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Yes, another top level comment about The Origins of Woke from me, in the same thread on the same week. But this is about something else. I had an epiphany while reading the book.
I've wondered for many years why Marxism is more socially acceptable than racism when it's responsible for even more deaths than the Holocaust. It's because companies are (de facto) legally required to fire racists, but they're not required to fire Marxists. In fact, firing a Marxist for merely being Marxist would be illegal in California.
California has a state law against firing people for their political beliefs, but it didn't protect James Damore, who was fired in compliance with the law against creating a hostile work environment for protected groups.
It all adds up.
Communism is intuitively not terrible to the average person, because almost certainly they will have seen it, or something like it work at very small scales. Probably within their own family. You have resources coming in and in general within your direct family, those resources are allocated to who needs them not to who brought them in. I buy my kids clothes and food and toys much in excess of the economic value they produce. I give money to my brother when he is down on his luck even if I don't think he will ever be able to do the same for me. Money I've saved could just as easily go to sending my kid to school than me using it to buy myself a sweet new ride on mower. It's not exactly the same, but it has the same feel.
We could link that to BurdensomeCounts (I think?) prior post on how our intuitive thinking breaks down when dealing with above Dunbar numbers of people. If we see something that works with our direct local community, it's kind of grandfathered in to our thinking when we start looking at large numbers of people.
Also in the US at least, due to the historical issues with slavery, the tension in thinking between "that all men are created equal & independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness; ..." and enslaving a group of people and their descendents has created a national guilt of sorts around racism.
We see this tension right at the beginning in the Founding Fathers who wrote things like: “the only unavoidable subject of regret.” and “we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.” So this isn't some modern invention. The tension was seen right from the get go.
The reason racism is seen as so bad in the US is because of this collision between the idea of the US as the "shining city on the hill" as part of its founding mythos and how then failing to live up to their own ideals is seen as a "hideous blot". This kind of meta belief is in my experience as an outsider shared by many Americans whether on the right or left. The Civil Rights Acts et al did not cause it, they are the symptom of it.
My Trump voting conservative neighbors, believe that a man should be judged by the content of his character, not the color of his skin and that is part of the foundation of their belief set. That America is a place where dreams can come true for anyone, where anyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and have a chance of success, where Man is created in God's image. This is inherently at odds with treating a sub group of people as cattle. It can be rationalized away, because we are amazing at rationalizing away contradictions, but as HyncklaCG will always remind us, there is a reason Republicans were the original abolitionists. "The Radicals were heavily influenced by religious ideals, and many were Protestant reformers who saw slavery as evil.."
Comparing racism to anything in the US is going to be tricky because racism is a cloud that hangs over the national sense of identity, the tarnish on their otherwise exceptional outcomes. Not compared to the rest of the world but compared to their own standards. It's like a straight A student who agonises over a single D compared to a student who barely passes any of their classes. The very thing that pushes them to be exceptional also means their (perceived) past failures hurt that much more.
The question then would be, why would you expect Americans (in general) to think Marxism is worse than racism, when their only real direct experiences with anything like communism were probably somewhat positive, and that the juxtaposition of the inspiring rhetoric of their nation's founding has one tarnish which looms to an outsize degree in the collective consciousness. It is not comparing like with like.
It would be like going to Ireland and trying to find a legislative cause as to why they might think Marxism is more socially acceptable than Religious persecution or British Imperialism. Each nations cultural and social beliefs can only be understood in relation to their own historical context. The success in the export of American cultural values does also muddy this of course. Is racism more or less socially acceptable than British Imperialism in Londonderry/Derry would be an interesting comparison.
God, I love this place. I should start paying people in crypto for replies that make me think in new ways or something.
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No sir it is not BurdensomeCount's post. In fact it is the great risen @BurdensomeCountTheWhite's post.
Wait somehow tagging the OG profile makes it into the new one. Weird.
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Communist deaths are framed as attributable to mismanagement or mistakes, whereas deaths attributable to racism or imperialism are intentional
Right, that may be another factor as I mentioned below. We do on a human scale treat murder, manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide differently, even though the end state is still a death. Whether that makes sense scaled up to millions of deaths is a different question.
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The traditional family unit is far more similar to fascism than communism, a fact which was understood and asserted by the critical theorists who conducted their research into The Authoritarian Personality, a foundational text to modern Wokeness.
What is the proof of family units being like fascism instead of communism?
Why does it matter? Actually existing fascism and communism are fundamentally the same in nature and only differ in rhetoric. The family is, of course, utterly unlike either in rhetoric so the comparison has to be based on substance.
This doesn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny if for no other reason than actually existing fascism supported religion while communism dismantled it
Italian/Iberian fascism, sure. But Nazi fascism? They were merely being pragmatic about Christianity. Goering, Goebbels, and Himmler hated Christianity. Hitler was more wavering, but Christianity 100% would've been made verboten in a hypothetical Thousand Year Reich eventually.
