In A World Gone Crazy

 Not That I think the madness is new. For me, it has been a fellow traveler for decades upon decades. What differs between then and now is I no longer feel the madness; it all seems to be coming from you.

Why a professor of fascism left the US: ‘The lesson of 1933 is – you get out’ (The Guardian)

Starkly, Shore invoked the ultimate warning from history. “The lesson of 1933 is: you get out sooner rather than later.” She seemed to be saying that what had happened then, in Germany, could happen now, in Donald Trump’s America – and that anyone tempted to accuse her of hyperbole or alarmism was making a mistake. “My colleagues and friends, they were walking around and saying, ‘We have checks and balances. So let’s inhale, checks and balances, exhale, checks and balances.’ I thought, my God, we’re like people on the Titanic saying, ‘Our ship can’t sink. We’ve got the best ship. We’ve got the strongest ship. We’ve got the biggest ship.’ And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.”

Since Shore, Snyder and Stanley announced their plans, the empirical evidence has rather moved in their favour. Whether it was the sight of tanks transported into Washington DC ahead of the military parade that marked Trump’s birthday last Saturday or the deployment of the national guard to crush protests in Los Angeles, alongside marines readied for the same task, recent days have brought the kind of developments that could serve as a dramatist’s shorthand for the slide towards fascism.

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“The unabashed narcissism, this Nero-like level of narcissism and this lack of apology … in Russian, it’s obnazhenie; ‘laying bare’.” It’s an approach to politics “in which all of the ugliness is right on the surface,” not concealed in any way. “And that’s its own kind of strategy. You just lay everything out there.”

She fears that the sheer shamelessness of Trump has “really disempowered the opposition, because our impulse is to keep looking for the thing that’s hidden and expose it, and we think that’s going to be what makes the system unravel.” But the problem is not what’s hidden, it’s “what we’ve normalised – because the whole strategy is to throw it all in your face.”

‘Where are the foreigners?’: does a facile explanation lie behind Ballymena’s outbreak of hate? (The Guardian) is a reminder America's problems fall within a broader trend.

Bringing federal government cuts back home: Entire Staff Gone from Muncie Senior Center (Woof Boom Radio News)

We are attempting to reach Julie Meares, director of the Muncie Senior Center,  but first saw this post from Muncie City Council member Ro Selvey:

“Due to delayed funding, the Center is temporarily without paid staff—leading to the closure of Edie’s Boutique and Thrift. But let’s be clear: the Senior Center is NOT closing. Programs and activities are still happening, and now is the time for the community to step up!

I have been trying to understand MAGA for some time now. Reactionary Futurism 2025 (Los Angeles Review of Books) would place MAGA into the wider alt-right context:

WE OFTEN CONSIDER the Far Right to be backward-looking. White nationalists appear as nostalgic and retrograde: they desire to drag us into the past, pulling us towards an imagined era of unquestioned hierarchy that was supposedly characterized by stability and order. Obviously, this is one of the major narratives of the Far Right—think, for example, of Donald Trump’s campaign slogan “Make America Great Again.” We see this orientation within the alt-right and white nationalism more broadly as well. Some white nationalists want to return to their distorted versions of Greek antiquity, pagan Europe, medieval Christendom, or the United States at some point prior to the 1960s. But the notion that the Right has ceded the future to progressives has always been a dubious proposition. Interwar fascism saw itself as a forward-looking, modernizing force, and in practice, the contemporary Far Right’s political program requires changes as unprecedented and revolutionary as anything proposed by the Left.

I forgot that Mussolini and Hitler were actually revolutionaries - we make so much of them today as having come to power by elections. They were opposed as much to liberal democracy as the Communists. Which eludes some people I know who are Trumpers - one friend told me the "No Kings Day" demonstrators were Communists wanting to overthrow the government. 

I see the usual Trumper as working class, minimally educated with high school diploma or a GED certificate, and white; what I think of as Marx's proletariat. Which is what causes my basic lack of understanding about MAGA: Trump, Musk, and et al have no use for this class of people, other than to be ruled, even if that rule imperils the lives of their supporters.

