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It's actually insane to me that much of the the left in America thinks white supremacy not only is a threat to America but literally the biggest threat. I have been visiting some family in California this week and I have really gotten to see the white lib in their natural environment. Before this trip I had thought that the complaining about white liberals by conservatives was just a round about way to criticize other groups that aren't acceptable to attack and they were overemphasizing how bad they are. I have actually changed my mind on this and I think they have become quite deranged. Literally everything is seen through the lens of race and white/POC. These were people who had pretty moderate political views from what I remembered but they are no longer moderate. I was so annoyed by their beliefs but I didn't want to argue with them so I just kept silent.
However, I kept thinking to myself who are these white supremacists that they think run the country? If this country was run by white supremacists, they would be doing a terrible job. I think we can imagine what a white nationalist government would do.
First of all, their immigration policy would obviously promote having a white majority. The US obviously fails this. Its immigration policy has transformed a country that was once 90% white into a country where whites will be less than 50% of the population in 20 years and this has happened in people's life times. This isn't some slow demographic change. It was deliberate in some cases and merely allowed in other cases. A white supremacist country would simply not allow this to happen. We've seen ethno states from Nazi Germany to Israel. In the case of Israel, they prioritize keeping Jews the majority and try to get more Jews to move there. In the case of the Nazis, the took it to the extreme and exterminated non-Germans. The US does the opposite of either of these, allowing non-whites to become a majority of the young people and of births in about 50 years.
The second things they would do is prioritize whites over non-whites. Does the US do that? DEI and those kinds of organizations and philosophies are designed to hire more non-white people and less whites. On my job review I filled out, I was judged on 20% of my review on DEI type stuff, one of which was hiring more "diverse" candidates. It is illegal to specifically hire whites only and even if it wasn't the country would hate you if you actually did it. All kinds of programs have been set up to get more non-white people into elite institutions through affirmative action and other policies. The isn't a single government program that was created to specifically help whites, but the same can't be said about all other groups. Biden literally said he would only consider a black woman for VP and on the Supreme Court. Their competition in the Republicans would never dream of explicitly saying they'd only pick a white man.
In a white supremacist country ran by white supremacists, white supremacists would also be liked by the population and government. Except again this doesn't happen. If you are a white supremacist openly, you will be hated and fired from your job. If you try to be a public intellectual and organize a pro-white organization, you will be kicked off of social media and be removed from the banking system. People will say it is okay to physically harm you. If you get famous enough, you will be the most hated person in America like RIchard Spencer. You will be sued and attacked by left wing lawfare, again like Richard Spencer. If you want to be like and be successful, being a white supremacist is literally the worst thing you could be other than a pedophile.
This has real world consequences where it makes people think in insane ways. Look at this insane reddit thread I found on rdrama. These people literally think being concerned about millions of people crossing the border a year is racist and white supremacy. I know many people like this, including in my own family. This delusion is then propped up by academics and intellectuals. Probably 75% of every "smart" person out there who is educated in elite institutions believes this to some degree.
I don't really have anything else to say other than I'm just baffled that so many supposedly smart and rational people don't think through their arguments and beliefs. Cartesian doubt is apparently out of style. I don't see any evidence whatsoever that white supremacy or racism is anywhere close to the biggest issue the US faces.
Related h/t @ymeskhout
This guy is talking about "leftism" as a shibboleth for what I would call radical progressive. People who call themselves "leftists" and hate "libs". Literally abolish the police, end capitalism, Portland / Seattle Black Bloc.
In the above essay, the author is a former leftist examining the pathology that leads to minimizing Hamas atrocities. The latent desire in American leftism to Fuck Shit Up needs a dastardly target to excuse its behavior.
I don't think there is much difference between leftists and libs. The online leftists who hate libs more or less agree with them on almost everything. They pretend to take edgy positions because they aren't actually trying to get elected or affect change, but if they actually ran for office they would be pretty much the same. Look at people on /r/stupidpol who call communists who support trans stuff and identity politics liberals. It's just leftists shit flinging like the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front scene in Life of Brian.
I feel like the core of 'liberalism' is holding principled positions, specifically with regard to crushing people who disagree with you, the Liberal Wisdom is, there are in fact bad tactics.
The progressive liberal conflict, is that progressives think appealing to principles is just a tool of the oppressor, no bad tactics, only bad targets.
