“Exit over voice”...indeed, Peter Thiel once tried to start his own country. We kept treating people like him & Donald as harmless cranks. Not so harmless now.
I just watched a documentary about the KKK (whose numbers have admittedly whittled down drastically over the decades, though this vastly understates the influence of their ideas or adjacent ideas among hundreds of thousands of people on digital platforms like StormFront. To be a Fascist doesn't require that one don a bed sheet, obviously. One can stay at home and be covered in a bed sheet while liking racist comments). Isn't it true that they're highly religiously motivated (or at least imbued) and are basically Christian Nationalists? However, it's true that many Fascists, to the extent that they're religious, are influenced by Odinism and are truly hostile to Christianity, which they view as a "slave religion" invented by Jews. I watched a rather bizarre video last year by a Christian Trumper who was canvassing the support of pagans to engage in a race war.
Also, have you read "Black Sun" by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke? He was actually a rather conservative thinker (if I understood him correctly) but warned about how fascist currents would metastasize. His diagnosis (no doubt incomplete but perhaps zeroing in on something crucial) was that political correctness and clumsily applied affirmative action (I believe he died before "wokeness" became an item) would elicit a response by the right and feed into right wing grievance by seemingly validating their world view that the world was out to punish whites. Do you think there's something to be said there, at least from a strategic point of view? Obviously, PC/wokeness are not the main issues at play and are a sideshow in the broader scheme of things, but do they create their own type of friction when we're not cognizant of how people on the right (or people who are at risk of becoming radicalized by right wing ideas) view things? They do hand our opponents something "for free" when they're applied or argued for in a certain way?
I think it’s a matter of order of operations if you will. You’ll remember from The Freedom Illusion how I say that neoliberalism benefits from divisions made across race/class/religion as it maximizes extraction.
Any time a sufficient portion of the public is under severe extraction, i.e., they’re struggling to make ends meet, anything designed to benefit one religion, one race, or one class, especially when said group is not the dominant group, even if legitimately justifiable, will be easily weaponizable for conflict by those in charge of neoliberalism in order to sow division and minimize solidarity.
And history shows us how to defeat this dynamic. A large reason why the Civil Rights Movement was able to take off in the 60s was precisely because during the preceding decades, via New Deal policies, the middle class had been built up, and much of the white people were rather prosperous. Much of that prosperity came from labor unions, which increasingly got people from all races working together and collaborating for labor protections/rights.
As a result, it was much harder to weaponize programs designed to improve the lives of African Americans as a “threat” to white people, since white people could see said programs as a clear means to bring African Americans’ conditions up to par with them. However, since then, much has been done to destroy the middle class, to destroy those labor movements. And so, when you have a vast number of white people, especially in rural areas and poorer states who are struggling, they see any program designed to help African Americans as programs designed to leave them behind that help someone other than them.
And that’s what I mean by order of operations. When as much as 50% of the population generally own little to no wealth, you can’t try to run programs designed to help only this group or that group, especially as it relates to race/religion. You must first work on programs designed to lift everyone, and once you’re able to recover the middle class and get a substantial portion of the population into financial security, then that’s the time to run programs to bring to par anyone who’s been left behind. Do it in the reverse order, and you’re just about guaranteed to get exactly the backlash you’re seeing now.
Good post. We can't forget to call out the lesser knowns, too – the working level functionaries in the MAGA movement who most people haven't heard of but who are just as responsible as Elon, Trump, and all the other big names. It's the work of those little MAGA minions who give the big name MAGA their power. https://ktb2025.substack.com/
“Exit over voice”...indeed, Peter Thiel once tried to start his own country. We kept treating people like him & Donald as harmless cranks. Not so harmless now.
I just watched a documentary about the KKK (whose numbers have admittedly whittled down drastically over the decades, though this vastly understates the influence of their ideas or adjacent ideas among hundreds of thousands of people on digital platforms like StormFront. To be a Fascist doesn't require that one don a bed sheet, obviously. One can stay at home and be covered in a bed sheet while liking racist comments). Isn't it true that they're highly religiously motivated (or at least imbued) and are basically Christian Nationalists? However, it's true that many Fascists, to the extent that they're religious, are influenced by Odinism and are truly hostile to Christianity, which they view as a "slave religion" invented by Jews. I watched a rather bizarre video last year by a Christian Trumper who was canvassing the support of pagans to engage in a race war.
Also, have you read "Black Sun" by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke? He was actually a rather conservative thinker (if I understood him correctly) but warned about how fascist currents would metastasize. His diagnosis (no doubt incomplete but perhaps zeroing in on something crucial) was that political correctness and clumsily applied affirmative action (I believe he died before "wokeness" became an item) would elicit a response by the right and feed into right wing grievance by seemingly validating their world view that the world was out to punish whites. Do you think there's something to be said there, at least from a strategic point of view? Obviously, PC/wokeness are not the main issues at play and are a sideshow in the broader scheme of things, but do they create their own type of friction when we're not cognizant of how people on the right (or people who are at risk of becoming radicalized by right wing ideas) view things? They do hand our opponents something "for free" when they're applied or argued for in a certain way?
I think it’s a matter of order of operations if you will. You’ll remember from The Freedom Illusion how I say that neoliberalism benefits from divisions made across race/class/religion as it maximizes extraction.
Any time a sufficient portion of the public is under severe extraction, i.e., they’re struggling to make ends meet, anything designed to benefit one religion, one race, or one class, especially when said group is not the dominant group, even if legitimately justifiable, will be easily weaponizable for conflict by those in charge of neoliberalism in order to sow division and minimize solidarity.
And history shows us how to defeat this dynamic. A large reason why the Civil Rights Movement was able to take off in the 60s was precisely because during the preceding decades, via New Deal policies, the middle class had been built up, and much of the white people were rather prosperous. Much of that prosperity came from labor unions, which increasingly got people from all races working together and collaborating for labor protections/rights.
As a result, it was much harder to weaponize programs designed to improve the lives of African Americans as a “threat” to white people, since white people could see said programs as a clear means to bring African Americans’ conditions up to par with them. However, since then, much has been done to destroy the middle class, to destroy those labor movements. And so, when you have a vast number of white people, especially in rural areas and poorer states who are struggling, they see any program designed to help African Americans as programs designed to leave them behind that help someone other than them.
And that’s what I mean by order of operations. When as much as 50% of the population generally own little to no wealth, you can’t try to run programs designed to help only this group or that group, especially as it relates to race/religion. You must first work on programs designed to lift everyone, and once you’re able to recover the middle class and get a substantial portion of the population into financial security, then that’s the time to run programs to bring to par anyone who’s been left behind. Do it in the reverse order, and you’re just about guaranteed to get exactly the backlash you’re seeing now.
Good post. We can't forget to call out the lesser knowns, too – the working level functionaries in the MAGA movement who most people haven't heard of but who are just as responsible as Elon, Trump, and all the other big names. It's the work of those little MAGA minions who give the big name MAGA their power. https://ktb2025.substack.com/