It’s become increasingly clear in the last few years, and in the last few months especially, that America is a very unhappy place. There is a great deal of anger and division. Hatreds which had been simmering under the surface since the early 1970s now have come back to life in recent months. We have to ask ourselves how we got here, and what we can do to get out of it.
When a segment of the country’s white youth has come to believe that Nazism is the answer to their woes, it shows me there is a great deal of hopelessness, fear, and despair across the country - for me, that’s what drives a person to Nazism. That sense of hopeless despair is what drove the German people into Hitler’s arms. On the flip side, when a segment of our black youth has come to believe that the more radical messages of Malcolm X - those dealing with hatred of whites, and with the idea of voluntary racial separatism - are the answer - it shows great fear and hopelessness on their parts too.
The question is, how do we fix these wounds? How do we teach our young people - white and black - that hating each other isn’t the answer? How do we teach our young white men that their lack of a job isn’t a black man’s fault? How do we teach our young black men that white supremacists don’t constitute the majority of white people? How do we teach a generation that the Confederacy’s cause was an evil one, and that Nazism was even worse than the Socialism many of those on the far right so hate? How do we teach our people that hate is not the answer?
How do we get out of this pit before it gets any deeper?
Nazism, by all accounts I’ve seen has extremely small support; and by small I mean a fraction of a percentage. Do you have any statistics to show otherwise?
That’s not to say that there aren’t problems, but the problems I see aren’t as sexy or extreme as Nazism; they’re more mundane.
Frankly, I think most people just don’t feel very good about themselves and it’s just going to get worse for a long time before it gets any better.
I’m pretty sure that a major cause of these problems is economic. So we need to shrink the divide between the rich and poor - direct more wealth and value to the lower classes and they won’t feel the sort of despair and impotence that drives them to look for foes to be better than.
And as for how to get that wealth redistribution going, well, first you need to find a magic lamp…
I think that people today THINK that things are bad, that we are divided and going downhill, but honestly, I think it’s mostly hype and a 24/7 media. Simmering hatreds have been simmering for a long time, but it’s mostly just simmering in a small fraction of the population. Some folks still haven’t gotten over the changes that have transpired in the last 50 years…and some folks want the change to be almost instant, as if people can just will things to be different and they want their damned revolution NOW NOW NOW!! In between those extremes is the majority who are kind of looking around and wondering what the fuck is wrong with things today, since mainly those making the noise are at the extremes…and since they make all the noise, that’s what the media covers. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365.5 days a year, give or take a few minutes.
A segment of our population believe 9/11 was an inside job, that the Moon landings were a hoax and that their IS NO QUEEN OF ENGLAND! IOW, who cares what a small fringe group believes or what they espouse? I don’t believe for a second that the US is going Nazi…or Communist…or going to make the non-existent queen of England our lizard overlord.
Like we always have gotten over these sorts of self inflicted wounds…mainly by participating, by showing light into the dark corners and rebutting the idiots, and by waiting for the extremes of the moment to eventually burn themselves out and to do so in such a way as to discredit their ideas in the forum of public opinion. The loony lefties have gone through this several times, the right has as well. The racists have had their turn at bat, been tossed down, simmered away in the dark, and now are coming back out for round…er 9 or so. Just like the other 8 rounds, they will inevitably be knocked back into the dark so they can simmer away in there to re-emerge to get smacked down again in the future.
Today’s little dustups are nothing compared to the past, but people today THINK that it’s all new and all so over the top that we’ve never seen anything like this before! It’s horseshit of course…even in my lifetime this is small beer compared to the 60’s and nothing like as bad as, oh, say 1861 or so.
By not over reacting or overly fretting, and by not shifting, in our fear, too far in the other direction. By staying the course, by voting for sanity, counter protests to get it in the public’s eye that the majority don’t support this crap and basically by waiting for the racist movement to burn itself out. Same answer I gave when folks were fretting about the Occupy movement going to cause a revolution…or fretting about Obama, or Bush, or Clinton, or Regan or Carter. Fucking chill out is my advice.
Ignore the carnage in places like Chiraq and tear down Supreme Court statues, burn Lincoln statues, deface monuments and other property. Once all the the inanimate weapons of oppression are eradicated stage two of healing can begin.
Look, ReddyMercury, power can be achieved by exploiting differences. You expect those who desire power to refrain from using an effective tool?
The only answer is to stigmatize hate. Hate includes bigotry, intolerance, sexism, racism, homophobia, chauvinism, and all forms of attacking the Other. Hate has to be made publicly unacceptable. We’ve made a start on many of those. Anti-Semitism was a common practice among the elites but almost unthinkable now. Gays could be freely attacked but now have gained marriage privileges. Most overt racial bias is condemned whenever it occurs.
The next step is to stigmatize those who still actively call for hate or silently acquiesce when their group calls for it. For convenience we can call them Republicans. The modern Republican Party is built upon what is hated and who is hated and has a President who is applauded for his hates. There should be no political home for hated in America. They need to be stigmatized until it an embarrassment to be Republican. That won’t eradicate hate, obviously. Nazis will still exist. But they won’t have Presidents equating them with people denouncing hate. And that’s the best we can hope for.
Really sad that it was caused by Trump finding unnecessary stupid ways to keep Nazis happy. Of course, seeing that the Republicans then came back to support Trump after the “grab them by the pussy” tape it remains a small signal. I expect the Republicans to act as if things like that never took place a few days from now.
