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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.
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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