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A lot has happened since the last time I posted.
My mom went into the hospital for a routine knee surgery and ended up having to stay an extra day because the anesthesia caused her blood pressure to fluctuate in a worrying fashion. She is out now, and stuck at home, bored out of her mind. But anyway - while I was doomscrolling Bluesky in the hospital waiting room, a guy shot the CEO of United Healthcare.
Right away, this act was very divisive. Half of the people were cheering on the shooter, and the other half were scolding the people for cheering on the shooter. My mom, when she came to and heard about it, was like "if they catch him, they won't be able to find a jury who will convict him." MY MOM.
People were already coming up with names like The Claims Adjuster and Robin Hoodie.
There were also skeets (like tweets, but on Bluesky! Yes, I am aware of the other definition of skeet, that's why it's funny!) like "Maybe we shouldn't be posting the photo of the (admittedly hot) shooter. You know, because of reasons."
My take on it was the usual image of Bugs Bunny in a tuxedo, with the caption "I wish all of my well-intentioned and hilarious mutuals a very pleasant not getting a visit from 'The Feds'"(tm). Boy howdy, that meme did a lot of heavy the lifting that day. (Also - if shooting someone is bad, so is denying someone healthcare that would save their life.)
Then we learned that the person they have apprehended for the shooting has a lot of right wing beliefs. He sounds like a guy who got, (forgive me, Lana and Lilly) "Redpilled" by the right wing internet, before then having a personal medical crisis (a back injury from a surfing expedition) that allegedly led him to do what he did. Allegedly.
Just a few days before that, I'd been in a Skeet Thread discussing empathy and how it forms, and my theory that we aren't actually born with empathy, especially empathy for people outside of our own "in group." It's a learned skill. It's actually something that takes time to develop. Some people never do develop it. Some people disagreed with this, and I understand why they do.
I feel like this is relevant to what I'm want to talk about next. Which is this article, about why Trump won the 2024 election.
I used to just up and post the entire texts of whole articles to blog entries here. Because even back in the 2000s, articles just would up and disappear all the time. And I'm not even sure that anyone is going to read it. So I'll just sum it up here: Americans aren't turning to Fascism because of hardship. The ones turning to Fascism are actually statistically doing better than a lot of us. (This is actually backed up by exit polling from the 2016 election.)
In essence: this isn't a revolt being waged by people for cheaper groceries. This is a war being declared on the rest of us by people who used to be able to shop at Whole Foods - but they're mad that Whole Foods raised their prices so now they have to shop at a working-class coded supermarket like Wal Mart. They're mad as hell that inflation has effectively knocked them down a rung on the Class Ladder, and they're not going to take it anymore. Add to this the study that visible signs of poverty makes people feel unsafe (instead of, you know, feeling like they should do something about it other than punishing poor people for being poor.)
I grew up hearing that people in 1930s Germany started listening to Hitler only after they started to need whole wheelbarrows of cash to buy a single loaf of bread. All it took here in America in the Year Of Our Lord 2024 was for the price of eggs to go up a few bucks, apparently.
It all comes down to the fact that America is still doing better than everyone else in the world: but it's not good enough if upper-class people can't feel that they are safely, sneeringly above the working class. John And Jane Q Upper Middle Class are more likely to be MAGA than say, the barista at their local Starbucks who has to share an apartment with four other people. The Upper Middle Class (people making just under six figures to just above) were statistically the ones storming the Capital on January 6th, 2021. But we're told that Trump won the election last month because Democrats "are out of touch with the working class."
Actually, since the early 2010s, the Online Discourse has been that a socialist utopia is striving to be born in this country, and we could already have Automated Luxury Space Communism by now if the shitlib Dems would just get out of its way. And if they don't, maybe they deserve to be first up against the wall even before the Fascists when it does finally happen. But mainly that the Rise Of Fascism is mostly the fault of Stupid Liberals who enable Fascism by not being Lefty enough, rather than it being the fault of the actual fucking Fascists who keep trying to vote for and support the rise of Fascism.
But what if that doesn't actually reflect what is really going on in reality, and this narrative does? What if Mainstream America has actually rejected Automated Luxury Space Communism because the thought of a truly just, equitable society - one in which the class hierarchy has been effectively abolished and everyone has what they need - outrages, terrifies, and disgusts them?
