02-27-2022, 04:24 PM
(02-16-2022, 08:21 PM)JasonBlack Wrote: No disrespect intended, but....all of you are extremely out of touch with anything resembling what the average right winger thinks or looks like. Most right wingers are more like
below is a pretty decent cross-section of the modern right (note that not all of these are subgroups I view positively. there are a few subcultures on the right that are pretty terrible, but most of them are not like what is being described)
- working class employees who see a lot of people milking the system, destroying their neighborhoods or speaking condescendingly to them and want to see consequences
- farmers (interestingly, in Canada they tend to be more socialist)
- law-and-order bullies
- college students who think their SJW peers don't make sense and treat people terribly
- businessmen who just want to make money (ranging from sociopaths to normal people with more ambition)
- grill dads
- parents who are freaked out by how terrible the school system is and how drugs are being pushed on their children for the crime of being normal boys
- Evangelicals
- libertarians who hate corporate lobbyists just as much as anyone on the left
the unironically white supremacists haven't started really reemerging until just a few years ago, and like 2/3 of them say some variation of "I was liberal until like 3 years ago".
With respect to the first -- the System really is rotten. Corporate America is all for the working man on the condition that he work as long and hard for as little as people worked for about a century ago, only to be priced out of the wonders of high technology. -- and of course denied any means of contesting low pay, bad working conditions, and brutal management. That is Nazi Germany without the racism, personality cult, militarism, corruption, and despotism. Nazi Germany was a workers' Hell in which workers were sweated on the job and cheated off the job. One got to put money down against a car that would not be produced for fifteen years except in quantities large enough to be visible. The cars were being made, but not as fast as the payments were being collected. One would be bled for dubious charities to give vague aid -- that well-connected people would skim deeply. One might get an inexpensive vacation to the Alps...only that one only saw a screen backdrop painted or printed to look like the Alps while one was in Bremen (which is on a flat plain). One paid little for such a vacation and got nothing.
We liberals are completely dumbfounded for solutions because anything other than 'more of the same' is out of the question. After all under neoliberal practice, he who owns the gold makes the rules. Anyone at all frustrated is obliged to suffer with a smile. So enjoy the short bus ride to some amphitheater in which a giant television screen shows you Old Faithful.at Yellowstone National Park. You will still be fleeced.
Someone like J D Vance (a writer of the much-acclaimed Hillbilly Elegy) gets it partially right in recognizing that powers that most people do not understand are gutting the basis of the prosperity that Americans used to enjoy while far from the giant cities. Yes, most Americans are ill-suited by cultural interests to make the most out of the coastal behemoths of cities.Places like Lima, Middletown, and Mansfield that used to be good places to live if one's culture is country music cheap chromos (Jesus at the United Nations), and hokey 'collectible' figurines or 'plates'... and of course, televised sports and detective stories that offer much "T&A"* Maybe some kid who got his first paycheck might want to visit a strip club in the Big City, but visit art galleries or a museum of natural history? No way!
If one must go to one of the few urban behemoths to get a job, one finds that one must spend half one's pay from working two jobs on rent, as America has built little modestly-priced housing in the last twenty years. Landlords profiteer off anyone with either talent or a work ethic. America was a better place when one could make a life for oneself fairly easily in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, or Milwaukee..
Farmers? The giant agricultural interests are squeezing out the family farmers. Big rural landowners have typically been the most reactionary interests in almost every time and place. In a certain part of America those were the most vehement defenders of slavery. Before World War II in Europe they were the loudest supporters of fascism, including Nazism. Small farmers recognize the need for government to modernize places not so profitable for the giant corporations to serve. With a landed aristocracy thr serfs can suffer as much as will not kill them.
The Hard Right has gotten increasingly hostile to anyone who expresses hostility to anything that contradicts their world-views. The safest approach to their ideology is to say something like "Yeah. Sure. It's interesting" to someone convinced of something so stupid as young-earth creationism offered to a rationalist in a seemingly-charitable effort to save the rationalist from eternal damnation.
*t!ts and @ss..
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.