "fixed".

The myriad ways that the Reagan administration totally and completely set the stage for the corporation-based whites only dystopia we've been living in for the past 30 or so years is terrifying in it's scope.
posted by Sphinx at 10:13 AM on January 5, 2022 [20 favorites]


My anxiety causes me to do... a bunch of things I do. Their anxiety makes them do .... that. Supporting Trump. Attempting an insurrection. Why the difference? Let's interrogate that, because that's what's worth interrogating

I mean you could look at literally the next thing I said, which was that their baseline is racism, and they live in a deeply racist culture?

Like seriously just read all the words I type.

Solving bigotry and racism is also critical but if the goal is to prevent the overthrow of this specific government by this specific flavor of racist fascism, then one way to do that is working toward a society where even racist asshats are too busy being happy and fulfilled to overthrow the government.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 10:15 AM on January 5, 2022 [13 favorites]


The fear is obviously and visibly there. It has been almost entirely fabricated by the media. It used to just be FOX and the other low rent AM radio types fanning the flames of racism and fear, but now it's CNN, NYT and MSNBC, because if we learned one thing from the Trump presidency, it's that drama sells.

This is a YUGE problem in this globally connected day and age because this 'fear the brown person' shit is now spewed all over the world and affects us all, unless we block the digital platforms and their slanted right wing algorithms along with them.

This thread is also very helpful to see evidence Merkel's fear of an increasingly insular America out of touch with the rest of the world and the way it thinks.
posted by infini at 10:16 AM on January 5, 2022 [4 favorites]


You can't say that economic anxiety explains Trump votes AND ALSO say that economic anxiety is something literally every American suffers from.

So I think the problem here is that media narratives are, by definition, simple, because if people were interested in complex analysis, they would be reading sociology papers.

Economic anxiety is on the rise for the vast majority of white, non-immigrant Americans right now. This is not because white Americans are necessarily intentionally and deliberately racist; this is because previously, white Americans had a largely unearned share of the pie that produced better life outcomes. Now that large steps towards equity are being taken, white Americans are by and large, absolutely, in real terms, worse off economically than their parents. Technocapitalism and precarity are absolutely affecting us all, but it affects us differently when you consider things generationally. Americans of color are not in better straits than their white counterparts, but they are largely doing better than their parents were, because their parents were being artificially kept down.

So we see that childcare costs are rising. Why? Because you can't just pay people of color, or teenagers, shit wages to care for your children anymore, because they have other opportunities. (You see this mismatch of expectations a lot, when people post 20$ 'jobs' for teens to watch several children for four hours) You see that it's harder for white male Americans to have and keep a job than it was thirty years before: in part because now computers can determine if he's really the best at that job, but also because other people are now able to compete for that job.

And I've talked about this previously, but people tend to remember their family's outcomes without largely remembering why those outcomes existed. They remember that their family's house was always sparkling clean, without remembering it took place because there existed a person (largely, a woman) who was effectively a full time housekeeper because she didn't have better options - and that she would probably also have outside cleaners come in. Even if you don't read various accounts of that, you can see this kind of stuff by looking at the television shows of the time - how often did housekeepers, cleaners, landscapers, or occasional cooks appear for middle class families?

So we are seeing white Americans react in a variety of ways to that feeling of loss - that genuine feeling that they are worse off than their parents. Populism is on the rise - and like it always fucking does, it is breaking into a choice between socialism and fascism. You are seeing white middle class scions literally flood left and right organizations right now, largely seeking for an answer. And people are choosing between the answers of "The real problem is the billionaires/capitalism" and "the real problem is all this rise of equity taking away our Way of Life". And unfortunately, that break is not cleanly explained by racism. I can say this, existing on the left now, that a lot of the people flooding in to that side can fake the talk but are not a whit less racist or sexist than their counterparts on the right.

My current hypothesis is that it is largely explained by cultural and social factors - people have a slight inclination to join in with the answer of those around them, so left and right leans are being exaggerated. But whatever it is, it's absolutely wrong to say economic anxiety plays no part in it just because most people have economic anxiety to some degree.
posted by corb at 10:18 AM on January 5, 2022 [37 favorites]


Another threat on the horizon: the inevitable cryptocurrency crash radicalising a cadre of younger participants to fascism

This analysis is just terrible. He writes:
Crypto is now worth trillions of dollars. All of that value is premised not on some fundamental utility, but rather on the idea that there will always be someone else who will come along and pay you more than you spent on your crypto.
Value hasn’t been based on utility since the barter system. Fiat currency certainly doesn’t have any fundamental utility. And the idea that the value of stocks is based on ownership of a company is profoundly ignorant: the market is based on growth of value (i.e. “speculation”), not utility.
Their value fluctuates far too much to be a useful medium of exchange.
I’d like to see some serious analysis behind this claim. Recently at least, fluctuations in bitcoin seem similar to fluctuations in the dollar. The main difference being that while the dollar is inflationary (decreasing in value over time), bitcoin is deflationary (increasing in value over time). This is because cryptocurrencies are inherently scarce. There are many reasons that having a deflationary currency is bad (mostly having to do with further concentration of wealth), but “inevitable” collapse of value is not one of them.
The crash of crypto is bound to happen for the same reason that all Ponzi schemes eventually crumble: There is not an infinite supply of new people willing to pay ever-increasing prices for the stuff that you currently own.
I don’t even know what to say to this. This is just a fundamental misunderstanding of how markets work. If cryptocurrencies are a “Ponzi scheme” then so is everything else in capitalism. Which it may be, but that has very little to do with cryptocurrencies qua cryptocurrencies.
posted by mr_roboto at 10:20 AM on January 5, 2022 [1 favorite]


Solving bigotry and racism is also critical but if the goal is to prevent the overthrow of this specific government by this specific flavor of racist fascism, then one way to do that is working toward a society where even racist asshats are too busy being happy and fulfilled to overthrow the government

And the counterpoint is that will never happen because it is the nature of the racist asshat to never be happy and fulfilled unless they are in control.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:22 AM on January 5, 2022 [4 favorites]


(BUT SURELY, you say, racists will never be happy or fulfilled until they have achieved their racist aims of pure unadulterated racism enforced at the highest levels. And this is probably true for a very small number of people. There are no doubt people out there who will never be contented unless they are the undisputed dictators of some all-white all-male fiefdom, and those folks suck, and we should deplatform them and invalidate them in the strongest terms.

But I would argue that actually, most people are in fact way, way too lazy to keep up some kind of active, high-energy, storm the barricades racist activism in the face of feeling like their lives, and the lives of their kids, are going to be basically fine. Working to root out their ingrained bigotry seems to me the second thing AFTER ensuring they do not do cataclysmic harm.)

LOL on preview I see that I was correct in my first sentence.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 10:27 AM on January 5, 2022 [7 favorites]


I guess some people really do need to watch the Atwater interview again (or for the first time).

It's not either economic or racial, they're mutually reinforcing and the feedback loop is getting tighter and louder for want of any effective structural constraints or counterforce as existed during certain moments in the 20th century. Except, I suppose, ecological pressures which could just as easily (or more easily) lead to increased violence and totalitarianism.

Online culture has replaced dogwhistles with outright trolling, I suppose. Which has overhauled the political culture enough for retired Boomers to put Let's Go Brandon flags on their trucks and go start shit at school board meetings. But that's just meatspace posting.
posted by snuffleupagus at 10:28 AM on January 5, 2022 [16 favorites]


Value hasn’t been based on utility since the barter system. Fiat currency certainly doesn’t have any fundamental utility.
You can and must pay your taxes in fiat currency. Its fundamental value is derived from the state monopoly on violence and the role that the state plays in coordinating economic activities. The crypto people are figuring this out the hard way from first principles, to the extent that they’re figuring it out at all — the ones who aren’t figuring this out are at risk of huge disappointment and massive ego injury. They will do stupid, terrible things when they land on their asses without having been cooled out.
posted by migurski at 10:29 AM on January 5, 2022 [13 favorites]


> Economic anxiety is on the rise for the vast majority of white, non-immigrant Americans right now. This is not because white Americans are necessarily intentionally and deliberately racist;

But it is because they're racist.

Not intentionally, not deliberately, but racist nevertheless. The rest of your paragraph explains exactly how they're racist:

> this is because previously, white Americans had a largely unearned share of the pie that produced better life outcomes. Now that large steps towards equity are being taken, white Americans are by and large, absolutely, in real terms, worse off

That's racism. That's what the data in this OP and everywhere else shows us: that white Americans who vote for Trump and mount insurrections are driven by anxiety about being replaced. As Clawsoon said above, there is vast amounts of evidence for the fact that the Great Replacement anxiety is the strongest motivator of Trump voting and insurrection mounting - not least of which is the folks will tell you so, in so many words.

And in spite of all the evidence, in spite of hours of footage of open admissions straight from the racists' mouths, there is still this stubborn insistence that calling racism by its name is... "simple". Reductive. Not "complex" enough. Or as Shankar Vedantam always puts it, "a shallow, superficial narrative."

It's like racism is being defined out of existence rather than combated away.
posted by MiraK at 10:29 AM on January 5, 2022 [25 favorites]


The racism (AND sexism) is what comes out when the oligarchs engineer their supporters to punch down instead of looking up, as a cure to the economic anxiety.

Down IS brown people (and women).

Turns out many Americans are particularly vulnerable to letting their inner racist out.
posted by Dashy at 10:33 AM on January 5, 2022 [4 favorites]


My personal belief (without much evidence) is that economic anxiety makes many people (particularly white people) susceptible to racist arguments. "You have less than you want/need/deserve or are in danger of losing it, and The Other is to blame", where The Other is non-whites, immigrants, Islamic terrorists—whatever gets traction with that particular person.

This. Anxiety is malleable. People often don't a real handle on what makes them anxious. So any widespread anxiety is ripe for redirection and exploitation, as has apparently happened once or twice before in history. (not to say thay there ISN'T real racism just itching to come out)

So what to do about this? Get less anxious.


Big ask, I know. The fix probably starts with a government system that isn't rigidly bipolar, that more than a few people have some faith in.
posted by Artful Codger at 10:36 AM on January 5, 2022 [3 favorites]


What else can all of us do to address the threats that surround THIS YEAR's election and the one in 2024?

This is a good question. Honestly, I was set up to go on the lines of some sort of "Be happy that things are getting passed like voting-rights protections & the Child Tax Credit, which lifted 3 million children out of poverty (and would be foolish to give up on)" jag, but really that's just my own anxieties about how things are being handled speaking, & it wouldn't add to the conversation.

I don't think there's good answers, and it's an important question, and I'm not sure how to balance "don't doom-dump into the thread too hard" with honestly accounting for what I feel the trend-line is for 2022 & 2024 electorally. (my prediction could definitely be skewed, but I don't think even the most optimistic of political analysts are foreseeing an easy walk for Democrats)

Let's imagine, for a moment, that 2022 sees a regression to the mean & the GOP takes the House & Senate, but not in overwhelming enough numbers to carry out the impeachment of Biden that they're threatening.

All the current headwinds are still in place, but nothing particularly catastrophic comes out of geopolitics or the Supreme Court. (for simplicity/avoiding freewheeling too hard here) The big line is along the lines of "Biden had 4 years, and look what he did with it. Trump gave you more money than he did."

What's the play, at that point?
I don't have any particular levers into electoral results, I'm guessing nobody here does.

My move so far is "Try to build up resources to help others be sheltered from the worst brunt of things, feed resources into groups that are often 'sharing the same $20 bill back & forth'", but that's also basically what I've been doing this whole time & it's good on an "individual impact for individual effort & multiplied but distributed impact for individual effort" basis but it's a delaying action at best.

Ultimately, I'm hoping that the dry-runs of the Western States Pact, Eastern States Multi-state Council, Midwest Governors Regional Pact, etc. might blossom into something. That's at the level that we might be able to see concerted action move things. It's not a great hope, but it's the best one I've got.
posted by CrystalDave at 10:37 AM on January 5, 2022 [2 favorites]


You can and must pay your taxes in fiat currency. Its fundamental value is derived from the state monopoly on violence and the role that the state plays in coordinating economic activities

Right. But “value” and “utility” mean different things in this context. Utility is like wheat or lumber: you can eat it or use it to buy stuff. And commodities certainly have both utility and value (though their value is not based solely on their utility; there’s also market speculation).

Also, the value of fiat currency is not based entirely on the will of the state, else hyperinflation would be impossible. The market always matters, even in economies with strong central control. Fiat currency value is determined in large part by supply and demand (this is how central banks can influence economies by altering the availability of money via interest rates, for instance). The value of bitcoin is derived from its scarcity as imposed by the inherent design of the currency.
posted by mr_roboto at 10:37 AM on January 5, 2022


Enter this tweet by The Daily Show - with perfect timing
posted by djseafood at 10:37 AM on January 5, 2022 [23 favorites]


But I would argue that actually, most people are in fact way, way too lazy to keep up some kind of active, high-energy, storm the barricades racist activism in the face of feeling like their lives, and the lives of their kids, are going to be basically fine. Working to root out their ingrained bigotry seems to me the second thing AFTER ensuring they do not do cataclysmic harm.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how racism works. Look at the recent election in Virginia, and the discussions coming out of it, where you had "concerned moms" complaining how changes to school curricula had their children "feeling ashamed" because the schools were finally teaching them the actual history of how dispossessed groups were treated. You cannot make them feel secure through economics, because that's not where their insecurities lie. Furthermore, while they may not be pushed to engage in violence themselves, they will support violence done on their behalf - I'm old enough to remember what "Run Eric Run" meant.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:42 AM on January 5, 2022 [21 favorites]


use it to buy stuff

I meant to write: "use it to build stuff".
posted by mr_roboto at 10:45 AM on January 5, 2022


But I would argue that actually, most people are in fact way, way too lazy to keep up some kind of active, high-energy, storm the barricades racist activism in the face of feeling like their lives, and the lives of their kids, are going to be basically fine

Wait, what? Are you saying racism automatically ends when economic anxieties end? Jesus, that's a bit much, don't you think?

