Happily, we have a word for exactly that!
Exactly. It can be as simple as anything “new” or “strange” that they don’t understand.
This is a good thing. Back in the 50s, racism and sexism artificially boosted the wages of unskilled white men over everyone else. There are lots of examples of job categories where two similar jobs were done by white men and some other group (white women, Black men) and the white men were paid substantially more.
This is part of what encourages fascism. Because many of us still instinctively respect a physically powerful man and feel he ought to do well. But there’s not a lot of paths for that today. And brains, like brawn, is something that we didn’t all win in the genetic lottery.
This is my best solution. I don’t think it’s right for strong white men to automatically be winners. But i don’t think it’s right for them to be losers, either. If we could have fewer losers overall, some of those men, maybe many of those men, would be satisfied and not as attracted to fascism.
And wannabee dictators will invent imaginary enemies so weak-minded people will feel like they are being unfairly imposed upon and will turn to fascism.
What are the rest of us supposed to do when this is happening? Are we supposed to tell the weak-minded people their imaginary enemies are real because that’s what they want to hear?
We’re not arguing with these people because we’re their enemies. We’re arguing with them because we’re trying to help them. It’s the people who they think are their friends who are harming them.
I mean…I don’t have the cure for fascism or anything.
But part of the problem may have to do with this sort of thinking:
To play devil’s advocate, do you believed you work as hard getting your degree as someone who works as a roofer or carpenter or some other labor intensive trade?
I think that has led to a lot of resentment from working class blue collar types who maybe didn’t go to college, but work very hard at jobs where shit actually gets done. And these aren’t “dummy” jobs either. Many of them require significant skill and training. But these jobs are often looked down upon.
It’s one thing if you get a college degree so you could be an engineer or a lawyer or some other actual profession. But so many students seem to graduate with degrees in whatever, having no idea what they actually want to do for a living besides some nebulous idea of working for certain high profile corporations.
So if I were a blue collar guy, I might wonder why all this attention on making sure every group has the opportunity to get into an overpriced college to learn a bunch of bullshit to push paper at some megacorporation looking to meet a DEI requirement and then they whine when they are struggling with debt and can’t find a job. There’s plenty of work to do. Spend a fraction of that to learn to weld or be a plumber and do real work.
At least that’s my theory. In reality I have to get ready to meet with one of my sales director to talk about how we want to pitch our services (such as they are) to some bank so they hire us instead of Accenture or Mckinsey.
I appreciate your bowing in in the first place. Myself, I just couldn’t find the energy to put together all the necessary cites and quotes from David Graeber, Thomas Frank, Catherine Liu, etc.
And they’ve tried, over and over again for decades; often at the expense of their own supporters. It never does anything but make their supporters angry while their opponents totally ignore their efforts.
They don’t want to be helped; they want everyone but themselves to be subjugated or dead. It’s hatred and cruelty that drives fascism, not self interest. Stripping women of the vote, re-enslaving blacks, and killing everyone else on the planet is what would make them happy; their happiness is the unhappiness of everyone else.
That’s an astute observation. In our entirely warranted outrage over the atrocities fascists like Hitler and Mussolini committed, we often lose sight of the more mundane stupidity of their regimes. Fascists are no less prone to gross inefficiency and corruption than any other sort of dictatorship, and we would do well to remember that lest we take too seriously the more mundane lies, short of the Bug Lie (there’s at least one in every fascist’s rise to power), akin to “he’ll make the trains run on time.” Point of fact, no he won’t. If anything, there won’t be a (metaphorical) rail network left by the time [insert would be fascist dictator] gets done with it.
Without reading the thread, I’ll just note that it would probably have been better to just say that, given a land with lots of uneducated men with few prospects, how do you prevent them from venturing into extremism or other “ill pursuits”. It’s hard for people to stay on task when you put forward the F word.
In terms of what can be done:
- Split the money between urban and rural. There should be two currencies with two different purchasing powers, controlled by two separate central banks.
- Franchise US public universities abroad, and shrink quotas for foreign students.
- Tax estates higher and shrink the quantities that can be passed from generation to generation.
