Seems appropos
There comes a point where “marginalized white men” fight back and can become dangerous. There is then a false narrative that we are under attack, and bringing back the Old Ways will fix everything. And who doesn’t like safety? Easy selling point.
That’s why Trump won in 2016 and why he can win again. He knows that’s what gets him the votes. And the media plays into it too.
Not an expert but it seems to me the most important thing is education. In the U.S. they’ve been chipping away at that since at least the eighties. I’m not “handing it to them” but the right has put in the long term work to get us where we are today, with only feeble liberal centrist pushback.
Lotta very well-educated MAGAs. Not sure if education cuts to the heart of the illness.
Also a lot of well-educated and intelligent people who are not happy and/or governed by their inner darkness. Education is important but I think there’s something far more fundamental at issue
There’s not one illness, strictly speaking.
Russia found a guy who appealed enough to the legacies of confederate know nothings who were about to become politically irrelevant if the GOP had died as expected in 2015.
The two illnesses are A) lawful evil, Roman republicans who are working to sell us out to Christian fascists. B) patriots of the Confederacy who think that if they lie to themselves long enough it will become truth. The stupidity of people in group B is profitable enough to turbocharge into political power for people in group A. The heart of the illness is the entire mass of B being held together by group A disinformation, you could call it propaganda but that would imply concern with truth. The hearts of the illness are the links holding them together.
I hope there’s larger effort towards collecting case studies in terms of former MAGAs and what it takes to bring them back to reality
There are well-educated racists, but there’s MORE uneducated racists. The well-educated racists spread their ideology and weaken their opposition by hurting education, then they get to rule over the other racists by using their education.
But the bigger issue is the racist part, there must be people in history who were vehemently racist who had a change of heart…
What does it take for that to happen, is there a way to nudge them to take off their jacket in the warm sun
Educate them.
Show them the world outside of their bubble. Let them interact with people different to them, expand their horizons, and enrich their personalities. A trip around the world can be useful, I think.
It’s not guaranteed. Like I said, there are well-educated racists. There are people who don’t even care about their own children, so why would you expect them to like minorities? They will never change. There is NOTHING you can do about them.
But the ones you can do something about? They could do with education.
I doubt many MAJOR racists changed their minds at all.
For the sake of definition, I’m going to say a major racist is someone who actively hates a group and will go out of their way to watch them suffer. A minor racist could be a child of a major racist. They won’t go out of their way to make them suffer, but they are suspicious of them and less likely to treat the group with equal respect. They don’t have personal reasons for their hate, but they’ve been raised to accept the group as inferior.
Minor racists either lean into the racism, or they get out of that circle and expand their perspective.
Progress is generational. Our kids are generally more accepting than we are. Young adults today are more accepting of LGBT+ than my generation was, just like we were less racist than our parents or grandparents.
Major racists don’t change their mind, they die off. We sadly won’t see major change in our lifetime, but as long as we instill our good values to the next generation, and are willing to learn new ones from the younger generation, we’ll get there.
Being MAGA and being educated are mutually exclusive.
To believe in MAGA you need to believe there was a time in the past where America was great, but that that time has passed and that somehow there is a way to return to it.
Anyone with decent education realizes the myriad flaws with the very idea the movement is based on.
I’m sure you’re correct. Just as a poor education along with lack of socio-economic opportunity and inavailability of mental healthcare might contribute to radicalization in the working poor, it stands to reason that a basic lack of empathy, whether taught or innate, likely coupled with greed must play a role for radicalization of the wealthy.
Like, the economic is huge, I’ve noticed strange impulses even in myself when I’m in a bad way financially…
Trying to appease fascists by avoiding confrontation or acting when they start chipping away at our insitutions willl just lead to more fascism. The nazis didn’t spring forth overnight, they consolidated their power through legal means and appealed to the population’s bigotry and hatred of ‘others’ without enough of a response to stop their ascension.
Basically the same thing that is happening in the west right now.
The Nazis are only the yardstick of evil by convention. Their crimes exist in an enormous set of savage acts including genocides and invasions that suffuses history.
The lesson “of the Nazis” needs to be that the Nazis are not unique in history, nor are they the only sort of people who commit such acts.