That's your idle speculation, did the NSDAP ban religious worship or not?
(The answer is no, they banned Judaism, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Masonry, but unlike communism, did not dismantle religion)
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I don't think they are actually the same in nature.
But the reason I ask about the family structure being more like fascism is because I've only ever seen that claim in the context of trying to cast conservatives as fascists. It was a talking point during the 2016 US election. So to see it alluded to here surprised me, that's all.
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Traditional familial structure is associated with patriarchy and father-figure role, hierarchy within families and between kin groups, concentric circles of concern correlated with kin-group and genetic similarity. Not class struggle, but genetic cooperation expressed as family love and solidarity.
Communism, a political arrangement where all property is publicly owned and all are paid by their needs, is not even close to being more similar to the familial structure than fascism.
The Critical Theorists in particular related familial discipline to propensity for latent fascist tendencies, i.e.:
Kevin MacDonald has an excellent chapter on TAP. MacDonald shows that the Critical Theorists would, for example, survey respondents to measure the level of discipline exerted by the parents of the respondents. Then, even though the children who reported a more disciplined household also reported closer relations to their parents, the researchers concluded that the lower-discipline households were healthier because the respondents of those households felt more "honest" to be open about the rifts in their family.
So the "post-modern neomarxists" certainly argued the traditional family structure was more similar to fascism than communism.
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Comparing fascism and communism is more nuanced than most people would think I would agree. but do you think the average American is likely to think of their household as fascist, regardless of what critical theorists think?
We're talking about people's perceptions here, remember.
Nope, but the reason for that is not because their family arrangement is more similar to communism than fascism, their perception is due to the cultural signals they've been inundated with their entire lives and have thoroughly internalized. Those cultural signals were indeed influenced by the perception of the Critical Theorists, so what the Critical Theorists thought actually does matter because of its influence on culture and academia.
Or is it because of the national mythos and about defeating Nazism in WW2? Being integrated into the founding mythos of being the beacon of liberty and justice, combined with having direct examples in the US of racial discrimination and making the connection to what Nazis were doing in Europe?
Did Critical Theorists invent that connection or is it a logical one? I don't think Critical Theorists have had a great deal of influence on church going, conservative rural Americans. I think their own ideology and experience is enough to explain why they would reject fascism but have some non-negative views of communal living. Leftish Social welfare policies are popular in poor areas because they benefit from them, even if they are otherwise conservative. You don't need to explain that with critical theory, just as you don't have to explain why struggling people in high immigration areas might be against further immigration. Some things just follow.
Well yes, I certainly believe that public perception of Fascism versus Marxism is downstream from the national mythos, that was my point. It's not related to Marxism feeling closer to an organic family structure, because it isn't. The "national mythos" in turn comes from the institutions most influential in creating myth, culture, and academia, it doesn't come from a grounded reality.
What the Critical Theorists did was develop a framework that pathologized the traditional family structure, traditional values, and white ethnocentrism. It's the same thing the Marxists do, they take organic hierarchies like class and assume them to be artificial figments of some injustice. They did not invent the connection so much as they falsely pathologized it and developed a therapeutic framework that greatly influenced cultural movements into what we now call Wokeness.
Yeah, it's really incredible how Western democracies waged an unnecessary world war that destroyed Old Europe, killed tens of millions, and handed half the continent to Stalin and turned that outcome into being the foundational story of the US as a beacon of liberty and justice. They saved Hitler from conquering the world, a truly audacious claim made by the alliance of the USSR, United States, and British Empire.
The "lessons" learned from that conflict are just more mythos: Hitler gassed Jews in gas chambers disguised as shower rooms, so that means White people cannot have their own spaces and White people cannot advocate for their ethnic interests.
These ideologically-motivated culture-creators created the foundational mythos, the foundational mythos did not create them.
Are you sure? I don't think anyone creates it, it's a gestalt entity that evolves over time, and is largely immune to individuals trying to push it. And I say that, as someone whose job used to be to try. My experience is that you can't create or control what large groups of people think, at best you can tap into things they already believe and maybe, maybe nudge it slightly. And that is with modern tools and communications technology. Being the all-conquering heroes who saved Old Europe is a narrative that makes us feel strong and powerful and moral, so of course that will preferred to one where we handed power to an even worse tyrant. You don't need anyone pushing that, it pushes itself. Hitler gassed Jews? Well that fits, that just means we were even more right! The people who spread those ideas are not (in a viral meme sense) the infectors, they are the infectees.
So I guess that is a long winded way of saying I think you are exactly incorrect, no-one created it, and no-one can. We created it collectively, out of our own inherent desire to be the good person, reinforced by our neighbors and their neighbors. It's human nature.
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