- e-Verify
ETA: This isn’t to endorse such initiatives. I’m just saying that they’re options on the table.
I thought of this thread while reading a WaPo (yeah, I know…) article on road rage this morning. I think it’s safe to say fascists appeal to, direct, and heighten people’s anger. In the article, an anger management class explored their anger and defined it as “a cover emotion,” triggered by "fear, sadness, emptiness.” The link of these emotions to economic insecurity, especially in a society in which “you are what you earn, you are what you can buy,” where even basic health is directly tied to income, seems pretty obvious to me. And it is pretty obvious that for many groups, economic security and equality have been slipping for years.
That seems like a big piece of the explanation for the growth of fascism to me.
I’m confused. I understand the third one.
I guess I understand the second one. But do universities even have quota for foreign students? I thought it was the reverse; universities had an upper limit on how many foreign students it would enroll each year (which is effectively a quota for American students).
But I don’t see what the point of the first one is. What would be the supposed benefit of having two different currencies?
And I don’t know what “e-Verify” means. Is it a voting thing?
White men may be losing economic security but the issue of them losing equality is one of the central questions of this thread. Many people have pointed out that what some white men are angry about is gaining equality.
I meant student visa counts but I expect that the schools do probably have their own limits as well (official or unofficial as may be).
It’s a proposed law that would require employers to verify that potential employees are legally in the country by checking a government database. It would give the government the evidentiary basis for locking up employers, which is expected to be the thing that would cause the number of illegal aliens working in the country to fall off a cliff.
Trump won’t mention the thing.
The cost of living in the city and in the countryside is wildly different (largely because of the price of land). Workers in the city need to be able to live there, which means that there’s a lower bound on salaries that is very high. In the countryside, that number can and should be much lower.
Minimum wage laws apply across the whole country and the average value of the dollar is the product of these market forces - one pushing up and the other pushing down.
The rate of inflation is set to match the general growth of the total US marketplace - which includes high growth industry like software and low growth industries like rice farming.
If you split the money supply, the countryside effectively becomes a separate country with a currency that isn’t being dragged upwards by city dwellers. It also becomes practical to keep two separate minimum wages. We would expect, over time, for the two currencies to drift from one another with the value of the urban dollar going up to match Switzerland and the value of the rural dollar to drop down to match Mexico or Hungary.
We would expect this to drive investment towards developing out production capacity in these regions, since production closer to the sales point is cheaper and the workers would be speaking the same language as the people at HQ.
Any location picked for development would risk becoming wealthy enough to migrate back to the urban dollar, so this would incentivize businesses to spread it out and develop more smaller bases of production.
It would become difficult for people in the rural area to visit the city, unless they’d found employment there. It would become very cheap for urbanites to tour the country, retire out there, choose a simpler life after racking up urban money for a few years, etc. We’d expect that the cities would become slightly less popular and that there would be a larger quantity of migration from the cities back out into the countryside, reversing the trend of brain drain that we have today and the natural separation of experience seekers and traditionalists that helps to generate the culture war.
In theory.
"When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”
How on Earth would any of this be a good thing?
Oh, good grief. You want me to have to have different money to shop in the nearest village or in the nearest city? Hordes of people are going to be shopping in both rural and urban areas. That’s an utterly absurd idea.
Which is exactly what we should be avoiding.
In any case, we’re not a separate country. We’re inextricably entwined.
Why on earth do you think this is a good idea?
It’s a current law, actually:
I believe that you’ll find that you can easily use US dollars in Mexico.
So your proposed “solution” is to wall off the Districts from the Capital both physically and economically, confiscate wealth, and enforce citizens to provide e-papers?
What part of this doesn’t sound “fascist”?
That basically summarizes the roots of fascism, doesn’t it? “There is this group of people I don’t want to live with because they think or act differently from me so I want the government to put a bunch of strict policies in place so I never have to deal with them.”
I think what men (white and otherwise) are frustrated about is lack of purpose. Many of the traditional roles for men have been changing for the past several decades. But the demands on men don’t seemed to have changed that much.