Political passivity
A preview of some ideas from The Authoritarian Personality and the F Scale Reading Group and the present situation. Next meeting November 19, 8 am PST. Zoom invite out next week. Paid subscribers only
Even though it seems that there is a pressure on campuses across America to take a position in the Middle East conflict, it’s actually amazing how few people do take public positions or participate in public protests.
I want to go back to the war in Ukraine to think through how weak the anti-war movement was there. I was called a Putin lover because I dared to suggest that there could not be a definitive military victory won by Ukraine against a nuclear giant neighbor and that some negotiated peace was going to be necessary and even desirable as Ukrainian resistance had proven itself very strong, but that Ukrainian gains in land would have to make it a vassal state to NATO if it was going to protect itself from its neighbor.
People were like — give Putin an inch, etc. and what are you a Russian agent?
It was mostly liberals who had this reaction to me. Maybe I don’t talk enough to conservatives, but I was struck by a certain rigidity in the liberal thinking. I have a suspicion of US news sources that liberal friends simply do not share. They are smart people. They read Foreign Policy magazine and the Financial Times. They think of themselves as informed, but I’m realizing this kind of ‘information’ allows them to outsource executive functions to the US government, the Democratic Party and well funded centrist media organs.
These liberals, all PMC types all are having a hard time with the Israeli attacks on Gaza. They find protests from both sides unseemly. In the case of the war in Ukraine, they could feel their support in line with their consciences and their party affiliations. Ukrainians are the underdogs and don’t we all love an underdog? Is it OK to be against the murder of Palestinian women and children? It seems risky because a good liberal could be called an anti-Semite, and yet to oppose the fact that Palestinian civilians are being killed in the most obvious (bombs) and covert (starvation, disease, dehydration) of ways seems a matter of liberal humanitarianism.
If you don’t like the other activist groups, we should all be standing with Jewish Voices for Peace , Katie Halper and Norman Finkelstein, but the libs aren’t ready for even that kind of political commitment.
In terms of the Authoritarian Personality, I think the category of liberal rigidity/passivity should be explored more deeply. Adorno and his team would have called low scoring individuals (low proclivity for Fascism) on the F scale, but who nevertheless get high scores on rigidity and a punitive attitude towards those who disagree with them. I was also thinking we should come up with passive authoritarianism as a new category to describe Democrats right now. This seems to be the position of the Professional Managerial Classes. They remain confident in the US government and the thinktanks and media from where they get their information and they don’t want to take any difficult or controversial positions.
Most importantly, they don’t want anything to change. The status quo is good for them. Protests demanding any kind of change are unseemly. Political passivity is their rigid position, even though they espouse a humanitarian liberalism that justifies their support for the war in Ukraine and their silence about the attacks on Gaza.
They let the news media take stands for them.
Last night during the debate, Nikki Haley and DeSantis kept saying “finish them” with regard to Hamas. They were competing for most bloodthirsty ghoul on the stage. We haven’t learned, we will never learn what violence is, and how violent we are.
Democrats think voting against Republicans will be enough of a political statement. James Carville texted me this morning asking me for money because the Republicans are so bad and dangerous for democracy. They’re dangerous all right, but so is he.
November 9th, day of this post, the date itself gave me a pause the first time I stopped by to see what blossoms here, “what am I forgetting?” Ahhh.. My dad’s birthday 🤔 He volunteered for combat in Korea from the bridge of what is now a museum docked in San Diego. The combination of a good looking Dutch kid-from-the-Bronx ‘s youthful thirst for adventure mixed with some notorious north Korean clusterfuk, so sick it’s reflected in his name, getting out of bed on the wrong side, resulted in part the creation of an opportunity for a Trump supporter like myself to be here now to ask a question of some topic relevance: 13 likes and zero comments before this one: where is the down-wind conversation?
Every paragraph of this post (Political Passivity) is rife with qualified points to potentially launch deep and probing, interesting, useful conversations. Is every reader or passer-by, themselves likely brimming with insight and curiosity, too busy to put a match to such a neatly stacked pile of fodder and dry kindling?
To a once young Marine who stepped-over the line between here and there on a recent leap year day,
Happy Veteran’s Day Dad.. 🇺🇸
“Republicans” as defined by what we saw on stage of that last debate?
I’d say “affirmative” too..
Personally, I don’t know any Republicans who identify with or support any of those ridiculously obvious war mongers or that entertaining say-with-confidence-what-they-want-to-hear Obama clone WEF actor. It’s difficult to not recognize all of them as mere managed-opposition, likely funded by the radical left (owned and operated by the WTF), placed there on-display for the sole purpose of painting every Republican, especially the very large and patriotically sincere Make-America-Great-Again variety, in the receptive eyes of indies and other fence sitters, with a broad brush loaded from a bucket of bullshit.
RINOs, in heels of any measure, aren’t real Republicans; their poll-numbers, or lack thereof, far beyond my own observation, accurately reflect that more broadly. None of them have a chance outside of hell to secure the nomination, why else would they bother? -$$$-
There’s always lots of there there, when intelligent people suspect, they, are them.
Evil operates as a point-design.