You do realize that powerful people will always have the motivation to convince the masses that they are insecure and that their share is being stolen from them, even if that's false? THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT'S HAPPENING RIGHT NOW, THAT'S WHY THE INSURRECTION HAPPENED! These people are more economically secure than most other Americans, most of them are in the top 20% most economically secure demographic in the country, and yet they were whipped into a frenzy by people who stand to profit from an insurrection.

Back in my home country of India, Hindu brahmins get frenzied when they think of how lower caste people are stealing places in private schools that should belong to brahmins, even though lower caste people hold less than 2% of the seats there (25% of the population) and brahmins hold ~60% (20% of the population). Even my parents go beserk at every reported story of how some lower caste kid got into a fancy English medium school. They don't even have any school age kids off their own, and their grandchildren live in the US. Why do they get worked up? Because the political party in power convinced them to FEEL insecure even though they aren't. Not even if my parents had a direct stake would they have any real reason to feel economically or educationally threatened by lower caste people in private schools. My parents have plenty of reasons to feel anxious in general! They are economically stressed, the pandemic is impacting them badly, and they have MANY legitimate fears and concerns which they share with most people in the country. But also, my parents would storm the local schools and personally kick lower caste children out of there if given the chance, if encouraged by their political leaders, because they also have irrational anxiety about that shit.

Exactly like those people who mounted the insurrection - they had no real reason to feel so threatened by the idea of being replaced that they needed to storm the capitol. Their valid economic anxiety is not what made them storm the capitol (or else you and I would have been there too, seeing as how we feel the same valid anxiety.) They felt UNDULY threatened and IRRATIONALLY anxious because they were lied to. Their racism was what made them vulnerable to these lies. You and I didn't storm the capitol because we aren't racist. That's the only way in which we differ from those who did storm the capitol.
posted by MiraK at 10:52 AM on January 5, 2022 [22 favorites]


It's like racism is being defined out of existence rather than combated away.

Trump and his supporters are super racist. Republican politicians and policies are super racist. America has always been a super racist country. But it's hard to write laws that say "don't be racist", especially as the (racist) Supreme Court has hamstrung Congress, states, cities, ​and the courts themselves from doing so*, so that even if we could get such laws passed, they might not last long. There are long term solutions to those obstacles, but they are probably a decade or more away.

What is easier (though not by much, thanks to gerrymandering and the filibuster) is passing laws and changing policies that pull economic levers. And so I find value in looking at the intersection of racism and economic issues in two ways: how can we directly improve the lives of the oppressed and how can we directly improve the lives of everyone in a way that takes some of the wind out of the sails of racist demagogues like Trump.

* See, e.g., a long line of Supreme Court decisions saying that racist laws can only be struck down if they had an explicitly racist intent, which is almost impossible to prove, and not "merely" racist effects.
posted by jedicus at 10:57 AM on January 5, 2022 [9 favorites]


Wait, what? Are you saying racism automatically ends when economic anxieties end? Jesus, that's a bit much, don't you think?

What? No, for fuck's sake. I'm saying a racist who's sitting at home enjoying their life and NOT overthrowing the government is preferable to one who is ACTIVELY STORMING THE CAPITOL and if we improve circumstances such that fewer racists are ACTIVELY STORMING THE CAPITOL that's probably a good thing.

Y'all want to make it seem like I'm proposing solutions to Racism Itself or to the United States Itself and I'm literally just out here trying to talk about the people in the FPP and how to make them stop doing this specific thing they're currently doing.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 10:59 AM on January 5, 2022 [8 favorites]


I'd settle for people merely calling racism "racism" in threads like these, thanks, no need to write laws against racism.
posted by MiraK at 10:59 AM on January 5, 2022 [1 favorite]


Re: voting rights protections

Unless I missed something, those are NOT getting passed. It seems like the most important thing the Democrats could do before the 2022 and 2024 elections while they still hold both houses of Congress, but they seem unable to do it.
posted by wittgenstein at 11:05 AM on January 5, 2022 [5 favorites]


You do realize that powerful people will always have the motivation to convince the masses that they are insecure and that their share is being stolen from them, even if that's false? ... THAT'S WHY THE INSURRECTION HAPPENED ... Their racism was what made them vulnerable to these lies.

I think maybe all we disagree on is which direction the causal arrow points: are racists susceptible to lies about economic anxiety, or does economic anxiety make people susceptible to racist ideology. I think both are often present, but in the end I think the question is (mostly) academic because, as a practical matter, the policy levers available in the US right now are mostly economic rather than socio-cultural (thanks to centuries of systematic racism).
posted by jedicus at 11:05 AM on January 5, 2022 [2 favorites]


Would it be great if we also fixed everything else too? SURE, but like, that's not what the FPP was about. The FPP was about researchers and journalists being surprised to learn that the insurrection largely consisted of middle-class professionals.

I merely don't think that's remotely surprising and their surprise reveals a lot. I don't think our media understands what the U.S. middle class experience is anymore, or anyway they don't understand it particularly well, and if they did, a lot of economic ideas that currently can't get a ton of media traction very well might begin to.

I think that happy, secure people with faith in their institutions and future do not, mostly, do a crapload of weird fascist violence. Even if they're racist to their sad shriveled cores. So if you wish for less weird fascist violence, one tactic (among many!) might be to increase peoples' material security and shore up their faith in the future.

Now, how do you do this? Well, fuck if I know, if I knew, I'd be doing it wouldn't I?
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 11:06 AM on January 5, 2022 [10 favorites]


If you're anxious about money, you don't spend a ton of it to go do some violence on camera. They're fascists and their goal is to institute an anti-democratic, racist government in which they can commit violence against the underclasses. That's not something you fix with a long lecture about how hard it is to keep a mortgage going at $85k.

There is anxiety, period. Economic precarity (perceived or actual) is just one cause.

Many Americans have been persuaded, and even observed, that their political system doesn't work as well as they'd like. That's a big source of anxiety. Abetted by a for-profit media landscape that is competing for eyeballs, by any means. And political operatives who are expert at increasing, and then exploiting anxiety. Including racial anxiety.

The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.
- P.J. O'Rourke

I think we're seeing this idea being played out to its extreme end.
posted by Artful Codger at 11:10 AM on January 5, 2022 [5 favorites]


What? No, for fuck's sake. I'm saying a racist who's sitting at home enjoying their life and NOT overthrowing the government is preferable to one who is ACTIVELY STORMING THE CAPITOL and if we improve circumstances such that fewer racists are ACTIVELY STORMING THE CAPITOL that's probably a good thing.

And again, this is fundamentally misunderstanding how racism works, and illustrates why the discussion about "economic anxiety" misses the point. You keep bringing up how they are pessimistic and no longer have faith in institutions, but ignore that this is due to the fact that those institutions are no longer upholding the racist beliefs that had placed these people on top of the social pecking order. Again, shoring up their material security will not resolve their anxieity, because the source does not stem from there.
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:15 AM on January 5, 2022 [8 favorites]


You and I didn't storm the capitol because we aren't racist. That's the only way in which we differ from those who did storm the capitol.

I mean...I AM a racist. I'm a white lady in the Midwestern US with a middle class income, my very existence owes itself to a pernicious racism. Like...that's also clearly not enough. I'm a white lady with a middle class income in the Midwest that I am terrified to lose. I know myself well enough to know that I'm actually not very smart, or very inherently good. I just have a different baseline for my scared person shit and that is, likely, pure luck. I didn't fall down the "wrong" rabbit hole on the internet in my 20s, I fell down the metafilter rabbit hole instead. I am too young for the Cable News pipeline and somehow avoided the youtube fascism generator.

The difference between you and the rioters is racism. The difference between me and some other midwestern white lady at the Capitol is just that the wrong folks didn't get me at the wrong time. That's IT.

So long as you have a lot of scared people, you will have people ripe to have their fear exploited and that exploitation can go either direction. But you can't exploit the fears of someone who isn't afraid.

You keep bringing up how they are pessimistic and no longer have faith in institutions, but ignore that this is due to the fact that those institutions are no longer upholding the racist beliefs that had placed these people on top of the social pecking order

I agree that this is true for the leaders of these movements; I do not agree that it is true of their followers. I know those followers. They don't, really, truly, have a firm and coherent racist philosophy of society. They don't have a coherent philosophy of anything. They are just tired of feeling like nothing they do matters and scared of ending up with a boot on their faces, and they're not savvy enough to question it when someone says that boot will be worn by a person of color instead of some white corporate shitbird.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 11:23 AM on January 5, 2022 [25 favorites]


The actual down-at-the-heel Appalachian, "economically insecure" folk that the greater liberal population has scared up as boogeymen are mostly too busy trying to survive to try and dismantle democracy. I am related to these people. I have worked with this people. I have lived among them. And what I can tell you is that, by and large, the fascists are not coming from the hovels and the hollers, they are coming from down the block and across the street.

Uhh, let's not overstate the case. The argument that poor, rural white people are actually crypto-liberals rather than overwhelmingly conservative has been made over and over, and it doesn't hold water.

Look at the numbers for Capito's victory over Swearengin; Swearengin was the picture-perfect Appalachian leftist candidate, if you believed that the problem was Democrats not going far enough left. She talked the talk and walked the walk: economic diversity, environmental protections, $15 minimum wage, Medicare for All, cannabis legalization, the whole plank. If leftist social policies were truly popular in the "hovels and the hollers", she would have won handily. But no: she was absolutely beaten up for it—losing by more than 40 percent.

That shouldn't have been too surprising; after all, Trump won WV by a margin of 41.7 percent in 2016, and 38.9 points in 2020. In the House races, no Democratic candidate got more than 40% of the vote; the high-water mark was Cathy Kunkel in WV-2 with 36.9% (losing to Alex Mooney with 63.1%).

The reason you didn't see a lot of poor white people storming the Capitol on Jan 6 was probably because they couldn't just take a random Wednesday off from other responsibilities to go play dress-up in Washington, even if it came with a chance to take a shit on Nancy Pelosi's desk. Most poor people don't get to set their own schedules; that's a privilege you only get if you're a professional or a business owner. Hence the 1/6 mob was filled with professional- and owner-class people. That should not be taken as a representative sample of electoral support, much less popular support.

Bluntly: the American left's love affair with the "white working class" is not reciprocal.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:26 AM on January 5, 2022 [25 favorites]


I don’t think it will resolve their anxiety, but I think it will (for some, by no means all) reduce how much they care and make it harder for racist politicians to make racist economic appeals. And make more of them willing to focus on elections instead of insurrections.

I mean, it seems like the alternative is to say that there are millions of violent, heavily armed racists in the country, who cannot be deterred by reason or any feasible policy changes. If that’s so, then I’m not sure how the end result isn’t Balkanization, civil war, or both.
posted by jedicus at 11:31 AM on January 5, 2022 [1 favorite]


I'm kind of repeating what others have said here, but:

Our entire system is predicated on economic anxiety -- that's what gets people out of bed in the morning to go to work at jobs they might hate.

The comfortable white management class has always been shielded from the full force of this, a privilege due largely to the color of their skin.

That is the part that is being eroded, and they are starting to feel the same level of precarity that non-privileged classes have always experienced.

The economic anxiety is real, its increase is largely falling on white people, and this is happening in large part due to society's attempts to enact greater social justice.

That isn't to say their response is justified, or not racist in some pretty fundamental ways. But neither were the Nazis justified by the conditions in interwar Germany, yet the world managed to build a ridiculously durable peace after WWII by recognizing how it was fed by those circumstances.
posted by bjrubble at 11:33 AM on January 5, 2022 [15 favorites]


Again: what do we DO about it? Economic and political theorizing and arguments are really just so much hot air if each and every one of us doesn’t vote in every single election. ALL of them - school board, city/county council, judges, commissioners, alderman - every last one.
You shouldn’t do that unless you know something about who you are voting for, so find out. One does this by going to community events that feature these folks as speakers (LWV-sponsored candidate forums, for example), attending council meetings (easier than ever now with Zoom), reading the voter pamphlet, and going to smaller campaign events where you can meet the candidate.
Volunteer to work on a campaign (or two) if you really like someone. Talk to your friends and neighbors and get them engaged too. Talk to your kids so they understand the responsibility and duty that voting brings with it.
The right wing has figured this out and is in the process of trying to transform local school boards and city councils by running and getting their candidates elected. They can only be successful at this if we don’t pay attention. Right now, most of us aren’t. Most of us don’t vote in local elections, which are the ones that most directly affect our daily lives. These are also where future congressmen, governors, mayors and presidents come from.
In my small town, we’ve got an open racist on Council. He got there because his district isn’t engaged, there’s no more local news coverage of city hall, and people don’t vote. At a council study session he spoke out against the mayor’s proposal to enact Juneteenth as a holiday by subjecting council to a 20-minute lecture on Confederate history, ending by sayin “folks, you can’t whitewash history” ( I said he was elected, not smart). Had more than one of his constituents been present for this bombast, he might not still be in office. As it was, only the few people in attendance noticed.
Please - VOTE.
posted by dbmcd at 11:34 AM on January 5, 2022 [10 favorites]


I agree that this is true for the leaders of these movements; I do not agree that it is true of their followers. I know those followers. They don't, really, truly, have a firm and coherent racist philosophy of society. They don't have a coherent philosophy of anything.