We can see in the new Silicon Valley Right the idea that the future is the province of a select few. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has adopted the mantle of rational planner, looking out into a future that we lesser mortals are unable to predict in order to see a universe populated by untold trillions of smart, productive citizens. Musk is a superficial reader of science fiction, but he nevertheless borrows from SF texts such as Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy (1951–53) and Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966) to flesh out this vision. Asimov writes of a brilliant scientific mind guiding the course of future history away from prolonged catastrophe through his projections, while Heinlein follows a band of smart individuals assisted by a supercomputer whose probabilistic calculations allow them to stage-manage a libertarian revolution. The lesson Musk seems to take from these works is that history is made by the smart few rather than the blundering masses. He marries this elitist vision to a eugenic ideology that stresses the need to maximize the reproduction rates of intelligent individuals to stave off what he sees as the coming “idiocracy.” Space exploration is therefore important to him not only because it provides insurance for existential risks but also because it allows him to imagine the exponential growth of genetically gifted populations unbounded by earthly constraints. But, of course, this vision of the future is only possible if people like Musk are not constrained by the masses, who appear in this scenario as zombified dupes infected by the “woke mind virus.”

Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel presents a darker prophecy than Musk, but one that complements rather than contradicts Musk’s prescription for a eugenic meritocracy. If Musk is the rational planner, Thiel is the inspired risk-taker. Thiel draws as much from eschatology as from speculative fiction. He argues that history veers between two inevitable poles: Armageddon and the Antichrist. Armageddon represents the risk of technological self-destruction, while the Antichrist represents a global state that stifles freedom and innovation in its quest to protect humanity from Armageddon. According to Thiel, progress outside of the computing fields has slowed in recent decades due to a failure of nerve in the face of dangerous new inventions such as the atomic bomb. Thiel claims that progress has stalled out because people have become too risk-averse, too worried about unleashing the immense technological forces that are within our capabilities.

And why such an ideology would look good to these people:

At this point, we may wonder with some consternation why anyone outside of the ruling class would want to bring about a world where they’re to be replaced by machines. I would argue that the techno-fascist vision of reclaiming a lost future resonates with people from a variety of socioeconomic positions who complain that the 21st century falls short of how it was advertised. The right is a cross-class coalition of the entitled and the disappointed. It is not composed of the wretched of the earth, but it is made up of people who perceive a gap between the social position they inhabit and the more elevated position they believe they were promised in the hierarchy. This includes downwardly mobile people who are genuinely impoverished or indebted but also local elites who think they’re entitled to a bigger presence on the national stage. And now it increasingly includes billionaires who think that the economy should be growing at a faster rate.

What unites these people is their belief that radical subversives and racialized outsiders have robbed them of a better future. They may be relatively comfortable compared to the rest of the world, but they look at the trend line projected by their parents’ upward mobility or the booming fortunes of the midcentury economy, and then they see that actual performance in recent decades has fallen quite short. The Right has varying solutions to the case of the missing future. Trumpists seem to think a strong nation ruled by a tough leader with hardened borders will take us back to the future. The Far Right, however, goes even further to suggest that the future promised in the 1950s is only possible with an all-white racial stock. In actuality, all of these revanchist fantasies misrecognize what is really going on, namely the crisis of capitalism.

 Which may be why I do not find these ideas attractive. I do not mind not having a flying car like The Jetsons. Restrictive makes me think of a body of water draining away until it is only a stagnant pool. I prefer this:

...A more utopian world will be realized through a process of inclusive, democratic, and egalitarian imagination—or it will not be realized at all.

I suggest reading the whole of the review. 

Our crisis is not loneliness but human beings becoming invisible (Aeon Essays) I came across late, much later than the preceding essay, and, at first, I did not think it would come into this post. However, it raised a question in my mind: what if the depersonalized find themselves recognized and made persons by the fascists, so they do not care if the end result of right-wing ideas will harm them; they feel like people until the fascists extinguish them.

Instead, pundits and policymakers are applying the word ‘loneliness’ to address a real and growing problem, but they are applying the wrong diagnosis. What they might call ‘loneliness’ is actually a different sort of crisis, one of depersonalisation. Depersonalisation is what happens when people feel not exactly lonely, but rather profoundly invisible. What is missing here is what scholars call ‘recognition’, ‘mattering’ or ‘being seen’ – the notion that you are seen and heard, even emotionally understood, by the people around you, as opposed to feeling insignificant or invisible to others.

When someone says they've got all the answers, know they're full of it.

When someone says they're going to fix the world for you, know they mean to fix the world for themselves.

Be a wild child and find your own answers and fix the world yourself.

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