The leftist liberal conflict, is socialism/communism vs redistributive capitalism.
This is how I understand these terms in the context of American, and to a lesser extent, Western politics in general.
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I’m a liberal and a centrist, and I’ve heard the exact same argument from leftists, but reversed, in that I’m basically a fascist because I support capitalism, am against identity politics, quotas, unrestricted immigration, and am geopolitically pro-Western.
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I'm saying the opposite and that most "communists" in the USA (and socialists too like the DSA) are essentially just liberals
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There are obviously major ideological differences between DEI capitalists who vote Biden and actual Leninists or Black Bloc anarchists who want to guillotine rich people (including many of the previously mentioned group) ASAP. That’s like saying both sides in the Cold War had the same ideology. Both may have been descended from the same kind of Hegelian narrative, and ultimately from enlightenment ideas about progress, but they weren’t the same.
Stupidpol is just white male leftists who prioritize their interests in the leftist coalition over those of the queer leftists, radfems, third worldists, ethnic minorities and other groups on the far left.
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It looks like inconsequential infighting to you because you're distant from it.
Your own disagreements with other people to the right of Mao look like inconsequential infighting to them.
Indeed it's a well documented fact that fascists, liberals and communists all think the other two are basically identical.
The truth is that politics is a great deal more complicated than a discrete amount of ideological groups vying for power.
Indeed, let this be our weekly reminder that Identity Politics makes people stupid.
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Differences though there may be, I think there's something to be said of the fact that, for whatever reason, liberals seem to hold that the person saying "liberals get the bullet too"/"Scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds" is their dear friend, and they seem quick to circle the wagons to defend radical leftists who hate their guts.
Liberals seem to be under the impression that the radical leftist is a strawman, that these people are just the same as them, save for maybe being a bit more energized, and that they are having their words distorted. This phenomenon is probably why conservatives say they're the same people. Liberals are all too eager to see anyone anti-right as an ideological ally. See: sanewashing, as with "defund the police." "These fellows seem to agree with me, being upstanding anti-rightists. Surely their words and movement are being unfairly mischaracterized." clueless.png
From what I see, liberals don't think communists are fascists, they either think they're fellow liberals, or flat out don't believe they exist, that they're just an exaggeration used to malign regular old liberals. (Which, to be fair, does happen, and might be their primary exposure to these radical ideas.)
I'm reminded of the Muslim suicide bomber's parents who said that they didn't know their son had become so religious as though that were the inevitable consequence. There is a sense in which leftists are just liberals that take the liberal's ideology seriously, and so liberals have no real textual defence against leftists. When a leftist takes them to task on an issue, they might have pragmatic objections but they can't argue the principle.
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I’d say most liberals would argue that there’s no imminent risk of capitalism being abolished or overthrown in the modern west and that the actual far left is a vanishingly small and powerless group of irrelevant people who occasionally smash Starbucks or Chase Bank windows during G20 protests or whatever. It’s not like the denizens of CHAZ were going to take over Amazon or assassinate Bill Gates.
When liberals are actually threatened by the far left it tends to be more of a mixed result.
That's not relevant. You can take a cultural issue, and the same dynamics will appear - "no one is performing gender surgeries on minors", "CRT is just a continuation of the Civil Rights movement", "feminism is just about equality between men and women". I suppose they try to deploy they same sort of dismissive "there's no imminent risk of X being abolished" argument here too, but it's a bit of a harder sell, when all the top institutions are pushing the radical messages that are supposedly strawmen.
Well no, because beyond deciding who gets into Harvard the far left does have a central, overriding goal, larger than all else, which is a revolutionary abolition of the “capitalist mode of production” ie private property. And again they don’t seem close to this in practice. You can’t have Marxism without Marxian eschatology. CRT while extreme wealth inequality and billionaires exist isn’t the ultimate goal for them, or even a good stopgap measure.
I don't think so. If it was an overriding goal, we'd already have an economic-left + cultural-right coalition. As it stands even the "class reductionist" stupidpol leftists have to signal their disgust with "rightoids".
Their economic goals are at best secondary, and in the worst case opposite of what they publically claim.
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From years of reading fact checking sites for my job, this seems true. Snopes liberals fend off right wing accusations implicating and sullying Antifa with incredible regularity. Meanwhile something like smiling Covington kid, Damore and other stores that take off on the right isn't really their beat.
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