I'm sorry but I have to disagree hard here - and also note that you're giving these followers short shrift by arguing that they are just dupes, and in doing so stripping them of agency. They aren't being tricked or duped - they are responding to an argument that they agree with.
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:38 AM on January 5, 2022 [3 favorites]


I suspect I have the overly eager pattern-recognition of a new convert, but to me the question of racism here is largely answered by CRT.

I think the most fundamental thing -- and, not by accident, the lie about it that's most central to anti-CRT arguments -- is that it is NOT about individual people being racists. It's rather the recognition that everyone has convenient falsehoods that they believe about the world, that there's really no such thing as a "value neutral" idea, and that an enormous amount of harm comes from the ability of these unexamined assumptions to bypass even good-faith attempts to engage with other people fairly.

In terms of "what to do" about these things, to me this means the only real solution is to address them at a deeper (and by outward appearances more indirect) level.

I'd start by more or less directly attacking the notion that precarity is an acceptable motivator for economic activity. As long as we treat the pyramid as a valid shape for the distribution of human welfare, we will never stop people from making up bullshit excuses for climbing over the bodies of others to reach the top.
posted by bjrubble at 11:59 AM on January 5, 2022 [7 favorites]


> think maybe all we disagree on is which direction the causal arrow points: are racists susceptible to lies about economic anxiety, or does economic anxiety make people susceptible to racist ideology.

I don't think we disagree about this at all, because we have already accepted that all of us on this thread experience economic anxiety, but we didn't go storming the capitol or voting for Trump. Why? Because we were not moved by the racist lies being told by Fox and by Republican politicians, no matter how economically anxious we feel.

> I mean...I AM a racist. I'm a white lady in the Midwestern US with a middle class income, my very existence owes itself to a pernicious racism. Like...that's also clearly not enough. I'm a white lady with a middle class income in the Midwest that I am terrified to lose. I know myself well enough to know that I'm actually not very smart, or very inherently good. I just have a different baseline for my scared person shit and that is, likely, pure luck. I didn't fall down the "wrong" rabbit hole on the internet in my 20s, I fell down the metafilter rabbit hole instead. .... The difference between me and some other midwestern white lady at the Capitol is just that the wrong folks didn't get me at the wrong time. That's IT.

I resonate with this VERY DEEPLY. I am exactly as racist and casteist and bigoted in every way as you, Blast Hardcheese, and I, too, thank my lucky stars that I fell in with the right (left) crowds at pivotal times in my life. I'm sure that's the only thing that saved me from going down the same path as my parents, or down the Ayn Rand path I almost took in my late teens. I'm not smarter or morally superior to any of the racists who stormed the capitol. My soul is not purer than any racist who voted for Trump. There but for the grace of this world I would have gone, too.

See, now I think we're on to something. You notice that the difference between you/me and the insurrectionists is not that we have less economic anxiety than they do. You did not tell a story of how you were born into economically precarious circumstances and could easily have become a Trump supporter, except you won the lottery, got rich, lost your economic anxiety, and thus escaped this horrible fate.

Neither of us were or are ever rich. Our economic circumstances have fluctuated wildly throughout life, I bet, but our politics did not fluctuate along with our economic anxieties. Our politics were shaped in our formative years by our peer groups, by the propaganda we happened to be exposed to in our homes or in the media or in society at large, by the books we happened to read, by the mentors we happened to meet, etc. At best we might say that our economic circumstances had an indirect effect on shaping our politics, because it can affect which peer groups we mingled with and whether we had the capacity to leave/escape a toxic native community we were born into to find a healthier group to belong in... But especially in the internet age in the context of a first world country like USA, our levels of economic anxiety have had jack shit to do with whether or not we turned out to become adults who vote for racist presidents, mount insurrections, and feel threatened by the barest visibility of lower caste people in "our" domains. It was luck and community predominantly, and maybe some other things like personal experiences, but not economic anxiety.

> So long as you have a lot of scared people, you will have people ripe to have their fear exploited and that exploitation can go either direction. But you can't exploit the fears of someone who isn't afraid.

There is no human being who isn't afraid. There is no human being whose fears can't be exploited for *something*. (Watch me spend hundreds of dollars I cannot spare on Covid tests which have a 35% chance of giving accurate results for my asymptomatic family members who have recently been exposed to the virus!) I think the notion that racists would all settle down and stop frothing at their mouths if only they were economically content is deeply wrong: my parents are rich, lol, watch them froth away!
posted by MiraK at 12:05 PM on January 5, 2022 [18 favorites]


Reducing immiseration will reduce radicalization; including by the aggravation of racism for ideological ends. Fewer individuals are radicalized by their prejudices alone, and those remaining are more easily ostracized via both official and social mechanisms.

While I'm not for coddling any individual violent racist I am in favor of conditions that would produce less of them and enable the greater structural change that producing all of these reactionaries aims to prevent.

Tides don't arrive or recede all at once...
posted by snuffleupagus at 12:10 PM on January 5, 2022 [10 favorites]


Millions of Angry, Armed Americans Stand Ready to Seize Power If Trump Loses in 2024, David H. Freedman, Newsweek, 12/20/21:
...a much larger and more diffuse movement of more-or-less ordinary people, stoked by misinformation, knitted together by social media and well-armed. In 2020, 17 million Americans bought 40 million guns and in 2021 were on track to add another 20 million. If historical trends hold, the buyers will be overwhelmingly white, Republican and southern or rural.

America's massive and mostly Republican gun-rights movement dovetails with a growing belief among many Republicans that the federal government is an illegitimate tyranny that must be overthrown by any means necessary. That combustible formula raises the threat of armed, large-scale attacks around the 2024 presidential election—attacks that could make the January 6 insurrection look like a toothless stunt by comparison. "The idea that people would take up arms against an American election has gone from completely farfetched to something we have to start planning for and preparing for," says University of California, Los Angeles law professor Adam Winkler, an expert on gun policy and constitutional law....
3 retired generals: The military must prepare now for a 2024 insurrection; Paul D. Eaton, Antonio M. Taguba, Steven M. Anderson; Washington Post Opinion, December 17, 2021 (alternate Archive.org link):
As we approach the first anniversary of the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, we — all of us former senior military officials — are increasingly concerned about the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election and the potential for lethal chaos inside our military, which would put all Americans at severe risk. In short: We are chilled to our bones at the thought of a coup succeeding next time.

One of our military’s strengths is that it draws from our diverse population. It is a collection of individuals, all with different beliefs and backgrounds. But without constant maintenance, the potential for a military breakdown mirroring societal or political breakdown is very real. The signs of potential turmoil in our armed forces are there....
More in the articles.
posted by cenoxo at 12:11 PM on January 5, 2022 [9 favorites]


There is no human being who isn't afraid. There is no human being whose fears can't be exploited for *something*.

The idea is not to eradicate all fears of all people for all time, it is about not utterly disregarding one potential avenue for the reduction of human misery and fear simply... at this point it seems like simply because!

Suppose a movement toward greater material security in the nation reduced that 8% of violent racist insurrectionists to 5%. Am I meant to think that's a fucking failure? That's millions of human beings who can no longer be persuaded that it's a good idea to leave their homes to do violence. But let's not indulge the thought, because some other people are racist enough that they'd do violence no matter what.

This is I think familiar ground for the frustrated Metafilter progressive--the impression that the Left can't get behind any solution that is not perfect, merely good, and that any choice we make must be the sole choice.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 12:18 PM on January 5, 2022 [8 favorites]


But neither were the Nazis justified by the conditions in interwar Germany, yet the world managed to build a ridiculously durable peace after WWII by recognizing how it was fed by those circumstances.

Sure, but the Nazi's lost and had to be shown how badly they lost. Because even in 1945, the morale among the Wehrmacht was actually not in the toilet. A lot of them still believed in Hitler. Operation Werwolf was a thing. So, that's why at the end of the war the Allies top-down removed/banned Nazi symbols, statues, and media. That's also why they published pictures of executed Nazi leaders and for years hunted down the rest. And, y'know, all this may also have been helped along because the Soviets were the "bad cop" while the US/UK/France were "good cop" (or at least less bad cop).
posted by FJT at 12:21 PM on January 5, 2022 [4 favorites]


The vast majority of those protesters were probably not acting from self-interest, due to their devoted self-sacrifice to Qanon and Trump himself. Their high level of blind obedience and manipulable suggestibility has an alternative disturbing explanation here, from an economist who understands that searching for meaningful motives is likely a common bias of rational people.
posted by Brian B. at 12:22 PM on January 5, 2022 [4 favorites]


Oooh, here's something concrete almost every one of us (Americans) can do - get involved in these three key elections:
The governors’ races in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin will be the three most important elections of 2022. Political math matters. It may determine, more than the will of the people and well before 2024, whether we will continue to live in a democracy.
Who's with me?
posted by PhineasGage at 12:22 PM on January 5, 2022 [7 favorites]


the impression that the Left can't get behind any solution that is not perfect, merely good, and that any choice we make must be the sole choice.

There is an irony in the left's relative parochialism in its annointed organizing and tactics, vs. the right's willingness to sling every form of shit and run on what sticks.

Who are the conservatives again?
posted by snuffleupagus at 12:22 PM on January 5, 2022 [2 favorites]


The three key gubernatorial candidates to support: incumbent Michigan Gov. Gretchen Witmer, current Pennsylvania Attorney General and presumptive Democratic gubernatorial nominee Josh Shapiro, and incumbent Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers.
posted by PhineasGage at 12:31 PM on January 5, 2022 [7 favorites]


> I don’t think it will resolve their anxiety, but I think it will (for some, by no means all) reduce how much they care and make it harder for racist politicians to make racist economic appeals. And make more of them willing to focus on elections instead of insurrections.

> I mean, it seems like the alternative is to say that there are millions of violent, heavily armed racists in the country, who cannot be deterred by reason or any feasible policy changes.


Good grief, why would you think that's the only alternative?? Racists are not slavering mythic monsters, you know, that they should be utterly undeterrable, unreasonable, ungovernable, unstoppable! Racists are human beings. They respond to human actions that other humans can take to address racism. Labeling racists as racists is merely the first step in taking these actions - not, as you fear, some final stamp on the situation as hopeless! hopeless! We should all give up and panic! Or whatever it is you're imagining.

> So, that's why at the end of the war the Allies top-down removed/banned Nazi symbols, statues, and media. That's also why they published pictures of executed Nazi leaders and for years hunted down the rest.

THIS. We could do worse than copy Germany's example in dealing with Nazis. Step 1: call racism by its name, label racists as racists. Step 2. Tear down racist networks, shut down racist propaganda, prosecute racist leaders, disband racist organizations. Step 3: Eradicate racist symbols, de-glorify racist monuments by placing them in context of the racism they inflicted on people. Step 4: Confront the past squarely without minimizing damage done, and teach history that centers victims of racism. (I recently read on twitter an amazing thread that explained what US history textbooks might look like if we took hints from the way Germany treats the Holocaust... for one example, the Civil War would only be mentioned at the very end of the high school curriculum.)
posted by MiraK at 12:31 PM on January 5, 2022 [7 favorites]


They're fascists and their goal is to institute an anti-democratic, racist government in which they can commit violence against the underclasses. That's not something you fix with a long lecture about how hard it is to keep a mortgage going at $85k.

The most eye-opening recent book I read was written for kids age 10 and older (I'm in my 50s) - Katherine Johnson's autobiography "Reaching for the Moon". She does not hide behind fancy words when she describes being born in 1918 America to black parents descended from slaves, no matter how fair their skin colour was. And throughout the book, as the years unfold, she describes the incomprehensible "threat perception" that her mere existence, as a brilliant mathematical genius who just happened to be a black woman, created in white men. She also describes living through Jim Crow and explains sytemic racism intended to terrorize the black population through violence and lynchings so that they "know their place". She describes the difference in each generation as they push the envelope of their rights and the lines drawn for her community when trying to navigate the random acts of violence they had to live with.

Reading it, it seemed to me, that what the Trumpian post Obama era was about was bringing these aspects of the pre-Civil Rights Era and pre-political correctness era back into the foreground. Increased violence, threats, fear, all in the support of ensuring that the place that felt so uncertain and ambiguous in this modern era was retrieved, strengthened and stabilized. That's what this movement is inherently about.

Its not just "racism". Its White supremacy and its systematic strategy and tactics which are currently at play - unleashed by the bannonite media and trumpian trumpets. The insecurity may be social and economic, the precarity and the changes, but the reality is also the demographic changes and the societal changes that Obama's existence blew up into public on a global platform. Oh noes, who's next? Michelle?
posted by infini at 12:47 PM on January 5, 2022 [30 favorites]




Suppose a movement toward greater material security in the nation reduced that 8% of violent racist insurrectionists to 5%. Am I meant to think that's a fucking failure? That's millions of human beings who can no longer be persuaded that it's a good idea to leave their homes to do violence. But let's not indulge the thought, because some other people are racist enough that they'd do violence no matter what.

