Grumpiness & It's Not All Politics Induced (Part 3) Politics and Thumbsuckers

  The echocardiogram did a number on me. I have to admit that. This morning I woke grumpy from stiffness and achiness. 

I made a trip to the convenience store for cigarettes and caffeine. Then I started on the email. 

First stop, the Los Angeles Review of Books. Two things I like about LARB. It is not as stodgy as the New York Review of Books without sacrificing a quality of writing, and it is free.

Now, for Part 3.

I have a nephew who last spoke to me about 4 years ago, extolling that he was against socialism and never waved the blue flag. I remember a Republican friend of mine years ago exhorting against the socialism of common roads. Neither really knew how much they were a product of "socialism" or the meaning of socialism. The latter would never have minded socializing the costs of big business failure. Both make me think of those people who talk about having previous lives as Napoleon or Caesar or the like. Their vanity never considers the possibility they were just as ordinary then as now. Both nephew and former friend give off the impression they will rise to their destined heights just by the virtue of their white manliness but for the idea of American equality of opportunity. These two came to mind as I read From Democracy to “Safety”. 

Slobodian carefully investigates the three hard realities of the alt-right: hard biology, hard borders, and hard money. In tracing the intellectual genealogy of scientific racism, anti-immigration rhetoric, and a fascination with gold as the ur-currency, the book seeks to expose the ideological foundations of our present political moment. Given their beliefs about racial superiority, denizens of the alt-right abhor any government interference in markets, especially affirmative action, redistribution, or social safety net programs. In their view, these policies allow genetically inferior citizens to reproduce and thereby “dilute” the genetic quality of the domestic population. By a similar logic, immigrants from what Donald Trump once referred to as “shithole countries” should be rejected in favor of nice, white (and presumably smarter) immigrants from nations like Norway. Capital should be free, but labor must remain fixed in its country of origin lest the unsavory masses from beyond the United States’ shores come to eat our cats and dogs.

Slobodian’s subjects assert that “the world virus [of] socialism” is the deep evil that must be rooted out of American society, a claim that continues to resonate within mainstream conservative political discourse in 2025. Trump rails against “Marxist maniacs and lunatics” on college campuses while he blames diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives for recent plane crashes. In 2023, Trump imagined that he was being persecuted by “Marxists” and “communists” in the Biden administration, using terms popularly associated with the enemies of the United States. Trump’s attempt an instigating a Third Red Scare, or the scientific racists’ claim that all demands for a more egalitarian society are fundamentally socialist in character, should not be dismissed as anachronistic rhetorical posturing. As Austin Sarat wrote for Politico in 2023,

Trump’s kind of red baiting has a long lineage. It is right out of the playbook of authoritarians and tyrants from the early 20th century. It was instrumental in the rise of fascist leaders in mid-century Germany and Italy.

 Like them, today’s strongmen and would-be strongmen like the former president need powerful “us” versus “them” narratives, and communism is a tried and true boogeyman.

Thumb-sucking whiners need an excuse for their inadequacies. You play, you can lose. Don't cry if you failed; that's life. You don't play; don't cry that others take their chances. Life has only one certain outcome - death. Nothing is deserved. If women and people of color succeed against the obstacles put in place by our history of bigoted self-interest when the white male thumbsuckers made no effort to improve their lot, did not even try to compete, they belong in the dustbin of history. They should be asking who benefits from the idea they deserve rewards without effort and success means keeping others down.

As wealth is concentrated into the hands of a few oligarchs, discourses of hardwired human biological difference shift the blame. Whereas one neoliberal camp wants us to believe that our failure to succeed is due to a deficiency of our own work ethic, its bastard child asserts that many among us are simply incapable of ever succeeding due to our lower intelligence or otherwise substandard genetic inheritance. This is the neoliberal capitalism of what Slobodian calls “neurocastes,” a return to a far more brutal economic system, one originally built in this country on the dispossession of Native Americans, the chattel slavery of Black people, the subjugation of women, and the ruthless exploitation of immigrants. For a while, dedicated and brave activists within the United States put the metastatic cancers of racism and sexism into some degree of remission, with the prospect of a cure seemingly around the corner. With the rise of the pro-differences alt-right, the cancer has returned.

I prefer thinking that if we all work together, we will all rise. I guess that is socialism.

Still, too long, there is a Part 4 coming tomorrow.

sch