There is evidence which shows that Trumpers do want some socialized perks - but only if these perks are handed to them by an authoritarian strongman leader, preferably in a right wing religious context (i.e. a "Jubilee.") And only if they are assured that these perks will be denied to the people they hate, the people they consider to be beneath them. And only if they can gladly watch those people suffer. Otherwise, they are willing to suffer and die themselves if it means that the people they feel are "undeserving" are suffering even more than they are. There is very much a vibe of them wanting to try and starve the "undesirables" out - with them maybe not realizing that this is probably exactly how people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel would like to deal with them.
Otherwise, you know the old saw, often attributed to John Steinbeck: Americans haven't embraced socialism because they don't see themselves as an oppressed proletariat, but as a nation of temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
I supported Bernie Sanders in 2016, and donated to his campaign, and tried to convince everyone I knew to give him a chance. I pleaded and argued with people who told me "I'll never vote for a Socialist. My Grandparents fled Communism in the USSR/Latin America." I begged them to ignore their family's lived experience and vote for a Democratic Socialist here in the USA. Because we do need Universal Healthcare. Every other "First World" country in the world, along with many others that we would not consider "First World," has Universal Healthcare. And the need for affordable, accessible healthcare is the common denominator amongst all rungs of the social ladder underneath the Billionaire Class (as we are seeing right now, in the wake of the shooting of the United Healthcare CEO.)
(Personally, I would also like to see a form of UBI. The stimulus during the Pandemic showed us that it's possible. I just don't think a lot of Americans are going to go for it, for the exact reasons I have already stated, and will continue to expound upon.)
But the article is right about one thing in particular: if we couldn't get a Democratic Socialist elected on easy mode, what makes people think we can do it on nightmare mode? How do we tell Leftists that the problem isn't "shitlibs," it's that the majority of people in this country don't seem to want the vision of the future that we're trying to sell them? At least, not the way that we've been presenting it to them so far?
Aside from that - I've always hated the idea of social hierarchies. I've always hated the idea of designating a whole group of people as "no better off than they should be" and turning them into a punching bag.
Maybe because I'm Queer and on the Spectrum. Maybe it's because I grew up in a single-mom broken home in the Bible Belt during the conservative 80s. Social hierarchies just seem dumb, arbitrary and impractical to me. I spent the formative years of my life not only not fitting in to the ones I found myself in, but finding myself incapable of doing so; which always sent me straight to the bottom of all of them.
What I found out later was that a lot of my fellow social rejects started forming hierarchies themselves, with the people who'd rejected them (hot girls, the popular kids) at the bottom. Which seemed just as dumb, even if I could understand it. They were hating on people for having been hated on themselves. This is primarily the hate that spawned Gamergate and the media culture wars. ("Oh, girls rejected me for liking video games/Dungeons&Dragons/Sci Fi and Fantasy Fiction/Magic The Gathering, and now they want to like these things themselves? We'll see about that! Anyone who isn't one of us who gets any kind of representation in any of these forms of media is stealing something from us!" When no, they rejected us for making those things our whole personality. But anyway.)
I'm reminded me of something else I read recently, about how upper class Conservatives in the 40s were upset about the New Deal because they believed the increased security would give working class people ideas above their station. Then 25 years later we had the Civil Rights movement, antiwar movement, and the women's liberation movement. Suddenly the social hierarchy was threatened, and the upper class panicked.
Ronald Reagan was their solution. Reagan punished the working class and put them "back in their place," as a desperate and struggling underclass - but they loved him for it. And they loved him for it for the same reason MAGA loves Trump: because he promised them that he would restore the social hierarchy, and that there would be people beneath them in it that they could safely despise, bully and mistreat.
Maybe this is the real cancer that is eating away at the heart of America. Like the meme says: To John and Jane Q Trump Voter, Fascism doesn't look like jackboots and barbed wire. It looks like safety, tradition, and upholding their beloved hierarchy. And this may be the real reason we will never have Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism. A lot of people are going to have to fix their hearts before that is even a distant ghost of a possibility.
The shooting of the United CEO might have provided a brief flashpoint of cross-class solidarity. But this is what America is, and what America always has been. And maybe the best that we who are stuck on the bottom rungs of the social hierarchy can do is practice mutual aid amongst ourselves so that we can survive it. And to resist the American Mind Virus - that compulsive and pathological desire to punch down - ourselves.