But here's the thing - you're making an assumption without any supporting evidence for it. In fact, we're actually in the middle of a natural experiment to test your thesis, with the government pushing a number of initiatives to improve material security of the populace. And yes, they are limited, but if the argument is that improving material security will cause people to walk down the pyramid of social violence, we should be able to see that.

And, well...we're not. In fact, we're seeing those very pushes to improve material security for the populace being used as fodder to increase racial anxiety.

I'm not rejecting your argument "because". I'm rejecting it because a) as I have pointed out several times, it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of racism, white supremacy, and the anxiety engendered by both (remember, to the privileged, equality feels like oppression); and b) the evidence we have is against your theory.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:59 PM on January 5, 2022 [5 favorites]


only 19% carry any [medical debt] and the median is $2k

I hope it's not a derail to push back against how minimizing of a statement this is, as someone who has been worrying about how to pay off that much medical debt for a year or so. Hell, I used to have a nest egg, then I needed various surgeries over the past decade, and, well, here we are.
posted by Vervain at 12:59 PM on January 5, 2022 [4 favorites]


Yo if you make $85k and have some money kicking around hit me up.
posted by East14thTaco at 1:01 PM on January 5, 2022 [5 favorites]


This is a really interesting article and analysis. Thanks.
posted by mazola at 1:01 PM on January 5, 2022


Because the political party in power convinced them to FEEL insecure even though they aren't.

Everyone, on some level, in America, is insecure. I understand it's all relative- some people are more insecure than others- it's all very complex, etc etc.

For me a key takeaway is that we have this anxiety specifically because of the perceived social hierarchy that has been discussed here at length.
If we can eliminate the hierarchy, which is a complete social construction, though one that is not without consequences, we could also alleviate some of this anxiety. America needs more equality- across the board. But these hierarchies are fundamental to the fabric of American identity. These issues are a feature, not a bug.
posted by erattacorrige at 1:04 PM on January 5, 2022 [1 favorite]


So, that's why at the end of the war the Allies top-down removed/banned Nazi symbols, statues, and media. That's also why they published pictures of executed Nazi leaders and for years hunted down the rest.

Leaders, yes. But we didn't (at least officially) treat every follower like they were personally in it for mass exterminations.

And, y'know, all this may also have been helped along because the Soviets were the "bad cop" while the US/UK/France were "good cop" (or at least less bad cop).

Right, we also didn't treat the losers like vassal states.

(We definitely kept our collective boot on their necks in different ways, but I guess my argument is that it does matter how hard or soft that boot is. In particular, putting the least bit of visible effort into making that boot softer really does make a difference to the average person, who's likely walking around with 50 other boots on their necks at any given time, so their willingness to consider the justification for any particular boot is heavily shaped by whether it has gratuitous spikes.)
posted by bjrubble at 1:30 PM on January 5, 2022 [1 favorite]


with the government pushing a number of initiatives to improve material security of the populace. And yes, they are limited, but if the argument is that improving material security will cause people to walk down the pyramid of social violence, we should be able to see that.

So initiatives being pushed currently, most of which have not yet gone into effect, should definitely already be showing evidence by preventing a thing that happened one year ago.

we're seeing those very pushes to improve material security for the populace being used as fodder to increase racial anxiety.

The specter of these initiatives is being used to increase racial anxiety. It has in fact often been shown that people not only make use of, but argue strenuously against the repeal of, these same kinds programs and initiatives once the lived reality takes hold. To do away with social security and medicare is a political third rail now but these were also once used as fodder for racial anxiety.

And as to whether material improvements have ever short-circuited extremist movements in the past, well...isn't that what they say about the New Deal? Now, obviously, most of us here would point out that it was meant to curb a trend toward socialism, and therefore is a Bad Thing, but one can't really argue that it had no effect.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 1:31 PM on January 5, 2022 [3 favorites]


Hence the 1/6 mob was filled with professional- and owner-class people. That should not be taken as a representative sample of electoral support, much less popular support.

Bluntly: the American left's love affair with the "white working class" is not reciprocal.


The paper I linked to above showed that right-wing radicalization was the higher in richer, whiter areas. Their measure uses social media participation, which only required having a cell phone.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 1:32 PM on January 5, 2022 [2 favorites]


The paper I linked to above showed that right-wing radicalization was the higher in richer, whiter areas. Their measure uses social media participation, which only required having a cell phone.

Bluntly: the American left's love affair with the "white working class" is not reciprocal.

An assumption that all white working class people are fascist dupes is another old saw that complicates understanding what we're up against.
posted by ryanshepard at 1:47 PM on January 5, 2022 [6 favorites]


with the government pushing a number of initiatives to improve material security of the populace. And yes, they are limited, but if the argument is that improving material security will cause people to walk down the pyramid of social violence, we should be able to see that.

Kind of by definition, "security" isn't one-and-done. Even more the *expectation* of security, which is what really matters here. It takes a memory of stable security for people to develop this.

That said, I would expect there to be some effect. I would also expect that nothing offered as evidence for this effect would be convincing to any skeptic.
posted by bjrubble at 1:49 PM on January 5, 2022


It's starting to feel like we're all dancing around the theory that every single white person in the United States is one bad day away from becoming a fascist foot soldier. Speaking as a white person, if that is what we want to propose, then I won't be offended, but we should discuss it plainly rather than couching it in terms of "economic precarity."
posted by Faint of Butt at 1:57 PM on January 5, 2022 [3 favorites]


So initiatives being pushed currently, most of which have not yet gone into effect, should definitely already be showing evidence by preventing a thing that happened one year ago.

Your argument was "improving material security will lower active racial animus." As you have noticed, the animus uncorked on 1/6 didn't just vanish, but moved to be applied in other directions afterwards. And the government has been making moves to improve material security, so if your theory holds, we should have seen some lowering of the current tension. Instead, we've seen it just amp up,with the government's attempts being used as fodder to do so.

At what point do we acknowledge that perhaps the source of this anxiety isn't based on economic status?

And as to whether material improvements have ever short-circuited extremist movements in the past, well...isn't that what they say about the New Deal? Now, obviously, most of us here would point out that it was meant to curb a trend toward socialism, and therefore is a Bad Thing, but one can't really argue that it had no effect.

The New Deal famously was built on deals with white supremacy, with many of the programs it created designed to leave out minorities. It "short-circuited" racial extremism by bowing to it.
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:57 PM on January 5, 2022 [4 favorites]


Basically all of US history has been about bowing to racial extremism in an ill-fated attempt to short circuit it, it seems. Rather than, you know, actually fighting it, which is literally the only way we can move forward with the stated national project.
posted by flamk at 2:05 PM on January 5, 2022 [10 favorites]


You didn't ask me if material security solved racism you asked me whether material security ever did anything at all about curbing extremism and I gave you an example. I remain unchanged in my assertion that the media stereotype of "economic anxiety" is incorrect. And I remain unmoved in my opinion that happy people don't overthrow governments. And that maybe we should work to make people feel more happy and secure in their lives, across the board, even when we think they're crap jerks who suck and we'd rather their lives were shitty because they're big racist assholes. And that there are probably ways to do that, for a lot of them if not for every last one walking the Earth, without indulging their racism.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 2:23 PM on January 5, 2022 [10 favorites]


We definitely kept our collective boot on their necks in different ways, but I guess my argument is that it does matter how hard or soft that boot is.

Well, maybe we're talking past one another. My point is that it's gotten far enough and bad enough that in order to change their minds or at least their behavior, they have to lose in a big and ugly way and it has to be reinforced by showing them that. And losing and seeing things like their leaders being punished and their symbols/media destroyed and banned is certainly also going to produce a lot more fear and anxiety for them, at least in the short term. I don't see any way around this. Basically they kind of have to believe that the future is a boot stamping on a fascist face. Forever. Yes, I'm aware of the irony.

And of course that's not the only thing that will be done, because I'm not against the providing for their material security part. I acknowledge that previously it's mentioned that providing for material security isn't the only thing that will be done either.
posted by FJT at 2:28 PM on January 5, 2022 [1 favorite]


MetaFilter: Well, maybe we're talking past one another.
posted by PhineasGage at 2:35 PM on January 5, 2022 [14 favorites]


losing and seeing things like their leaders being punished and their symbols/media destroyed and banned is certainly also going to produce a lot more fear and anxiety for them, at least in the short term.

one weird counterinsurgency trick that deradicalizes every time
posted by snuffleupagus at 2:41 PM on January 5, 2022 [1 favorite]


And I remain unmoved in my opinion that happy people don't overthrow governments. And that maybe we should work to make people feel more happy and secure in their lives, across the board, even when we think they're crap jerks who suck and we'd rather their lives were shitty because they're big racist assholes.

My point isn't that I want racists to have shit lives (which is a really shitty position to hold, which is why I don't), it's that material security won't make them happy. Again, their anxiety isn't about their material position directly, but about their social position,and the evidence lines up with this - the greatest amount of support for the Sedition Caucus isn't from the Rust Belt, but from the border regions seeing major demographic shifts. They feel insecure because their traditional place in American society is disappearing, but the thing is that old position was quite literally built on the backs of other people, which is why it's vanishing. And they are not bashful about pointing this out - they make it clear that they want to go back to the days where they were on top of the pile, and society was set up to protect them.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:46 PM on January 5, 2022 [14 favorites]


Also, it's worth pointing out that in his press conference today, the Attorney General pointed out that there is a line between Oklahoma City and 1/6 that connects the two events.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:48 PM on January 5, 2022 [5 favorites]


Basically all of US history has been about bowing to racial extremism in an ill-fated attempt to short circuit it, it seems.

Except for the parts of history where the extremists took the initiative. Who else pines for the days where if a politician wanted to intimidate the halls of Congress, they picked up a cane and did it themselves?
posted by pwnguin at 2:50 PM on January 5, 2022 [2 favorites]


Also, Blast, I would recommend reading Dying of Whiteness, which discusses how racial animus and white supremacy is literally driving many of these people to death.
posted by NoxAeternum at 3:16 PM on January 5, 2022 [2 favorites]


Petit-bourgeois white conservatives may be 'anxious' with a flavor that is economic, but that is not the same as material economic anxiety. Their anxiety is rooted in the fact that non-supremacy, to them, feels like losing everything. That's precisely how they can feel somehow on the brink of losing everything while being financially confortable. The threat of a social economy where they do not maintain full cultural, social, political, and financial domination over other demographics is their anxiety.
posted by dusty potato at 3:40 PM on January 5, 2022 [9 favorites]


Political scientists have actually studied these questions---we don't have to speculate. Here's a really good piece:

Globalization and automation have contributed to deindustrialization and the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs, yielding important electoral implications across advanced democracies. Coupling insights from economic voting and social identity theory, we consider how different groups in society may construe manufacturing job losses in contrasting ways. We argue that deindustrialization threatens dominant group status, leading some white voters in affected localities to favor candidates they believe will address economic distress and defend racial hierarchy. Examining three US presidential elections, we find white voters were more likely to vote for Republican challengers where manufacturing layoffs were high, whereas Black voters in hard-hit localities were more likely to vote for Democrats. In survey data, white respondents, in contrast to people of color, associated local manufacturing job losses with obstacles to individual upward mobility and with broader American economic decline. Group-based identities help explain divergent political reactions to common economic shocks.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 3:43 PM on January 5, 2022 [5 favorites]


Again, their anxiety isn't about their material position directly, but about their social position... They feel insecure because their traditional place in American society is disappearing...

There's that perception, certainly... but they're being manipulated into blaming this loss (and their anxiety about it) on minorities, and immigrants and women and wokeness and political correctness. Amplified by the bitter polarization of US politics.

but the thing is that old position was quite literally built on the backs of other people, which is why it's vanishing.

Their privilege and comfortable incomes are vanishing because of economics, and the fact that the unfettered capitalism they worship has sold them out. Not because of immigrants or minorities.

[or, what was just posted above]
posted by Artful Codger at 3:48 PM on January 5, 2022 [4 favorites]


> And I remain unmoved in my opinion that happy people don't overthrow governments.

Very few people who believe the election was stolen are going to be made happier by policies that help people they hate, even if those policies help them as well. Even the poorest among them likely professes a hatred of government support programs and votes against them, even if they personally benefit from them.
posted by tonycpsu at 4:12 PM on January 5, 2022 [10 favorites]


Or, y'know, as Lyndon B. Johnson said some 50+ years ago, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
posted by soundguy99 at 4:34 PM on January 5, 2022 [13 favorites]


...about the same time my high school history teacher was using this explanation for how the antebellum South worked. It's how poor whites were kept in their place.
posted by Rash at 4:41 PM on January 5, 2022


A Klan by any other name would smell as stank

seriously I wish we had White History month so people could understand how this kind of white violence to suppress and delegitmize votes of people of color has a long tradition in the United States

and no, it's not just in the "South"

We had a voting rights act in 2013, and we need another one, again
posted by eustatic at 5:04 PM on January 5, 2022 [5 favorites]


Every month is already White History Month, that was the point of Black History Month. With the current freakout over Critical race theory, can you imagine trying to establish White Terror Month? There's a show I would watch.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 6:05 PM on January 5, 2022 [3 favorites]


seriously I wish we had White History month

pass
posted by Ahmad Khani at 6:19 PM on January 5, 2022 [4 favorites]


> It's starting to feel like we're all dancing around the theory that every single white person in the United States is one bad day away from becoming a fascist foot soldier. Speaking as a white person, if that is what we want to propose, then I won't be offended, but we should discuss it plainly rather than couching it in terms of "economic precarity."

