Current Affairs The Far Right
- Thread starter Groucho
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since they elected a white supremacist to the top job
tsubaki
Player Valuation: £90m
We are dealing with superior minds here
I did say this earlier in the thread, but its very telling how many people latch on to the nazi / fascist / "white nationalist" thing whilst ignoring the far greater presence that the Confederacy and its works has at all of these demos - as if these alt-right types are representing a mindset that is somehow non-American, instead of having a mindset that has deep roots in US social and political history.
In that sense the tweet above is correct, they aren't Nazis; they are almost entirely homegrown racists who are repeating very old slogans and using violence against opponents in the same way that their descendants did.
It is likely a combination of factors, one being as you say a distancing to "this is un-American" and the other a practical one that the horror that was Nazi Germany is more recent and therefore more relatable to most - including personal family history told directly to people by their own grandparents/grandparents.
But if that enables people to both recognise the evils of the speech and then denounce if then perhaps it is more likely to being able to tackle the current rise in popularity of this type of view?
Why?
abelard
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Yes, I think you're right. There's also this tendency to speak about Trump like it's some shocking new departure from longstanding normality (and the right describes liberals now wanting to treat LGBT people like humans, for instance, in much the same way). But this only makes sense relative to the Disney version of America's past. Right/Left/Red/Blue/Coastal Elite/"Real" Heartland/Globalist/Nationalist is a divide as old as white settlement on the continent itself (to give just one of so many examples), and it has usually been far more violent than it is now.
The obvious continuity with Jim Crow and the Confederacy is one reason why conservatives hate history so much. Of course, they see their attacks on educators' free speech on campuses as trying to defend a true, honourable past, but all they really want to do is rescue the edifying propaganda version from the complexity, and frequent atrocity, inherent throughout the nation's development.
I think looking more thoughtfully at the past also discredits the idea of the US as "odd man out" in the developed world, or as a "City on a Hill" unto its own. It's actually a typical Latin American country, in terms of racial and class divides, and income distribution, except that it has nukes and much more effective PR (and critically, it was also unusually disinterested until relatively recently in the David Ricardo free-market economic model that has set Latin America so far back).
The conservative American Creoles, who rebelled to evade taxation and preserve slavery and slaughter natives for land or sport, were not really very different from their Latin American counterparts, who likewise opted for independence only after the Imperial metropole began to move in an intolerably small 'l' liberal direction. And even now the US has much more in common with settler/slave colonies like Brazil or South Africa than it does with Europe or East Asia. When you compare the Republican Party with Temer's Brazil or Trump with Jacob Zuma, contemporary American politics suddenly start to seem at lot less bizarre or exceptional and a lot more banal.
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Nope, not having this. Freedom of speech, no matter how much it might revolt a person, must be an absolute right.
Doesn't give them the right to run me over when the VAST majority tells them to rightly [Poor language removed] off.
I'm not entirely disagreeing with you, but white nationalism is a core principle of many of these groups. Almost all hate-groups in the US rally around the cause of white nationalism and its associated pet-hates (misogyny, anti-semitism, xenophobia, homophobia, etc.). While you could argue that their racism comes from "something deeper," it is operationalized through a new agenda, which now just doesn't focus on black people, Catholics, and the Confederacy. And loads of major hate-groups don't bring up the confederacy as motivation. Their racism isn't fueled by atavism; if nothing else it has evolved into a more expansive and pernicious form of hate. The use of confederate symbols, like Nazi symbols, doesn't make them Confederates or Nazis. The US, to be sure, has a long history of racism/hate, but I think the hate manifested yesterday is tethered by a very long string to the "confederate roots", despite the latter playing a role in it.
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