My mom went into the hospital for a routine knee surgery and ended up having to stay an extra day because the anesthesia caused her blood pressure to fluctuate in a worrying fashion. She is out now, and stuck at home, bored out of her mind. But anyway - while I was doomscrolling Bluesky in the hospital waiting room, a guy shot the CEO of United Healthcare.
Right away, this act was very divisive. Half of the people were cheering on the shooter, and the other half were scolding the people for cheering on the shooter. My mom, when she came to and heard about it, was like "if they catch him, they won't be able to find a jury who will convict him." MY MOM.
People were already coming up with names like The Claims Adjuster and Robin Hoodie.
There were also skeets (like tweets, but on Bluesky! Yes, I am aware of the other definition of skeet, that's why it's funny!) like "Maybe we shouldn't be posting the photo of the (admittedly hot) shooter. You know, because of reasons."
My take on it was the usual image of Bugs Bunny in a tuxedo, with the caption "I wish all of my well-intentioned and hilarious mutuals a very pleasant not getting a visit from 'The Feds'"(tm). Boy howdy, that meme did a lot of heavy the lifting that day. (Also - if shooting someone is bad, so is denying someone healthcare that would save their life.)
Then we learned that the person they have apprehended for the shooting has a lot of right wing beliefs. He sounds like a guy who got, (forgive me, Lana and Lilly) "Redpilled" by the right wing internet, before then having a personal medical crisis (a back injury from a surfing expedition) that allegedly led him to do what he did. Allegedly.
Just a few days before that, I'd been in a Skeet Thread discussing empathy and how it forms, and my theory that we aren't actually born with empathy, especially empathy for people outside of our own "in group." It's a learned skill. It's actually something that takes time to develop. Some people never do develop it. Some people disagreed with this, and I understand why they do.
I feel like this is relevant to what I'm want to talk about next. Which is this article, about why Trump won the 2024 election.
I used to just up and post the entire texts of whole articles to blog entries here. Because even back in the 2000s, articles just would up and disappear all the time. And I'm not even sure that anyone is going to read it. So I'll just sum it up here: Americans aren't turning to Fascism because of hardship. The ones turning to Fascism are actually statistically doing better than a lot of us. (This is actually backed up by exit polling from the 2016 election.)
In essence: this isn't a revolt being waged by people for cheaper groceries. This is a war being declared on the rest of us by people who used to be able to shop at Whole Foods - but they're mad that Whole Foods raised their prices so now they have to shop at a working-class coded supermarket like Wal Mart. They're mad as hell that inflation has effectively knocked them down a rung on the Class Ladder, and they're not going to take it anymore. Add to this the study that visible signs of poverty makes people feel unsafe (instead of, you know, feeling like they should do something about it other than punishing poor people for being poor.)
I grew up hearing that people in 1930s Germany started listening to Hitler only after they started to need whole wheelbarrows of cash to buy a single loaf of bread. All it took here in America in the Year Of Our Lord 2024 was for the price of eggs to go up a few bucks, apparently.
It all comes down to the fact that America is still doing better than everyone else in the world: but it's not good enough if upper-class people can't feel that they are safely, sneeringly above the working class. John And Jane Q Upper Middle Class are more likely to be MAGA than say, the barista at their local Starbucks who has to share an apartment with four other people. The Upper Middle Class (people making just under six figures to just above) were statistically the ones storming the Capital on January 6th, 2021. But we're told that Trump won the election last month because Democrats "are out of touch with the working class."
Actually, since the early 2010s, the Online Discourse has been that a socialist utopia is striving to be born in this country, and we could already have Automated Luxury Space Communism by now if the shitlib Dems would just get out of its way. And if they don't, maybe they deserve to be first up against the wall even before the Fascists when it does finally happen. But mainly that the Rise Of Fascism is mostly the fault of Stupid Liberals who enable Fascism by not being Lefty enough, rather than it being the fault of the actual fucking Fascists who keep trying to vote for and support the rise of Fascism.
But what if that doesn't actually reflect what is really going on in reality, and this narrative does? What if Mainstream America has actually rejected Automated Luxury Space Communism because the thought of a truly just, equitable society - one in which the class hierarchy has been effectively abolished and everyone has what they need - outrages, terrifies, and disgusts them?