Is this saying #NotAllWhites or #NotAllEconomicallyAnxiousPeople or #NotAllFascists...? I can't tell.
posted by MiraK at 6:29 PM on January 5, 2022 [3 favorites]


It's starting to feel like we're all dancing around the theory that every single white person in the United States is one bad day away from becoming a fascist foot soldier. Speaking as a white person

Projection?

But who will think about the whites!
posted by Ahmad Khani at 6:48 PM on January 5, 2022 [1 favorite]


Or, y'know, as Lyndon B. Johnson said some 50+ years ago, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

And then Lee Atwater said it in cruder terms, and he and his compatriots went about building a comprehensive media machine that blares nothing but that message, 24/7/365. That the traditional social/societal/economic/cultural position of Real White Straight Christian Right-Kind-of-White Right-Kind-of-Christian Americans is at risk because of the Other amongst us. The THEY who are stealing it all away. That prosperity and civil rights are zero-sum, and if someone else gains, that means you're losing.

These people believe that message because over the last forty years, they have existed in an ever-growing media bubble where as long as you buy the right newspapers, watch the right stations, listen to the right radio, visit the right web sites and hang around with other people who consume only the right media, that message isn't an outlier. It's not radical thought or fringe beliefs. It is what Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson preach daily. It is what Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich and Jesse Helms proclaimed. It is what Ronald Reagan stood for that day in Mississippi when he launched his campaign, and years earlier when he declared war on California's leftists, and years earlier when he put out record albums attacking socialized medicine.

It's not just race. It's not just sex, or religion, or preference, or gender, or any other single factor. It is caste, pure and simple. You are either With Them or you are the Other is the 24/7/365 message of Conservative Media. It cannot fail, at least to them; it can only be failed by the insufficiently devout. THEY have taken the America you know away; the one where people like you were the highest caste. Make America great again. Keep America great. Or as a Trump 2024 hat I saw this weekend read, Take Back America.

I like to say that the modern right wing has three camps -- Fiscal, who want government to deregulate all moneymaking enterprises and remove their taxation, Religious, who want government to have every knee bend to Biblical morality, and Authoritarian, who simply want raw power for power's sake. They wax and wane; the third camp is dominant because the media machine's incessant drumbeat has steadily set the table for autocrats and demagogues and grifters to seize control, and the corporate interests find authoritarian dingbats in charge more profitable than so-called left-of-center alternatives.

If the system people exist in is failing them, and someone proposes an alternative, they tend to listen. Sometimes even when that alternative involves stepping on other people. Sometimes especially when it does.
posted by delfin at 7:11 PM on January 5, 2022 [17 favorites]


JFC, people! So what do we DO about it? Those MeFites (Marxist and otherwise) who are talking about economic factors clearly have a view on what should be done to change this awful trajectory we're on. For those who think race and other cultural resentment are the key factors, OK, so what do you propose we do to change things?
posted by PhineasGage at 7:26 PM on January 5, 2022 [3 favorites]


We seem to be collectively largely ignoring the overrepresentation of people with military and law enforcement backgrounds among the rioters:
Though the percentage has gone down since that initial reporting, it is still high: Around 13% of those facing charges have military or law enforcement backgrounds. Those facing charges served in nearly every branch of the military, including the Marine Corps, Air Force, Army, Navy and National Guard. Among the accused are current and former police officers from police departments serving places as large as Houston and New York City and as small as Rocky Mount, Va. There were friends who served together in the Marine Corps, a cadet at The Citadel, veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and at least one recipient of the Purple Heart.

According to an April 2021 report by George Washington University's Program on Extremism, rioters with military experience were about four times more likely to be part of far-right extremist groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys than rioters without military experience. In the aftermath of Jan. 6, Defense Department spokesperson John Kirby called the riot "a wake-up call" and the prevalence of extremist views among current and former service members "not an insignificant problem." In late December, the department released a report determining that "extremist activity within the Department of Defense is rare, but even the actions of a few can have an outsized impact on unit cohesion, morale and readiness."
The cops and the military have quite frankly been hotbeds and forcing houses for fascists in this country for generations and if we cannot confront that, then the bluest of blue states and cities are a lot redder than we think, and Democrats do not control the entities that they were elected by no matter how large their majorities may be, and all the police have to do is stop enforcing laws against property and crimes of violence, and a terrified populace will restore an even farther right regime to power.

And, abandon all hope of controlling the treasonous and insurrectionary activities of the extreme right because no line can be drawn between them and the police or the military.
posted by jamjam at 7:26 PM on January 5, 2022 [11 favorites]


Since we keep having so much to say about whiteness and class, as a white person of 'making less than $30K experience, I have a lot to say about white people making $85K. Namely, that whatever class solidarity you think you have with us, I AM NOT FEELING IT. You have not organized with me, you have not protested with me, you have not fed me, you have not housed me. Over and over again I have been disappointed by my richer friends throughout this pandemic. Y'all hide in your houses while we bring you food. Y'all make a few phone calls and think you've done An Activism while me and my friends were getting tear gassed and shot. I just spent a 15-hour shift getting verbally abused by rich white people. It kind of seems like you hate us? Maybe deep down your real fear is that the POC are right and you did not earn your place in society. This is angry, but this thread also made me angry. 2 cents. Thanks.
posted by coffeeand at 8:06 PM on January 5, 2022 [26 favorites]


"The cops and the military have quite frankly been hotbeds and forcing houses for fascists in this country for generations and if we cannot confront that,"
I'm not sure what that's means, though even i have posited that common knowledge does not need citation by itself. I'm to take that the military is fascist because the U.S. has a military culture which Wikipedia will not provide. But my point is it can change if it turns fascist as the folks with the stars have
specific chain of command.

Phineas has brought up the key state election to look for. It is very apt as Michigans election results are being decided on by independents. The Republican challenger could pull out that margin. The Alpena Times what not is saying Whitmer should goad Trump to come to Michigan, remember President put her on a long short list for VP, and getting Trump to react then telling the white house to stand down, we'll call you if we need, you.
because, it's Michigan, they won't take it. or it will be a battle. But Trump came before, he was humbled. The Dems came to debate in Flint, Hilary humbled (by Bernie) every one knew it. How fucking smart is it for politicans to debate the future of the country in a city decimated by post industrial flight, poisoning of the water, murder capital at times.
Michigan is a battle ground and has
been
before
I've studied Marxism, Soc theory, historyblahblah and taught by u of Chicago professors who absolutely adored me. I live in Michigan and I'm telling you at 58-63% are unvaccinated, have guns and many centrists are sun necking were the dollar tilts.
But The Republic is.in.peril. More serious then I could have imagined. so I'll leave this old traiterous bastards words.

"See, they return; ah, see the tentative
Movements, and the slow feet,
The trouble in the pace and the uncertain
Wavering!

See, they return, one by one,
With fear, as half-awakened;
As if the snow should hesitate
And murmur in the wind,
and half turn back;
These were the "Wing'd-with-Awe,"
Inviolable.

Gods of the Wingèd shoe!
With them the silver hounds,
sniffing the trace of air!

Haie! Haie!
These were the swift to harry;
These the keen-scented;
These were the souls of blood.

Slow on the leash,
pallid the leash-men"

-Ezra Pound.
posted by clavdivs at 9:19 PM on January 5, 2022 [2 favorites]


Jan 6 is Epiphany by the way.

In Rome, by 354 Christ’s birth was being celebrated on December 25, and later in the 4th century the church in Rome began celebrating Epiphany on January 6. In the Western church the festival primarily commemorates the visit by the Magi to the infant Jesus, which is seen as evidence that Christ, the Jewish Messiah, came also for the salvation of Gentiles. In the East it primarily commemorates the baptism of Jesus and celebrates the revelation that the incarnate Christ was both fully God and fully man.

I'm sure it means (or doesn't) something.
posted by philip-random at 9:51 PM on January 5, 2022 [1 favorite]


Bureaucracy And Chaos Strangled The Military's Response To The Capitol Riot – An official report lays out procedural hurdles, confusion, and outright panicking that affected how fast military personnel responded on January 6th., Joseph Trevithick, The War Zone, November 18, 2021.
A rally to protest the certification of the results of the 2020 Presidential Election and a subsequent riot on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021, together remain one of the most significant and controversial chains of events in recent American history. Now, the Department of Defense's Office of the Inspector General, or DODIG, has released a redacted report on the U.S. military's initial preparations and response to the situation once the Capitol was breached.

The redacted review concludes that, based on the information available at the time, the Department of Defense, as a whole, including the D.C. and other state National Guards, took appropriate steps within its authorities to prepare for contingencies and respond to the evolving situation. In addition, investigators found that there had been no deliberate actions by anyone within the Department of Defense to obstruct any of these activities. These assessments aside, the publicly released version of the report, despite redactions, plainly describes a situation hampered by bureaucracy and compounded by chaos after violence erupted at the Capitol Complex….
Broken links in the chain of emergency command and control didn’t appear until first contact with the rioters, and by then it was too late to stop them from occupying the Capitol.
posted by cenoxo at 10:26 PM on January 5, 2022 [1 favorite]


When you make more money you can spend more money on your hobby, and these people’s hobby is racism. Fascist authoritarian racism. I am not being facetious. These people got to joyfully participate in their hobby, and the reason they’re more well off is that the more well off you are the more you get to spend on your hobby. Hobby here means: what you do in your spare time, what you bond with your buddies over, what you talk about when you have downtime. It is not meant to belittle their seriousness but rather to underscore it. White Nationalism has been their hobby for my whole entire life, and they’re finally getting a chance to really show off the skills they’ve inculcated. They’re not acting out of anxiety, they’re acting out of gleeful malice.

It is dangerous to underestimate the malicious joy that fuels fascists. Because it makes you think they’re going to be swayed by you trying to meet them in the middle, which just moves YOU further towards them.
posted by Bottlecap at 11:24 PM on January 5, 2022 [15 favorites]


Hm. I really did preemptively #notallwhitepeople myself, didn't I. I thought I was better than that. I need to sit with this for a while. Thanks.
posted by Faint of Butt at 4:04 AM on January 6, 2022 [5 favorites]


>... but they're being manipulated into blaming this loss (and their anxiety about it) on minorities, and immigrants and women and wokeness and political correctness. ... [The] unfettered capitalism they worship has sold them out. Not ... immigrants or minorities.

LOL do you think it's news to us that racism is incorrect? Yes, racists are people who have been manipulated and lied to about who is to blame. DUH. The point is, that doesn't make them any less racist. People of color (and women and gay people and trans people and and and) have to live with the reality of bigotry regardless of why it exists or how logical it is. And the least - literally THE LEAST - you can do is admit that racism exists. But apparently that makes y'all too uncomfortable, so here you are, pushing aside the reality of racism and insisting that only other conditions adjacent to it are worth acknowledging or correcting.

>...JFC, people! So what do we DO about it?

Here? To this audience? What we're doing is explaining to you that racism exists and is real. Out in the world what we're doing is plenty else, and it's none of your goddamn business, since I don't feel like being lectured to on how misdirected my actual work towards racial justice is by you lot who don't even think racism is real. You can stop writing the same comment over and over now, thanks.
posted by MiraK at 4:26 AM on January 6, 2022 [9 favorites]


In a thread about domestic violence, nobody would be proposing solutions for how to soothe the egos of men so they don't need to establish their masculinity by beating women. You would not be claiming that the best way to keep women safe in their homes is to keep the men who might beat them up happy. You wouldn't spend the whole entire thread talking about how men are treated badly at work by their bosses which causes anxieties and frustrations in men which causes them to beat up women, and therefore the solution to domestic violence must be workers' rights.

In a thread about homophobia or transphobia, none of you would be focused squarely on the plight of straight or cis people whose sense of entitlement has been shaken, nor would your primary suggestions for solutions involve catering to the all the needs of homophobes and transphobes so they're always feeling too safe and too satisfied to ever bestir themselves to cause harm to gay or trans people.

How the fuck do you all think it's okay to propose as a solution to racist people doing racist things: "let's give racists more money and more economic security, so they stop feeling so anxious that they do racist things"?

What will make you all to stop focusing exclusively on the needs and the struggles and the anxieties of racists in your analyses of how to combat racism done by racists?
posted by MiraK at 5:39 AM on January 6, 2022 [24 favorites]


Clip Of Attorney General Merrick Garland Remarks On January 6 Attack On The U.S. Capitol – Attorney General Pledges January 6 Attack Perpetrators Will Be Held Accountable, C-SPAN, January 5, 2022:
During an update on the Justice Department's ongoing investigations into the January 6 attack on the Capitol, Attorney General Merrick Garland says the work is ongoing and that investigators will follow the facts wherever they lead. To date more than 725 people have been arrested and charged in the investigation.

"The actions we have taken thus far will not be our last. The Justice Department remains committed to holding all January 6th perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law, whether they were present that day or were otherwise criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy. We will follow the facts wherever they lead," Attorney General Garland says.
~4 minute video clip with unedited text transcript.
posted by cenoxo at 6:21 AM on January 6, 2022 [2 favorites]


"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

call me crazy but maybe ALSO the picking of the pockets is a wrong thing that if we stopped, it wouldn't be so important to distract people with shiny racism? Or in other words my entire point from go.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 6:40 AM on January 6, 2022 [2 favorites]


call me crazy but maybe ALSO the picking of the pockets is a wrong thing

Won't someone think of the poor, anxious Nazis?

