Cass Sunstein reviews Laura Field's Furious Minds:
The deeper and more specific problem, at least to me, is the pervasiveness of the Manichaean sensibility. It’s harsh. It’s contemptuous. It’s ugly. It’s horrible. It’s sneering. It’s vicious. (It feels as if it has something like murder on its mind.) . . .
Because the New Right is striking such a nerve, it must be onto something. But what? One answer is a sense, on the part of many, that political elites have contempt for them. Another is a sense that longstanding sources of identity, pride, and self-respect (including patriotism) are under assault. In important respects, North America and Europe are indeed ailing. Patrick Deneen is entirely right to emphasize the importance of traditions, norms, virtues, values, and faith. But in my view, members of the New Right are least convincing when they argue that some abstraction called “liberalism” is responsible for the demise of those things. Liberalism is not a person or a thing; it is not Voldemort. When traditions and norms are at risk, it would be good to focus less on high-falutin’ claims about what abstractions do, and to explore, in a more systematic way, what kinds of economic, technological, and cultural forces have been at work, and how best to respond to them.
What Field captures beautifully is that notwithstanding the immense diversity of the members of the New Right, they are unified by one thing: a Manichaean sensibility, a sense that the forces of darkness are assembled against the forces of light. For many members of the New Right, the Manicheanism is like a form of chanting, almost hallucinatory, a prelude to something. It’s the Two Minutes Hate. It’s primal.
I feel the same. As I have said several times, what I keep hearing from MAGA folks is not really that Trump's policies are good, but that they are necessary to defend the nation from the ultimate horror building on the left.
I keep thinking that at least some of these folks just want to fight, and since they have no real enemies they have turn a bunch of two-bit anarchists and woke professors into a menace comparable to Stalinism.
2 comments:
"... not really that Trump's policies are good, but that they are necessary to defend the nation from the ultimate horror building on the left."
This is what I've heard from nearly all my Trumpist coworkers since 2016. Ask them what hose horrors are and, of course, their fears have little to do with actual Democratic Party policies -- but in my experience (I'm 70) they almost never have.
I keep thinking that at least some of these folks just want to fight, and since they have no real enemies they have turn a bunch of two-bit anarchists and woke professors into a menace comparable to Stalinism.
You are - as you so often do without seeming to realize it when you talk about Trump's supporters - literally describing textbook Fascism.
From Umberto Eco's 14 Properties of Ur-Fascism:
#6 "Appeal To A Frustrated Middle Class"
Eco singled out a "middle class", but also noted that it could be any "class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups".
Trumpists are diverse, but are united by feelings of humiliation - chiefly the erosion of white male privilege. Many of Trump's followers are economically quite poor, but could always take comfort in being able to look down on other ethnicities as being "lesser", even if both groups were comparably poor. In this sense, the slowly unfolding collapse of their unjust racist privilege makes them afraid of the "lower social groups" of non-whites, with whom they are becoming (to their horror) more equal to.
#7 "Obsession With Plot"
Eco noted "to people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country" ...and that... "the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies".
Trumpists feel their white privilege slipping away, and see themselves becoming more equal to those they consider "lesser" - which is a direct threat to their identity and sense of self, which is largely built upon said privilege over others. In order to reconcile these feelings, they need enemies to blame, and a plot to be the victim of.
You note how absurd it is that they "turn a bunch of two-bit anarchists and woke professors into a menace comparable to Stalinism". But this is no less absurd than the classic Fascist delusion of claiming the 0.2% of the globe who are Jewish somehow secretly control everything in a vast conspiracy that works to undermine 'the Aryan race'.
You are absolutely correct above, John. Many of these people just want to fight (because they feel threatened by losing their racism-justified privilege in society), and yet they have no real enemies, and so they manufacture them, no matter how absurd such manufacture is.
Being afraid of woke professors is laughable to a normal person, but it's perfectly Fascist. It aligns so very neatly with other Ur-Fascist properties Eco listed - "cult of tradition", "rejection of modernism", "disagreement is treason", "fear of difference", "contempt for the weak", "machismo", "selective populism"...
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