There is evidence which shows that Trumpers do want some socialized perks - but only if these perks are handed to them by an authoritarian strongman leader, preferably in a right wing religious context (i.e. a "Jubilee.") And only if they are assured that these perks will be denied to the people they hate, the people they consider to be beneath them. And only if they can gladly watch those people suffer. Otherwise, they are willing to suffer and die themselves if it means that the people they feel are "undeserving" are suffering even more than they are. There is very much a vibe of them wanting to try and starve the "undesirables" out - with them maybe not realizing that this is probably exactly how people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel would like to deal with them.
Otherwise, you know the old saw, often attributed to John Steinbeck: Americans haven't embraced socialism because they don't see themselves as an oppressed proletariat, but as a nation of temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
I supported Bernie Sanders in 2016, and donated to his campaign, and tried to convince everyone I knew to give him a chance. I pleaded and argued with people who told me "I'll never vote for a Socialist. My Grandparents fled Communism in the USSR/Latin America." I begged them to ignore their family's lived experience and vote for a Democratic Socialist here in the USA. Because we do need Universal Healthcare. Every other "First World" country in the world, along with many others that we would not consider "First World," has Universal Healthcare. And the need for affordable, accessible healthcare is the common denominator amongst all rungs of the social ladder underneath the Billionaire Class (as we are seeing right now, in the wake of the shooting of the United Healthcare CEO.)
(Personally, I would also like to see a form of UBI. The stimulus during the Pandemic showed us that it's possible. I just don't think a lot of Americans are going to go for it, for the exact reasons I have already stated, and will continue to expound upon.)
But the article is right about one thing in particular: if we couldn't get a Democratic Socialist elected on easy mode, what makes people think we can do it on nightmare mode? How do we tell Leftists that the problem isn't "shitlibs," it's that the majority of people in this country don't seem to want the vision of the future that we're trying to sell them? At least, not the way that we've been presenting it to them so far?
Aside from that - I've always hated the idea of social hierarchies. I've always hated the idea of designating a whole group of people as "no better off than they should be" and turning them into a punching bag.
Maybe because I'm Queer and on the Spectrum. Maybe it's because I grew up in a single-mom broken home in the Bible Belt during the conservative 80s. Social hierarchies just seem dumb, arbitrary and impractical to me. I spent the formative years of my life not only not fitting in to the ones I found myself in, but finding myself incapable of doing so; which always sent me straight to the bottom of all of them.
What I found out later was that a lot of my fellow social rejects started forming hierarchies themselves, with the people who'd rejected them (hot girls, the popular kids) at the bottom. Which seemed just as dumb, even if I could understand it. They were hating on people for having been hated on themselves. This is primarily the hate that spawned Gamergate and the media culture wars. ("Oh, girls rejected me for liking video games/Dungeons&Dragons/Sci Fi and Fantasy Fiction/Magic The Gathering, and now they want to like these things themselves? We'll see about that! Anyone who isn't one of us who gets any kind of representation in any of these forms of media is stealing something from us!" When no, they rejected us for making those things our whole personality. But anyway.)
I'm reminded me of something else I read recently, about how upper class Conservatives in the 40s were upset about the New Deal because they believed the increased security would give working class people ideas above their station. Then 25 years later we had the Civil Rights movement, antiwar movement, and the women's liberation movement. Suddenly the social hierarchy was threatened, and the upper class panicked.
Ronald Reagan was their solution. Reagan punished the working class and put them "back in their place," as a desperate and struggling underclass - but they loved him for it. And they loved him for it for the same reason MAGA loves Trump: because he promised them that he would restore the social hierarchy, and that there would be people beneath them in it that they could safely despise, bully and mistreat.
Maybe this is the real cancer that is eating away at the heart of America. Like the meme says: To John and Jane Q Trump Voter, Fascism doesn't look like jackboots and barbed wire. It looks like safety, tradition, and upholding their beloved hierarchy. And this may be the real reason we will never have Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism. A lot of people are going to have to fix their hearts before that is even a distant ghost of a possibility.
The shooting of the United CEO might have provided a brief flashpoint of cross-class solidarity. But this is what America is, and what America always has been. And maybe the best that we who are stuck on the bottom rungs of the social hierarchy can do is practice mutual aid amongst ourselves so that we can survive it. And to resist the American Mind Virus - that compulsive and pathological desire to punch down - ourselves.