If only we helped Nazis get rich, that would surely stop all this Nazi violence.
posted by MiraK at 7:25 AM on January 6, 2022 [2 favorites]


Mod note: Hi friends. First, a friendly reminder to please just speak for yourself and not put words in other people's mouths. Second, the same few people have gone around and around the same points many times already in this thread; once you've made your point several times, consider just leaving it at that.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 7:30 AM on January 6, 2022 [3 favorites]


On the subject of doing something, had there been any attempt all to punish Fox News? An Intercept reporter started outright, "What I saw in the Balkans makes me think the emergence of Fox News in 1996 was the trigger mechanism for our current predicament."
The late Miloš Vasić, one of the most fearless journalists in Serbia during the 1990s, chronicled his homeland’s descent into extremism and corruption. Vasić knew that the great unwinding in the former Yugoslavia was not a unique phenomenon. “All it took was a few years of fierce, reckless, chauvinist, intolerant, expansionist, war-mongering propaganda [a function that was fulfilled by Radio Television of Serbia] to create enough hate to start the fighting among people who had lived together peacefully for 45 years,” he said in 1993. “You must imagine a United States with every little TV station everywhere taking exactly the same editorial line — a line dictated by David Duke. You, too, would have war in five years.”
I can't recall seeing anyone in the administration talking about even anything as simple as re-introducing tighter limits on station ownership.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 7:31 AM on January 6, 2022 [9 favorites]


I know there was a semi-successful push (by Sleeping Giants? who I know have their own problems with racism and sexism, but their mission is a good one at least) to convince companies to stop advertising on Fox News? I want to say that Tucker Carlson was bleeding advertisers at some point? Am I making this up? Anyway, continuing on that path seems like a good idea to me.
posted by pelvicsorcery at 7:36 AM on January 6, 2022 [1 favorite]


Fox News is a cable network. Sinclair is a bigger problem w/local news than Fox broadcast affiliates (some of which Sinclair controls).
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:38 AM on January 6, 2022 [2 favorites]


On the subject of doing something, had there been any attempt all to punish Fox News?

This comes back to the cultural sacred cows I mentioned earlier - no, there has not been any attempt to punish Fox News, Sinclair, OAN, etc., because any attempt to hold a press outlet accountable for its behavior will immediately be decried as an attack on freedom of the press.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:45 AM on January 6, 2022 [3 favorites]


On the subject of economics and racism, there is some actual data on the subject.
In this paper we study the political fall-out from systemic financial crises over the past 140 years. We construct a new long-run dataset covering 20 advanced economies and more than 800 general elections. Our key finding is that policy uncertainty rises strongly after financial crises as government majorities shrink and polarization rises. After a crisis, voters seem to be particularly attracted to the political rhetoric of the extreme right, which often attributes blame to minorities or foreigners. On average, far-right parties increase their vote share by 30% after a financial crisis.
Note this doesn't say racism isn't a factor, but there is a historical tendency to blame minorities after economic shocks in addition to what societal issues already exist.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 7:57 AM on January 6, 2022 [2 favorites]


This comes back to the cultural sacred cows I mentioned earlier - no, there has not been any attempt to punish Fox News, Sinclair, OAN, etc., because any attempt to hold a press outlet accountable for its behavior will immediately be decried as an attack on freedom of the press.

That's because if the government did so, it would be, and a fairly blatant First Amendment violation at that. But the media could and should do more to counter right wing propaganda, including ceasing to amplify bogus right wing talking points under the lazy and cowardly "he said, she said" style and doing more to assert its prerogatives -- however inconvenient it'd be for the right -- instead of retreating in the face of bad faith "liberal media" criticism.

That said, as suggested above, the government can and should do more to limit media ownership consolidation, which leads to problems like Sinclair and others.
posted by Gelatin at 8:10 AM on January 6, 2022 [4 favorites]


MiraK:LOL do you think it's news to us that racism is incorrect? Yes, racists are people who have been manipulated and lied to about who is to blame. DUH. The point is, that doesn't make them any less racist. People of color (and women and gay people and trans people and and and) have to live with the reality of bigotry regardless of why it exists or how logical it is. And the least - literally THE LEAST - you can do is admit that racism exists. But apparently that makes y'all too uncomfortable, so here you are, pushing aside the reality of racism and insisting that only other conditions adjacent to it are worth acknowledging or correcting.

Thought I had, but happy to clarify: racism exists, and is still a significant factor in the daily lives of POC and other minorities. It must be faced and addressed.

Now, a little clarity from you: was Jan 6, 2021 mainly an expression of racism and white resentment, or was it something else, of which racism is a component, but not the root cause? Cos it seems you're recruiting Jan 6 to support a cause that you're clearly passionate about, at the risk of missing its true import.

And it took the Guardian to remind me this morning that the Jan 6 insurrection was not simply some semi-spontaneous eruption of festering white resentment. It was the last desperate act to save a long-planned but failing coup attempt.
posted by Artful Codger at 8:21 AM on January 6, 2022 [2 favorites]


What do we do? We LOSE. We get our butts handed to us, badly. The fascists or at least Trumpists WIN. Plenty of people are fighting, but the honest truth is it's not enough. It's not enough.

The right wing is in charge of the entire political party. At 66% voter turnout in 2020, with the constant stream of crimes and scandals and horrendous self dealing and covid murders, 74 million Americans looked at the credibly accused racist rapist who tried to murder democracy, and wanted more of the chaos because it hurt other people more than it hurt them. They almost won. Or they are evil, or victims of propoganda or scared of the other or committing more sins in an attempt to run from their old sins or ancestors sins. I don't know. I can't fathom that fear. I'm left throwing my hands up and reducing them all to evil enablers at best. They almost won.

But back to the topic, we lose. There is no At Last, this. Maybe Roe being repealed leads to mass protests. So what? They aren't going to shut down cities, see people blockading highways, cutting power. The Republicans steal another Supreme court seat. So what? 'Both sides are equally bad' or some bullshit. It's not going to rock the boat enough. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, the ability to literally throw out as many democratic votes as they want? Not going to trigger enough of a popular movement to stop them. They have no shame. We aren't going to organize like the regime has, not in time. We're playing politics, and they are waging war.

So they solidify ill gotten gains, continue to wage war against the environment, LGBTQIA+ rights, voting, the poor, minorities, sanity. Outrage after another. There's probably not enough people to overcome a Supreme court willing to look at highly partisan laws written to evade Supreme court oversight when Republicans hand themselves power, will of the people be damned.

Maybe a blatantly stolen election will do it. Maybe a completely packed Supreme court. Maybe Trump dying. But I doubt it. This is, to the right, a war for existence. Everyone they know tells them so, right? And the people who are going to, who do suffer most, are the most vulnerable.


How many people on the right think I should literally die for being A, transgender, B, lesbian, C leftist as heck, D willing to loudly call the right evil, E, kinky/poly, F, relatively educated? How many people think my handicapped girlfriend, god rest her soul, should have been killed for being born handicapped? Everyone supporting fascism literally supports those views, because we've seen fascism murder with impunity. We're The Enemy of the State after all, right? These are the people who are going to run the country soon. And I hope, I hope I hope that it doesn't get this bad. But we're closing in on a million covid deaths, most completely unnecessary. How many people are going to be killed at protests, at school shootings, by cops or national guard or because someone with a gun could get away with it? From pollution, global warming, antivax stupidity, deliberately withheld medical care, back alley abortion, lack of food or clean water in the USA, from corporate malfeasance and neglect, from suicide, unjust wars or even civil war?

We lose. I hate it, but I don't see the future changing. We lose. We wonder how it got so bad, so fast. Maybe California holds out as a pocket of resistance and hope, kindness and sanity, community, swelled by refugees from Red State USA. Maybe we Balkanize. Maybe some leader arises to get laws passed, that reverse the massive voter suppression coming. Maybe the military enforces fair elections. But mostly, almost inevitably, we lose. The right isn't going to stop, we have no real way to pull their fangs. We lose, and the time to stop it has already passed. I pray to a God I don't believe in that it doesn't get this bad, but it's no longer up to the sane and the kind, the people who want to improve the world and lift everyone up. We lose. And to the victors, the spoils.
posted by Jacen at 9:02 AM on January 6, 2022 [12 favorites]


If we could get the Fairness Doctrine back on the books, to trim the wings of organs like Fox "News" and Sinclair Broadcasting and OANN, would that help?

I suppose we'd need the same sort of thing online, to counter-balance the shitty algorithms that push-push-push awful, right-wing content, too.
posted by wenestvedt at 9:32 AM on January 6, 2022 [3 favorites]


The Fairness Doctrine only applied to broadcast licensees. Sinclair stations would be subject, but the others wouldn't.
posted by Surely This at 9:36 AM on January 6, 2022 [2 favorites]


What was new about 01/06 wasn't economic anxiety, and it wasn't racism; America is founded on both principles, and neither have been sufficient, by themselves, to bring us to this point. I agree with the above comments that say the focus should be on Fox and Sinclair, because that's a place to start. What changed was our method of communication, our pipelines to rightwing radicalism. There are at the moment so many paths into that radicalism, all algorithmically pushing people toward fascism. It doesn't seem possible that you could go from "worried about whether MRNA vaccines are safe" to whackjob Great Replacement theory, yet we're seeing it happen, real-time, among thousands of people, with an eerily small number of steps between the two.

We're not going to solve economic anxiety, and we're not going to solve racism, but we can solve the deluge of messages. We can imagine--and I suppose all we can do at the moment is imagine--the FCC or FTC or someone cracking down on the algorithmic recommendations that lead people to watch hours of brain-twisting videos, or frantically doomscrolling through tweetstorms about hyperinflation and immigration. We can slow this down. Perhaps we can't stop Fox from broadcasting, but we could bring back something like the Fairness Doctrine--not because we believe it'll solve the problem of Fox's viewpoint, but because then Joe Schmoe sitting in his dentist's waiting room isn't watching a solid hour of fascist propaganda while waiting for his appointment. We can interrupt the messages, and the speed of the messages, the volume of them. We can make news boring again. We can break up Facebook. Are there legal avenues for calming the likes of Gab or Gettr or whatever? Can we raise taxes from Substack income?

If there's an answer to our current problem, I think it has to be in that sphere. Our media is killing us.
posted by mittens at 9:45 AM on January 6, 2022 [6 favorites]


Sadly, Jacen, historian Timothy Snyder largely agrees with you.

And we seem to have a new thread on this big topic.
posted by PhineasGage at 10:18 AM on January 6, 2022 [2 favorites]


I read an interview in Danish with a soccer hooligan a short while ago. We (Danes) are more interested in those people these days, because they have morphed into a right wing militia called "Men in Black", protesting the corona-restrictions, and for many of us, including myself, it was a complete surprise. Well, he said something that I think is relevant to this discussion, basically that hate is a very powerful drug, and hating and fighting together (with the other hooligans) is a strong life-affirming experience. Don't look for any other meaning, the hatred is the meaning, and it trumps all other emotions and intentions, even self-interest. When I saw it, I realized that I had heard that before, but had forgotten, because I don't personally indulge.
The hate has always been there, to some extent, but Donald Trump legitimized it. He was no dog-whistler, but a shouting, spitting legitimizer of hatred, like no other American president. Participating in a Trump rally, a trumpist could scream and shout at all the "others" they hate: first of all people of color, but also women, the press, the liberals, foreigners, comedians, I don't think I even know the whole list.
IMO, this explains a lot of things, not least those who went from Obama to Trump. I think that if you go to a Trump rally out of curiosity, and eventually let yourself go, you can experience something almost mind-altering/religious. Something that has nothing to do will traditional politics and everything to do with a collective extasy of hate. Maybe you started out hating just liberals or Hollywood stars, but as you feel the rage-fueled adrenaline high, you add on, as with all other forms of substance abuse, led by the grand master of sputter.

I strongly agree with those who push back at the "economic anxiety" explanation. It does not fit the data, and it never has. It is well documented that extremist politics on both sides rise when there is economic insecurity, but it is also true, specially on the right but also on the left, that the majority of those who are attracted to extremist positions are not the most precarious, but the middle classes.
posted by mumimor at 10:25 AM on January 6, 2022 [20 favorites]


Racism and economic status anxiety are perpetually bound together in culture and politics and they are irrational and human and their perception is entirely subjective.

It's frustrating that in venues like this the possibility of solutions never get discussed because the terms of the problem are divisive between people making 85 and people making 35 thousand dollars a year. Neither of those amounts of money matter at all when you have to be a millionaire just to get elected.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 10:53 AM on January 6, 2022 [2 favorites]


Nobody has even done any serious fighting yet and this thread already says we lose. That's because the sort of people in this thread can't even agree to be on the same side.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 10:59 AM on January 6, 2022 [2 favorites]


The infighting is a systemic problem, and it sucks. It's a whole lot easier to build a big tent when your side supports the right to shout down dissent. Sometimes the monster wins because the only way to beat it is to become a monster yourself.
posted by notoriety public at 11:12 AM on January 6, 2022 [1 favorite]


mumimor > I think that if you go to a Trump rally out of curiosity, and eventually let yourself go, you can experience something almost mind-altering/religious. Something that has nothing to do will traditional politics and everything to do with a collective extasy of hate. Maybe you started out hating just liberals or Hollywood stars, but as you feel the rage-fueled adrenaline high, you add on, as with all other forms of substance abuse, led by the grand master of sputter.