In my opinion, the worst wounds stem from the two horrible stains on our past: the treatment of native Americans, including the theft of their land and the virtual annihilation of their population; and slavery and its aftermath, including Jim Crow, segregation, the culture of lynching, and ongoing racism of all varieties and strengths.
The past is over and can’t be changed. It would be impossible (at least I suppose so) to make those actions right to the survivors. But if the majority of this country would sincerely support some expression of contrition and regret, that would go a very long way. Followed by a reversal of current policies and actions that continue those old oppressions in the present day, so that it’s not just an empty and meaningless apology.
I am sorry to say that I don’t expect this to happen, barring something completely unforeseen like a visit from wise and advanced aliens. But think of how great America could actually be if everyone were really treated by everyone else as a real first-class human being!
One problem is, white supremacist leanings are not always easy to quantify. I would submit, though, that there’s a very serious problem when hundreds of young white men who are seemingly part of mainstream middle class society, presumably with personal and professional reputations, are comfortable enough to march around unmasked in public participating in a rally in which Nazi and Confederate symbols are displayed with chants of “Jews will not replace us.” I am in my 40s now and as long as I’ve been alive, there have always been extremist movements, extremist groups, confederate marches and so on - probably always will be. But I haven’t always seen college Republicans at these types of rallies - that’s different. Not that I’ve ever been comfortable with these parades of bigotry, but in the few events that I’ve seen on TV (and one or two I happened to observe in person rather by accident), the people rallying always struck me as just down-and-out types from rural America who were having a mid-life crisis of some type. But there’s something terribly wrong when presumably middle class or even upper middle class people aren’t afraid of being identified and associated in public with this sort of ideology. It suggests a degree of normalization has taken shape. And this is something that all stable democracies would do well to stamp out as quickly as possible. Because if it’s not, then today it’s college republicans who are comfortable joining this movement. Tomorrow it might be city councilmen and mayors. It might be police officers and sheriffs after that. Pretty soon you have a movement beyond just chanting and slogans, but one with real power. And that’s very, very dangerous.
I think you’re definitely spot on here, and this is really at the root of it all. You’re right: people just don’t feel good about themselves, and there really needs to be a more fundamental embrace of equality. American society has long tolerated economic and social inequality to degrees that would be unthinkable in the societies of many of our democratic allies. Some might call it “socialism” - I would label it capitalism with the aim of creating wider social benefit - but whatever we call it, we need to think of ways to reduce the imbalance in wealth. This subject is probably a thread in and of itself.
This is what it comes down to. These people cannot be allowed to become comfortable. Once they do, then they access the levers of power, and then they begin to establish what becomes “normal”. That is how extremist movements take shape. Extremist movements always have some degree of support and consent. That’s also why these monuments are such a big deal. The monuments weren’t put there just to memorialize good confederate men; they were there to remind people of what is considered “normal” in Southern society. That “normal” was White supremacy. These statues are daily reminders that while the North lost the cause of slavery and using black people as chattel, the South successfully won the right to position itself as the superior race and to continue dominating black people legally. Yes, times have changed, but it’s still very clear that many white people are uncomfortable whenever someone does something that threatens to remove their grip on power, even if it’s just removing a physical symbol of their historical dominance in society.
I’ve found that, generally, it is near impossible to get true harmony or healing in a conflict if one side feels that there is a double standard - that Side A is being permitted to get away with racism, sexism, etc. while Side B is not.
Now, before someone says, “Both sides are not the same” - I’m just saying that that is how it is perceived. Plenty of people on all points of the political spectrum are OK with a message that says “No racism, sexism, etc.” as long as it is consistently enforced. Their gripe is that “condemning racism, sexism”, in their minds, means “Racism by my side against them is considered wrong, but racism by their side against me is considered OK.”
Imagine a sports game in which the referees say, “No pass interference!” but then only enforce pass interference against one team only. There’s no way that leads to better sportsmanship or game.
I agree with XT. His post #4 pretty much says what I came in here to say.
And things were a LOT worse in the 50s, 60s. Perhaps the OP should explore that period of our history in a series of threads in order to understand it better.
Things might have been worse in many regards in the 1950s - so what? As unimaginably bad as things were in Europe from 1910-1920…they actually got WORSE from 1933 - 1945.
The past in no way speaks to how bad things can become in the future. There is constant friction between the forces for progress and those that oppose it. They’re constantly in motion and acting upon each other. Complacency is not an option.
As I said, yes, there have been neo-confederates and neo-Nazis all along, but what has changed recently is that they are attracting a wider audience that includes people you wouldn’t have seen participating in these events 15-20 years ago. It would have been too embarrassing for a college republican frat boy at state university to appear alongside some 55-year-old bearded militia man with an AR-15 and a confederate flag. That doesn’t mean that the frat boys weren’t themselves racist, but that they understood that openly manifesting those thoughts and acting on them were considered socially unacceptable.
I don’t see the point in trying to use more extreme examples as a way to put what happened in Charlottesville into context. Anyone ought to see that we’re moving in the wrong direction here, and that’s all that needs to be understood. We don’t want things to be even half as bad as they were in the 1950s - that’s the point.
When there actually is a collective – like “Nazis” – then, yeah.
If you define your sets in so fuzzy a fashion that they do not have boundaries, you aren’t really practicing set theory any longer.
Yes, the boundaries are slightly fuzzy. There may actually be a handful of “good Nazis,” but I don’t think those exceptions are so important as to justify not condemning Nazism.
IOW, who cares what a small fringe group believes or what they espouse? I don’t believe for a second that the US is going Nazi…or Communist…or going to make the non-existent queen of England our lizard overlord.