Just replying to my own shit to add here:
I think the Nazis were the first instance of this kind of behavior that got caught on video. Just like the Vietnam war was the first war US citizenry saw on TV, I think the Third Reich and whatever the term is for the whole campaign of land grab invasions, and the Holocaust, is a pattern that’s been going on for thousands of years, and it’s the first time the whole world was witness to it.
For the majority of history a king or emperor or whoever could march out armies, destroy, use a ton of his own internal political enemies as slaves and work them to death, then just murder the rest of them … and cover it up almost effortlessly by telling the town criers to announce whatever horseshit they want the farmers to believe.
We know historically this happens. But the Holocaust is the first of the pogroms that everybody around the world saw, and in the greater set of genocides. It was the first time (I think?) that absolute mass atrocity on civilians was televised.
But it’s not a unique event is the key thing. It’s the most well-known example of the eruption of evil into the world, but it’s a recurring part of humanity to do this kind of thing.
That we should never have allowed the nazis to get painted as this existential, somehow outerworldly pure evil. They understandably got that reputation after the holocaust and losing the war, but it obscures why so many people were so attracted to them in the first place.
It has made it impossible for most people to see what is truly the resurrection of fascism: many people don’t see it as such because they’re not (yet) having people shot or books burned. They think ‘if I’m not pure evil, surely I can’t be nazi’. And there’s the real danger.
Things that changed here in Germany (which I can think of off the top of my head):
- No presidential role. We don’t have a single person with that much power anymore. The most powerful is the chancellor now.
- No emergency laws. Many nations have laws that when something goes wrong, their president gets superpowers to do whatever they want. This is regularly abused, not just by Hitler. To my knowledge, we don’t currently have any such law.
- Secret voting. It is now illegal to make it public who you voted for. When Hitler rose to power, Nazis would sit in voting places and pressure people to vote for Hitler. And they would heckle people who didn’t want to show their ballot card.
Having said all that, it should also be said that we do still currently have a very real Nazi problem. It’s a few steps in the right direction, but no silver bullet.
Erich Kästner wikipedia.org, a german writer and satirist of the time, had this to say:
The events from 1933 to 1945 should have been battled in 1928 at the latest. Later was already too late. One must not wait until liberty is called treason. One must not wait till the snowball has become an avalanche. One must squelch the rolling snowball. The avalanche can’t be stopped anymore…
"The avalanche had already begun. It is too late for the pebbles to vote. "
moderates need to stop only punching left.
hitler got into power because their moderates refused to appeal to their leftist voters and supported facism and so hitler’s side won the election and, later, the country after they disenfranchised the moderates and executed the leftists; right now it’s looking like americans are going to follow suit.
Idk I feel like moderates punch both left and right lol. The extremists on both sides are annoying.
If you’re talking about the US, they certainly aren’t punching hard enough then. Trump is an extremist and basically leading right wing politics.
Unchecked conservatism naturally develops into fascism. Genocidal oppression is the natural tendency of conservatives. It always has been.
One important lesson of the Nazi rise to power and the Holocaust is that Nazis characterized their enemies as disgusting rather than scary.
Disgust is a different feeling than fear, and it leads to different responses. Hitler used imagery of infection and disease to describe not only problems in society but eventually groups as well. This talk of filth and infestation laid the emotional groundwork for the “purge” solution.
If we want to avoid another Holocaust, we need to be wary of analogies like rot, cancer, infection for describing people and points of view.
Curious if the word “deplorables” count.
I see such disgust coming from both major parties. Feels like either one can easily fall into this.
I don’t know honestly. Isn’t that one of the castes in India? No that’s “untouchables”.
Where is that word used?
It was used by Hilary Clinton to describe Trump supporters. A “basket of deplorables” I think was her term.
And then conservatives embraced the term and now proudly use it to describe themselves. They know they are toxic, oppressive and cruel and they celebrate it.
It’s always a good day to punch a Nazi
Preventing the victims of the Nazis to do something similar to another group of people.
But that would never happen /s
Democracy dies with half the country cheering
That the only good Nazi is a dead Nazi.
Every single one of them should have been executed. Might not have prevented the return entirely, but it would have made it harder, and perhaps made the newer ones less certain of their reception.
Well dont have Great Depressions is a major one.