It’s the Two Minutes Hate of 1984, but it continues 7/24/365 around the planet.
posted by cenoxo at 11:16 AM on January 6, 2022 [3 favorites]


Pretty sure the fairness doctrine would apply to any cable channel that wan ted to be on the broadcast satellite systems
posted by mbo at 11:44 AM on January 6, 2022


Aha, here's the article making clear how important a factor racial resentment was in motivating the Jan. 6 attackers.
posted by PhineasGage at 11:51 AM on January 6, 2022


I favorited delfin's comment above because I think the biggest cause of the spread of these fringe beliefs is media outlets and authority figures repeating and amplifying them. If Trump had come out and stood on the Capitol steps Jan. 6 and said "Not on my watch! This is not what I meant by fighting for freedom ... please go home." We'd be in a very different place. If Fox News didn't exist. If social media "platforms" owned up to their responsibility for content on which they make money. If elected politicians didn't deliberately lie to curry favor.

Thought experiment: AOC is president and in her re-election campaign. The opponent is Stephen Miller and he seems to be doing well. AOC starts telling people that SM is doing dirty tricks. Your preferred liberal/left/progressive media outlets are doing the same, over and over. Your Twitter is blowing up with "evidence" - remember the Bernie Sanders "smoking gun" Iowa whiteboard pic showing that he was being cheated? Etc. etc. Then after 18 months of that, SM ends up winning by a small margin. Everyone you know voted AOC except That One Uncle. HOw could that be legit? AOC tells people to come to DC and rally to save democracy ... things get out of hand.

As much as I like to think I am above groupthink, am I really? It hasn't been that long since police stations were burned because "all" cops are "bastards" - police have way too much power and some departments and individuals are rotten, but did we worry about individual culpability during those events? No, it was They Are All Evil, therefore this simple and blunt action will fix it.

Human brains are looking for simplicity and categorical solutions. Any excuse to toss nuance out the window and charge towards a simple answer. Clearly I'm not equating BLM protests or the (rare) associated violence with the Capitol riot/insurrection. I'm just saying that the focus on whether these individuals are A) racist or B) economically insecure makes me want to shout "C! The answer is C!"
posted by freecellwizard at 11:54 AM on January 6, 2022 [2 favorites]


For most of my life was extremely poor for an American. Birth home was young family biz, business wiped out by world events. Early childhood spent moving from place to place, couch-surfing, camping out. HIgh-school years in a trailer (on our own land tho) without electricity or plumbing, 30km out of town.
HIghest yearly income earned as an adult was about $25k.

I am very pale. Raised with a strong non-white ethnic identity, but called white everywhere I go.

Because of poverty and mental illness, I was harassed by fascists and bootlickers my whole life. Because of this, I spent a lot of time studying them.
I'm not interested in their emotions nor motivations. I watch what they do and I find out who they are.

Fascism isn't a political philosophy, it's a social club. Oath Keepers, Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer are all social clubs. They meet at the gym for reps and drink together in the beer halls, like the Nazis did. "Nazi" was originally a cute nickname for Nazionalsocializten to call one another.

If you want to be part of the gang you have to talk the gang shit and dress right. You also have to be able to afford things like blacked-out pickup trucks, gym memberships, firearms, and other expensive accoutrements. If you have some of "the right stuff" (outside connections, good looks, a platform, etc) the gang might subsidize you, labeling you one of "the deserving".

It's all about and only about who's in and who's out. Internally it's about control. Fascists all want to be masters or slaves, and for in-group status they all pretend to be "masters" or to be paragons of "merit" (strength, debate prowess, martial prowess, etc) for the "meritocracy".

To the extent that they are feeling "economic anxiety" it's because they worry that they will lose merit in they eyes of their club members. Fascist groups are notoriously prone to infighting, as might be expected from fundamentally hierarchical "meritocratic" organizations.
posted by Rev. Irreverent Revenant at 12:05 PM on January 6, 2022 [16 favorites]


Forgot to mention: the theme of all these social clubs just so happens to be expressible in 14 words. Racism is the point, fascism is the method.
posted by Rev. Irreverent Revenant at 12:11 PM on January 6, 2022 [4 favorites]


Aha, here's the article making clear how important a factor racial resentment was in motivating the Jan. 6 attackers.
posted by PhineasGage at 2:51 PM on January 6 [+] [!]


I should add that Pape is famous for doing absolute shit quantitative analysis. This one is no exception.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 12:47 PM on January 6, 2022


I am a suburban chicken-ass white boy. I make no bones about that. I cannot say that I have experienced the kinds of explicit Othering, of inherent bigotry based on how I appear or how I identify myself, that many, many other groups have. I do not speak for them; I try to speak with them, at best.

But I can say this much.

Racism and classism, in many different forms, are wound tightly into the American DNA. The targets may vary from time to time and place to place, but the caste system that these people want to defend and reinforce is a persistent son-of-a-bitch.

When a black person sought relief in court and got laughed away because their opponent was white, or when a woman felt powerless and overlooked because of her gender, or when an immigrant found themselves turned away from a job because of where they were from, or when a non-cishet person got attacked for simply being themselves, or when the power of Because It's Always Been That Way let its anger fly and its boot stomp on someone's throat... I don't know how they persevered, in many cases. I don't know where they found the internal fortitude to say, someday there will be a better day than this, and we will all find a way to make that happen.

But I can listen to them and try to find out how they persevered. Because they're sure as hell not done fighting those battles yet, and they might have much to teach us if we'll listen.
posted by delfin at 12:48 PM on January 6, 2022 [1 favorite]


Could you elaborate, MisanthropicPainforest? That analysis seems to support a viewpoint shared by many if not most of the contributors to this thread (and others).
posted by PhineasGage at 12:50 PM on January 6, 2022


When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross

an FPP on Metafilter, dated December 26, 2007
posted by infini at 12:52 PM on January 6, 2022 [1 favorite]


One is that the unit of analysis is the county, and the 'treatment' (declining white population) is a much more local one than of county. There's no theoretical pathway in which a declining white population within a county will lead to increased participation in 1/6. All the research on ethnic conflict/resentment is that it is very locally driven---most people don't care what happens two towns over. Moreover, everything I've seen of his process is that he threw in a bunch of variables and found what sticks.

The sample of those arrested is extremely biased---for one, its not representative of those that actually participated in 1/6, and the 1/6 participates are a non-representative sample of those that would like to participate or are otherwise radicalized, since it requires resources to travel to DC. So it really can't tell us much.

Moreover, research on right-wing radicalization on social media (which isn't plagued by these issues) doesn't show a relationship with a declining white population and radicalization.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 12:56 PM on January 6, 2022


Also Pape is generally known to be a complete asshole, if that matters.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 12:56 PM on January 6, 2022


An assumption that all white working class people are fascist dupes is another old saw that complicates understanding what we're up against.

I don't think anyone in this thread has suggested that "all white working class people are fascist dupes". (Though, looking at the numbers, I'd be pretty comfortable saying that somewhere in the neighborhood of ~60% probably have been radicalized to some extent.)


Broken links in the chain of emergency command and control didn’t appear until first contact with the rioters, and by then it was too late to stop them from occupying the Capitol.

This is all probably true, but sort of misses the obvious point: bringing in the military should not have been required, and in fact really wasn't required to stop the progress of the rioters/insurrectionists into the Capitol.

The high-water mark of Jan 6, in terms of how far the mob made it towards its apparent goal of taking hostages or executing legislators and thereby overturning the election, was the doorway to the Speaker's Lobby. Specifically, it was the head and shoulders of one Ashli Babbit, right before a Capitol Police officer shot her dead. The rioters pretty much instantly lost their forward momentum, and with it their opportunity to capture any legislators and meaningfully threaten the election. If they were hoping for a Second Civil War, that doorway was their Gettysburg and Babbit their Armistead.

Because, as it turns out, a lot of those would-be fascists are actually really big cowards. When faced with a situation that wasn't entirely one-sided, a whole lot of "patriots" cut and ran. And it would have been the same if the officers had made the front door their red line. Next time, it should be.

As for "what do we do?" — well, for starters, we should make it very clear to the Capitol Police that their job, going forward, isn't just to stand around and fucking direct traffic. In part, this is by ensuring that as the history of 1/6 is written, it's remembered as an absolute nadir for the Capitol Police in particular. This was their Bataan, their Dien Bien Phu. Or just their Burning of Washington, if we want to keep it local.

Maybe they followed orders, but they should be embarrassed for themselves as a unit. They were supposed to be the palace guards of the temple of Democracy, and on their watch, the place literally got sacked. For an organization whose stated mission is to "protect and secure Congress", that's a pretty solid L.

Because how things like that are remembered in the historical record, matter.

I don't know much about new Capitol Police Chief Pittman, but I hope she has a chip on her shoulder and a desire to transform the organization.*

I hope that in retrospect, 1/6 will be a catalyzing event, like the assassination of McKinley was for the Secret Service. There should be no way that anyone ever forces their way in the doors of the Capitol, any more than a mob would make it into the White House. I somehow don't see the Secret Service going down without a fight; we should expect at least the same level of commitment from the guardians of a co-equal branch of government.

* And she could start with some cooler uniforms; I mean, the guys at Buckingham Palace get the cool hats, the Swiss Guard each get a handmade cuirass and a pike, the French Republican Guard has got a whole Napoleonic Space Marine thing going on; even the Belgians have chonky horses. We can do a bit better than the sale rack at American Uniform.
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:11 PM on January 6, 2022 [4 favorites]




I hope that in retrospect, 1/6 will be a catalyzing event, like the assassination of McKinley was for the Secret Service. There should be no way that anyone ever forces their way in the doors of the Capitol, any more than a mob would make it into the White House. I somehow don't see the Secret Service going down without a fight; we should expect at least the same level of commitment from the guardians of a co-equal branch of government.

Up to a point. I, too, watched the taking of the Capitol and wondered where, at the most important place in America at that particular date and time, the fucking thunder was in defense. Where a deterrent was -- people who are trained and vetted, like the Secret Service should be, to put their jobs above partisan concerns.

And then i thought about it some more.

The Capitol Police, given the situation they found themselves in, were vastly outnumbered. They had no way of knowing for sure if anyone in the crowd had guns; yes, D.C. has very restrictive gun laws, but those are most effective against people who care whether or not they get caught with them. (What was in Ashli Babbitt's backpack? Nobody knew until she got taken down.) They were aware that the response to escalating violence is often equal or greater violence from the other side. They only had so many bullets each. Their best call was to de-escalate as much as possible, at the cost of taking some pretty severe lumps themselves, in the name of keeping the mob pushing and yelling and shoving rather than full-on attacking.

And the other thing that the Capitol Police did in that situation is something that all police should do -- correctly classify the threat and the required force to subdue it. They bent without breaking until they reached a line that could not be crossed, and then an officer fired. Suddenly, the "let's invade the Capitol!" game was no longer a game, and people backed away. But, elsewhere, the majority of people who went inside weren't.actively lethal threats. They were unarmed yahoos. They could be led in circles. They could be stalled at chokepoints. They could be contained without lethal force -- which was a good thing, since they were LACKING the kind of obviously lethal neutralizing force that they would have needed to wall the building off.

How much of this was cooler heads saying "we don't want an occupying military force at the Capitol, for optics' sake" or "for the sake of making sure our people can get in" or "for fear of them turning around and using it on US" is open to debate.

So, yeah. Organizationally, the prepwork for 1/6 was shameful. But on the ground... I'll cut them some slack.
posted by delfin at 3:05 PM on January 6, 2022 [14 favorites]


some cooler uniforms

...so they don't just look like cops -- perhaps something more like Nixon had made for the Secret Service, maybe?
posted by Rash at 3:05 PM on January 6, 2022


As to "what do we do about it?"

First you find out who they are. I don't mean why they fash or any that touchy feely shit. I mean their names and addresses. If you live in the suburbs these people are your neighbors, and it behooves you to know which ones are prone to violent, insurrectionary outbursts.

Once you know who they are, you shame them in your social circles and you disrupt their social circles. Look to the venues where they meet and disrupt those as you see fit.

Withhold your cooperation from them and from those who cooperate with them. This includes not shopping at their businesses (and calling their bosses to report their anti-sociality where applicable).

This is, in my view, the minimum needed to say you care about the issue. I don't believe you're anti-slavery if you go to the Nike store to buy Nestle water, and if I see you patronizing Adolf's Gun Shop I'm not going to believe you're anti-fascist.
posted by Rev. Irreverent Revenant at 4:45 PM on January 6, 2022 [5 favorites]


French has a good social safety net and an active far right wing. This doesn't mean it's bad to have a safety net, just that it isn't a protection against the far right.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 12:40 AM on January 7, 2022 [9 favorites]


Missed the edit window. Should have been "France has a good social safety net."
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 4:43 AM on January 7, 2022


"A good social safety net" can always be propagandized as "those people are getting my money."
posted by clawsoon at 7:33 AM on January 7, 2022 [2 favorites]


"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
call me crazy but maybe ALSO the picking of the pockets is a wrong thing that if we stopped, it wouldn't be so important to distract people with shiny racism? Or in other words my entire point from go.
Sadopopulism is a tool of oligarchs to maintain rule against the interest of their base. This intersection of racism and capitalism seems to explain a lot (though I'm short on answers of what one does to combat that).
posted by mazola at 8:29 AM on January 7, 2022 [2 favorites]


No, the reality is that the educated managerial class is not in charge, and that no matter how hard we technocrat, the material realities of politics are what they are. The electoral college and similar structural issues, the loss of the Supreme Court, etc. cannot be brainstormed away.

