(NOTE: Thank you to everyone who has contributed to our fundraiser, which is continuing throughout the week. My paypal link is here. I am also on Venmo as @George-Clark-61.)
Rebecca Solnit, “The She Made Him Do It Theory of Everything”
In mainstream discourse, it’s become standard to blame the excesses of the right on liberals, the left, feminists, Black Lives Matter, affirmative action, environmental protection, and BIPOC and LGBTQ people. It’s a way that the right is granted masculine prerogatives and the left feminine responsibilities for the right’s behavior. It’s also routine to blame the Democratic Party for what the Republican Party does. The two parties are unconsciously regarded as akin to a husband and wife in a traditional marriage in which it’s the job of the wife to placate and soothe the husband and help him realize his goals or be held responsible for his outbursts and outrages.
And in the same way the diverse population left of center is supposed to make nice to the right or be responsible for when the right goes wrong. These stories amount to “the left was so annoying about pronouns or liberals made people feel so guilty about plastic straws they had no choice but to get on board with the second coming of the Third Reich and the destruction of the planet.” Behind these stories is the assumption that some people matter more than other people, and that we who matter less have to pander to those who matter more – conservatives when they are imagined as straight, as white, as male, as rural, as salt of the earth, as the real Americans, unlike us ethnic/ immigrant/ urban/ non-male/ non-straight people.
John Oliver, “Last Week Tonight: Trans Athletes”
Monica Hesse, “What exactly does Trump think is in the Smithsonian?”
If you are looking for something to be shocked by, you can probably find it. But no more so than anywhere else in the museum. No more so than anywhere else in our history. America is a shocking place — shockingly beautiful and shockingly violent. And the people in it will make you weep with every emotion that can prompt tears. Jubilant, sad, ridiculous, sublime. It’s America, after all.
You cannot love America without hating it a little bit. But you cannot hate it without loving it so, so much. Wanting it to be better. Wanting it to be what we all deserve.
As I stood with the tour groups and the lunch crowd and the tired families pushing strollers and doling out juice boxes — as I stood in this completely free institution that exists for no other reason than to help America learn something about itself, that was the most shocking realization of all: The Smithsonian is not filled with hatred toward our busted, struggling, awesome country; it is filled with the deepest love, and that is what I learned at the museum.
Masha Gesen in Surviving Autocracy (quoted here)
However unskilled a person may be at lying, they usually hope that the lie will be convincing. Executives want shareholders to think that they have devised a foolproof path to profits. Defendants want juries to believe that there is a chance that someone else committed the crime.
People in relationships want their partners to think that they have never even considered cheating. Guests want the host to think that they like their fish overcooked. These lies can be annoying or amusing, but they are surmountable. They collapse in the face of facts.
The Trumpian lie is different. It is the power lie or the bully lie. It is the lie of the bigger kid who took your hat and is wearing it while denying that he took it. There is no defense against this lie because the point of the lie is to assert power, to show I can say what I want, when I want to.
Jeff Sharlet, “Don’t Take the Bait — Kristi Noem and Fascism’s Sadistic Eroticization of Power”
Trumpist rhetoric, from Trump on down, is rife with the idea that “their” women are “sexier” than Left or liberal women. This rhetoric is as common among right-wing women as among men. And even as it celebrates body modification—there’s no shame in plastic surgery on the fascist Right—it frames itself via a topsy-turvy idea of authenticity. Trump women, goes the thinking, are “real” precisely because they try hard to perform “woman”; liberal and Left women are not “real women” because, in this logic, feminism makes them rebel against their “natural” roles. The range of such roles has expanded from those of the 1950s even for fascism women, which is why Noem can comfortably show her power—just so long as she contains it within a still-just-as-narrow spectrum of femininity: “maternal” or “sexy.”
George Orwell, “Second Thoughts on James Burnham”
The real question is not whether the people who wipe their boots on you during the next fifty years are to be called managers, bureaucrats, or politicians; the question is whether capitalism, now obviously doomed, is to give way to oligarchy or to true democracy. …
Power worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. If the Japanese have conquered south Asia, then they will keep south Asia for ever, if the Germans have captured Tobruk, they will infallibly capture Cairo; if the Russians are in Berlin, it will not be long before they are in London: and so on. This habit of mind leads also to the belief that things will happen more quickly, completely, and catastrophically than they ever do in practice. The rise and fall of empires, the disappearance of cultures and religions, are expected to happen with earthquake suddenness, and processes which have barely started are talked about as though they were already at an end. Burnham’s writings are full of apocalyptic visions. Nations, governments, classes and social systems are constantly described as expanding, contracting, decaying, dissolving, toppling, crashing, crumbling, crystallizing, and, in general, behaving in an unstable and melodramatic way. The slowness of historical change, the fact that any epoch always contains a great deal of the last epoch, is never sufficiently allowed for. Such a manner of thinking is bound to lead to mistaken prophecies, because, even when it gauges the direction of events rightly, it will miscalculate their tempo.
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