The Trump era mainstreamed a move I call "implausible deniability". This is where you kind-of say something that sounds like you don't endorse bad things, while clearly leaving open the interpretation that you totally do. Back when the alleged "nazi salute" happened, for example, Musk never actually said he *didn't* mean it as a nazi salute, he just said: “they need better dirty tricks. The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired". The game is: don't distance yourself from anything, just pretend there's nothing to distance yourself from in the first place. Like when RFK Jr complained that normal presidential candidates get secret service protection in "14 days" but he's been waiting "88 days" (14-88 being code for a Nazi slogan, of course) ― I noticed another of Trump's appointees playing the 14-88 game in several different tweets btw, and I wonder if anyone is measuring how popular the game is. So anyway, then you see right-wingers pretend there is nothing suspicious about counting the exact number of days instead of saying "two weeks" and "almost three months" like any normal person.
What's going on here? Implausible deniability. It exists because on the Right there are lots of genuinely non-racist conservatives who thought (or still think) the racist era was behind us and the left-wingers are just making something out of nothing, and lots of other conservatives who are more or less prejudiced, but know full well that open racism will lose swing voters.
So in the coalition of non-racists and racists, both try to pretend racism is gone, but as the latter group gets more powerful the mask slowly starts coming off, to the point where conservatives are now openly feuding over Nick Fuentes.
But I disagree with your evidence that the mask IS off ― you're still seeing what you want to see. Like that tweet where Musk says "Murderers… should be hanged". No eugenicist speak there. Just coincidence that he is promoting another tweet saying 1-2% of the population should be executed to weed out "crime genes". That's implausible deniability. We used to have plausible deniability, but now it's just not considered important to make your deniability plausible. So he's drawing attention to the fact that he is not disagreeing about mass executions, but he always does that sort of thing implicitly, never explicitly.
Don't be so quick to disparage masculinity. Authoritarianism comes in many genders, and masculinity comes in many flavors. You need to spend more time with the KKK -- Kerouac, Kesey, and Kafka.
Are you really intent on defending Nurse Ratched from McMurphy -- backed by a shrieking mob whose "courageous" battle-cry is, "Me, too"?
Liberals shouldn't need to choose between brutal bullies and self-righteous scolds. Where is Al Franken now that we need him?
What the effin' hell are you talking about? Posting a whining "Not All Men" screed when the article is about White Supremacists/Neo-Fascists attempting to weaponize Tolkien's fiction in order to spur on assaults and murders in the UK, AND seeking to then state that vocal female survivors of sexual violence are somehow "hurting good men" by their testimony...this only reveals your twisted poisonous heart, Wormtongue Mitchell in Oakland, CA. GTFOH, you disgusting filth. Nobody needs or wants you, and you're using the oxygen that better, nobler people could indeed breathe. Go Disappear.
Robert Paxton (historian of Vichy, France and professor emeritus at Princeton) defined the phenomenon thusly:
"A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation
with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of
unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist
miltants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites,
abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without
ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."
He added,
"Classical themes: fears of decadence and decline, assertion of national and cultural
identity, threat by unassimilable foreigners to national identity and good social order, need for greater authority to deal with these problems."
And he summarized:
"Hard measures by a frightened middle class-that, indeed, is one good general
definition of fascism."
That seems entirely correct in the context of your own analysis.
Hard disagree.
The Trump era mainstreamed a move I call "implausible deniability". This is where you kind-of say something that sounds like you don't endorse bad things, while clearly leaving open the interpretation that you totally do. Back when the alleged "nazi salute" happened, for example, Musk never actually said he *didn't* mean it as a nazi salute, he just said: “they need better dirty tricks. The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired". The game is: don't distance yourself from anything, just pretend there's nothing to distance yourself from in the first place. Like when RFK Jr complained that normal presidential candidates get secret service protection in "14 days" but he's been waiting "88 days" (14-88 being code for a Nazi slogan, of course) ― I noticed another of Trump's appointees playing the 14-88 game in several different tweets btw, and I wonder if anyone is measuring how popular the game is. So anyway, then you see right-wingers pretend there is nothing suspicious about counting the exact number of days instead of saying "two weeks" and "almost three months" like any normal person.
What's going on here? Implausible deniability. It exists because on the Right there are lots of genuinely non-racist conservatives who thought (or still think) the racist era was behind us and the left-wingers are just making something out of nothing, and lots of other conservatives who are more or less prejudiced, but know full well that open racism will lose swing voters.
So in the coalition of non-racists and racists, both try to pretend racism is gone, but as the latter group gets more powerful the mask slowly starts coming off, to the point where conservatives are now openly feuding over Nick Fuentes.
But I disagree with your evidence that the mask IS off ― you're still seeing what you want to see. Like that tweet where Musk says "Murderers… should be hanged". No eugenicist speak there. Just coincidence that he is promoting another tweet saying 1-2% of the population should be executed to weed out "crime genes". That's implausible deniability. We used to have plausible deniability, but now it's just not considered important to make your deniability plausible. So he's drawing attention to the fact that he is not disagreeing about mass executions, but he always does that sort of thing implicitly, never explicitly.
Don't be so quick to disparage masculinity. Authoritarianism comes in many genders, and masculinity comes in many flavors. You need to spend more time with the KKK -- Kerouac, Kesey, and Kafka.
Are you really intent on defending Nurse Ratched from McMurphy -- backed by a shrieking mob whose "courageous" battle-cry is, "Me, too"?
Liberals shouldn't need to choose between brutal bullies and self-righteous scolds. Where is Al Franken now that we need him?
What the effin' hell are you talking about? Posting a whining "Not All Men" screed when the article is about White Supremacists/Neo-Fascists attempting to weaponize Tolkien's fiction in order to spur on assaults and murders in the UK, AND seeking to then state that vocal female survivors of sexual violence are somehow "hurting good men" by their testimony...this only reveals your twisted poisonous heart, Wormtongue Mitchell in Oakland, CA. GTFOH, you disgusting filth. Nobody needs or wants you, and you're using the oxygen that better, nobler people could indeed breathe. Go Disappear.