Maybe not at the Federal level, but the educated managerial class is in charge of most cities in the US, and they aren't great leaders. They are equally as interested in protecting their own class interests, and also where most of the Congressional leaders come from. Worse, even states that are blue at the Federal level are pretty conservative at the local level because local issues are not necessarily the same as Federal ones.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:36 AM on January 7, 2022 [3 favorites]


As with all these analyses of the situation, I'm still left with the question: so what shall we do about this?

Tell the Big Truth about Hitler. Those rioters are all influenced by Hitler and his media propaganda machine, and they will be the last to admit it for PR reasons. Hitlers paranoid propaganda was professionally designed to divide people, and it took off with the advent of radio just like it did with the internet. Nothing has changed, except their military defeat. People in the US study Hitler negatively in school, with cold facts. Older voters remember his attacks on the US and Europe, and their personal sacrifice. People now need straight thinking with laser focus from their true leaders. Passing up this chance is absurd. Imagine a serial killer obsessed with Charles Manson and then the media reporting it was just a disturbed person who just had his girlfriend dump him. When in doubt, put the blame where it started, to do otherwise is to be in denial about the next chapter.
posted by Brian B. at 6:50 PM on January 7, 2022 [3 favorites]


the educated managerial class is in charge of most cities in the US, and they aren't great leaders

Nor is education helping. From today's Academic Minute podcast:
Management students engage in less critical thinking than other university students, and they tend to become more selfish, more profit-oriented, and less ethical during their studies. As a result, ethics training, alternative management and critical studies courses are mandatory in many schools. Unfortunately, telling a person they should change their beliefs often doesn’t work. In fact, a person told they need to do better is just as likely to resist as they are to try to change.

Unfortunately, the shownotes commit the unfogivable sin of failing to self cite, so I cannot comment on whether the researcher's own method is really all that much better.
posted by pwnguin at 8:15 PM on January 7, 2022 [1 favorite]


This is, in my view, the minimum needed to say you care about the issue.

Just so we're clear, unless I am actively spending all day every day investigating the literally tens of thousands of people who live in my immediate vicinity, identifying them and building a database of their political leanings and secret internet doings, and then using that to inform every action I take, I do not care about fascism and am basically actually evil.

OK, cool, cool cool cool, no doubt, no doubt.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 9:37 AM on January 11, 2022 [7 favorites]


Management students engage in less critical thinking than other university students, and they tend to become more selfish, more profit-oriented, and less ethical during their studies

This is a vigilance thing for me, but I really see this terminology as a red flag for weak thinking, almost disqualification. Everything is ethical. Hitler had ethics, it just so happened that some of them said it's OK to genocide (among others). Those would be bad ethics in my book, ones that affected other people in a negative way, but ethics nonetheless. "Say what you will..." is a fine quip in the moment, but like all jokes has a grain of truth.

Unfortunately, to analyze behavior or decisions based on learning or figuring out someone's ethical framework is hard, and produces complicated and uncomfortable discussions as the critics, so to speak, find overlap between themselves and the subject, having to differentiate in a way that isolates the ethic(s) being discussed, and yadda yadda there's your shitshow. But this doesn't alleviate the problem of calling something or someone unethical. "The serial killer still mowed their elderly neighbor's lawn." Yes, but they also accepted the advice of their dog to kill nurses.

Obviously this is a much larger topic, but in the context of the quote, what do they mean by the word? That they became irrational? That they started treating other people as characters to manipulate for their own purposes? They didn't call the morning after? They said "no" to mowing their elderly neighbor's lawn? To tease "unethical" apart in this context would be to point out the problems in the education of Management students, and that, I'm pretty sure, would not win The Academic Minute many friends. So, they can say "unethical" to I guess mean "they're becoming someone doing stuff I don't like," but at the same time, they are becoming people doing stuff that other people like very much.
posted by rhizome at 11:46 AM on January 11, 2022 [1 favorite]


Bruv, it's a one minute radio show for the public, not a grad student seminar. Of course they use the terms to mean what the layman means by the words, without definition.

Nobody says after accounting scandals 'at least it's an ethos.' They wonder aloud what schools are teaching students, as if "Don't lie, don't cheat, and don't steal" are the entirety of ethics, or even covered in a collegiate course.
posted by pwnguin at 6:22 PM on January 11, 2022 [1 favorite]


Fair enough, but it is The Academic Minute! Not to mention that, y'know, everybody lies.
posted by rhizome at 12:19 PM on January 12, 2022


Not to mention that, y'know, everybody lies.

Obviously, since that podcast has a 2m30s runtime.
posted by pwnguin at 1:35 PM on January 12, 2022 [2 favorites]


Pretty sure the fairness doctrine would apply to any cable channel that wan ted to be on the broadcast satellite systems

No.

For those interested in the minutae, Fairness Doctrine: History and Constitutional Issues (CRS Report, 2011) [pdf]

in pertinent part:

It does not appear that the Fairness Doctrine may be applied constitutionally to cable or satellite service providers. The Supreme Court has held that content-based restrictions on the speech of cable and satellite providers are subject to strict scrutiny...Content-based regulations of speech in the print media are accorded strict scrutiny. The Supreme Court has recognized that regulations similar to the Fairness Doctrine, when applied to the print media, are not constitutional. If regulations similar to the Fairness Doctrine could not withstand strict scrutiny when applied to the print media, it appears unlikely that similar regulations would withstand such scrutiny when applied to cable or satellite providers.


In the US, satellite programming isn't free to air. It may be broadcast in the sense of signal theory, but it's a paid information service. From earlier in the report:

The Supreme Court also has said that broadcast content is unique in American media. It is free over the air to anyone with a television or a radio within range of a signal. Broadcast, therefore, is distinct from cable, satellite, and the Internet, which are all services for which consumers must pay.
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:41 PM on January 13, 2022 [1 favorite]


Catching up way after the fact, I think corb's comment was the most thoughtful and elucidating in the whole thread.

I think that, of the argument between "economic anxiety" and "racism tho" going on in the thread, both sides agree that this is an AND rather than an OR. The argument seems to be whether anxiety is what triggers the most violent, fascist form of racism or whether racism is what provokes the most violent, fascist form of anxiety, right? And it's an argument that gets more and more heated because it's not one-then-the-other: it's both at once, interwoven, completely impossible to disentangle.

Racism flares up and gets violent even when class position isn't at stake. And economic precariousness leads people to lash out in far more than just racist ways. It just so happens that the intersection of the two is obscenely noxious.

My own take has less to do with either end and more to do with: I think that people don't really think about ideology, I think that they think about themselves. And it's easy to be swayed by reactionary beliefs, whether anti-democratic or white supremacist, simply by pushing back against whatever comes your way (democracy, anti-racism, and a dozen other progressive aims).

It comes down to how people define the "us" and the "them". In fascism, the "us" is whatever powerful group is most convenient; in intersectional socialism or what-have-you, the "us" is everyone fighting against oppressive institutional power. And fascism is always going to appeal a little more easily, I think, because as lofty as the alternative is, the path of least resistance is always the reactionary one that sides with (and entrenches) existing power.

Corey Robin had a discussion with Masha Gessen about January 6th; Gessen was arguing that American democracy is largely in peril, and Robin was arguing that he doesn't fundamentally think our crisis today revolves around democracy. I'm not bringing this up because I think MetaFilter would be great at moderating that argument—like, please let's not try—but because Robin said something at one point that I really liked: the Right will always have tradition and nostalgia to lean back on, and those things will always exist in living memory, whereas the Left is always in the difficult position of imagining something that's never existed and finding ways to persuade others of that vision. If they succeed, their inevitable fate is to have their revolution co-opted by the right, who then use their figures as nostalgic beacons to a worse past and repurpose the language with which they articulated their ideas to re-affirm precisely the institutions that those ideas and terms were invented to dismantle.

(This is a restatement of Robin's thesis from The Reactionary Mind, which was itself one of the most thought-provoking reads on political history that I've read in quite some time.)

Whether the vision is "ending the profoundly racist divides in our society" or "fundamentally reworking how we think of money, livelihoods, and what it takes to live a comfortable life," we are talking about envisioning a world that doesn't exist yet, and selling people on that fact even though it will require them to let go of some of their own comforts and securities. In part, that's because a lot of those comforts and securities are a byproduct of investing in exactly those oppressive systems which will accept a person and aid them, so long as they remain the "us" and push against the "them."

I feel like most everyone here agrees on all of this, and we're playing the favorite game of the powerless, which is to fight over the misguided belief that all of us have to espouse these ideals in word-for-word identical ways—because individual expression is one thing that everyone has access to, regardless of power, and another is the ability to try and push people to change theirs. Personally, I agree that economic precariousness is immensely destabilizing, in surprisingly nuanced ways, and would also really love to see less people trying to make the misguided argument that racism isn't a crucial part of this moment in time.

(I would also argue that racism pops up in far more places than are overtly discussed: the rising obsession with biological essentialism is inherently racist even before it says its racist shit out loud, though it's also sexist and homophobic and transphobic and on some level more than a little classist too. Point being, I guess, that all these things are connected, and that "it's not A, it's B" isn't the most useful way to talk about this stuff when we all know that it's A and B and C and D and E, and really only start disagreeing significantly when we get to Q and X way down the line. I'm really interested in all the various ideas about how these things connect to one another, but that too feels like it could be an additive conversation rather than a series of ongoing negations.)
posted by rorgy at 4:43 AM on January 27, 2022 [3 favorites]


>I think that, of the argument between "economic anxiety" and "racism tho" going on in the thread, both sides agree that this is an AND rather than an OR. The argument seems to be whether anxiety is what triggers the most violent, fascist form of racism or whether racism is what provokes the most violent, fascist form of anxiety, right? And it's an argument that gets more and more heated because it's not one-then-the-other: it's both at once, interwoven, completely impossible to disentangle.

That's not the argument we're having... that's the argument that one set of people in this thread THINKS we're having.

All of us start from the same place: We have all known for a while that fascism has gone mainstream among conservatives. We have some new data showing us that the most active, most agitated, most visible fascists earn double/triple/quadruple of the national median income, and they have no other beliefs in common except racism.

Some folks on this thread are reacting to this information by wondering: How can we explain a regular working class/middle class person suddenly embracing fascism? What's been going on in their head, in their heart, in their life, in their community, and in their history that leads them down this path? How can we change their minds, their hearts, their actions, and their politics? If you fall into this group, you probably think that your opponents are saying IT'S RACISM, STUPID, THE ANSWER TO ALL THESE THINGS IS RACISM AND RACISM ALONE, and you're here on this thread saying "come on, these people have not been moved to this place by racism alone, it's more complicated, it's both!"

Other people are reacting to this same information by wondering: What common cause has brought the conservative masses together with the fringe right THIS time? What's written on that banner they're rallying under? What are the shared goals and shared obsessions of this group? What are the members' identifying traits and distinguishing characteristics? Who are their targets, and how can the targets be kept safe? What might their next moves be, and how can we be prepared? As someone who had the latter reaction, I see my rhetorical opponents on this thread as saying JUST GIVE THE RACISTS MORE MONEY, THEIR HAPPINESS IS THE WAY TO KEEP POC SAFE!, which is why I was on here saying "come on, that's not how racism works."

Both these sets of questions are valuable fields of inquiry in general. But IMO only the latter set of questions is directly responsive to the new data being presented as the topic of this thread (i.e. underlined bits above). The former set of questions is at best generic musing unconnected to the specific new data presented in the OP, and at worst seeks to dismiss, minimize, and deny the significance of the new data presented in the OP.
posted by MiraK at 1:17 PM on January 27, 2022 [4 favorites]


Yeah, that's extremely reasonable! The article makes it clear that the overlap between the January 6th protestors and believers in the Great Replacement is pretty non-trivial. And this in particular makes it clear that that's the most unifying factor by far, specifically mentioning fear of job loss as secondary to race-driven anxiety:
When you ask questions about their belief in “the great replacement,” you see that that is head and shoulders the No. 1 belief that’s driving the difference between being in the 21 million versus being in the rest of the body politic. Yes, there are other beliefs: Many in the insurrectionist movement believe in the QAnon cult idea, that there is a satanic cult of pedophiles running the U.S. government. Many also fear loss of a job in the next 12 months. Many also believe that the second coming of Christ is happening within their lifetime. Many also think government is an enemy. But those are secondary factors. Head and shoulders, the leading factor is the belief in “the great replacement.” Underneath that, the No. 1 factor that’s predicting whether someone believes in “the great replacement” versus not is racial resentment—that is, specifically resentment of minorities who get what they see as special privileges. These fringe beliefs like “the great replacement” are now no longer confined to the fringe. This is overall a mainstream political movement.
posted by rorgy at 1:36 PM on January 27, 2022 [4 favorites]


Precisely why the denialism on this thread was so infuriating for me. In the face of data that shows economic anxiety is a distant second to racism as a predictor of fascist beliefs, how does it make sense to insist that economic anxiety must remain central to any discussion of this data?
posted by MiraK at 3:35 PM on January 27, 2022 [4 favorites]


Because "economic anxiety" has easy answers. Racism doesn't.
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:23 AM on January 29, 2022


Anxiety and racism are often entangled in zero-sum thinking.
posted by Brian B. at 10:44 AM on January 31, 2022


« Older Queer fiction for 2022   |   "hey what's going on?" we're covering DMB "oh heck... Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments