Links: Now what, and what happened

[sonia]

The key is to avoid perpetuating the autocrat’s goals of fear, isolation, exhaustion and disorientation.. 1) Trust yourself. 2) Find others whom you trust. 3) Grieve [...] 10) Envision a positive future. Via cosmolinguist and ewt

Who Goes Nazi? by Dorothy Thompson."It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi."

I've been following Mekka Okereke @mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io over on mastodon, and he's been saying for months (probably years) that the key is the Black vote. White people (he's particularly down on white women) can't be depended on to vote against fascism. He says "Right here is where it all went wrong." Oct 11, 2024, Kamala Harris announced that as president she would create a bipartisan council of advisers. This is aimed at swing voters rather than at Black or other progressive voters.

The whole thread is worth reading, with lots of good points. And someone does call Mekka out on his focus on white women. (I wish people would specify white Christian women too. While I'm sure there are a few Jewish fascist sympathizers, I bet there aren't many.)

If, like me, you want to have some kind of understanding of what happened, the explanations are 1) Voter turnout about 8 million less than in 2020. Trump got about the same number of votes, so the deficit is in the Democrat tally. Partly the betrayal of Black voters (see below), and also, of course, voter suppression. 2) Abortion-rights referendums made some white women feel safer voting for Trump because they think their own right are safe. (?!!)

A thread about why moving to the center, collaborating with Nazis "a little bit", loses a crucial 10% of the Black male vote.

I explicitly said that Black men *will* experience worse outcomes [under Trump].

But the relative drop in freedom for a Black man under full fascism, is much less than the relative drop in freedom for a white Dem voter. And freedom from fascism for everyone else while you still live under fascism, does not feel good.

I've said on here before, racism is just fascism practiced on Black people first.

Like I said, this is not my position. I disagree with it. But it is not insane, stupid, or selfish.

What's selfish is expecting someone to save you from fascism, without reciprocating the favor.

Expecting to live in US luxury, while someone else lives under US fascism, is selfish.

In 2028 there will be another election. Again, I will tell US Dem candidates not to do the "Fight the nazis! But also, I will use your vote to give power to those same nazis!🤡" I will say that most Black people will make a selfless decision, but about 10% of Black men (2 million voters) will say hells no

I will again say that without that 10%, a Democratic candidate cannot win.

And again, some people will make the arguments that you are making now: "I know it's unfair, but look that's just how it is! Black people just have to take it!" But they don't just have to take it. We need them to play more than they need us to play.

Comments

[adrian_turtle]

While I'm sure there are a few Jewish fascist sympathizers, I bet there aren't many.

I wouldn't take that bet anymore. Quite a lot of Jews will support any leader who aligns with the Israeli government. If that leader is fascist, they consider that acceptable collateral damage. You might be able to show a person a list of fascist values and they would say they disagree with this one and that one and the other one. They might, for instance, say misogyny is terrible, but it's more important to protect the state of Israel than to fight it. They may deny any emotional sympathy with fascism, but they support it in practice. I think we really do need to call them fascist sympathizers, if not simply fascists.

Also, American culture honors individual success. Many prosperous Americans think in terms of schools and careers that reward sucking up and kicking down. Jews are not immune to this. It leads to thinking of "never again" in the sense of "never again TO US, because we will stay on the side of the winners and those other people over there will get hurt." I have been directly aware of pockets of racial prejudice among Jews since I learned to read. Is it logical? Of course not. But I know way too many Jews who regard racism as actively appealing so long as it's not aimed at them.

[sonia]

I guess Jews are subject to forgetting/ignoring history as much as anyone. And also subject to believing that the "Face-Eating Leopards" party won't eat their (our) faces.

[rosefox]

I was coming here to say this, yeah. Many Orthodox Jews are very right-wing and were big Trump supporters. In 2016, too—the kosher bakery in my neighborhood had Hillary and Trump cupcakes and sold a lot more of the Trump ones.

[sonia]

Yeah, that makes sense. And I'm still D: about it.

[silveradept]

A fair amount of the demographics that get obtained about who went where in both of the elections backs Mekka's assertion that white women shoulder greater responsibility for bringing them about. The "pandering to the right wing by moving toward the center will lose a significant amount of the base by painting both candidates as bad for them" is also pretty spot on. I will be interested to see and hear the post-mortems and see how much they mention the role that white people had in the election, or whether they're going to mostly focus on how Latine men resonated with the machismo.

[sonia]

I'm not contesting the voting habits of white women (although I'm still wtf about it). I'm saying that white men play an even bigger role and it doesn't help anything to just skip over that.

I don't know what official usage is, but the neutral "Latine" followed by "men" looks really strange to me. Is there a reason to avoid saying "Latin men"?

[silveradept]

For what I can understand, I think the reasoning is that white women can be peeled off to vote for women's interests over white interests, while white men have no reason, other than their own enlightened self-interest, to vote against whiteness and patriarchy. So they think white women are the wedge that decides whether white men's interests, or everyone else's, triumph.

"Latine men" covers a broader and more inclusive swath for me than "Latin men," but I also have it in MTT head that "Latin men" has fallen out of favor.