Thread by @drvolts

I'm stuck waiting on someone, so a quick 🧵I've been meaning to write, pulling together a few strands.

In his book The School for Dictators, Ignazio Silone famously called fascism "a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place." There is much wisdom there.

A core feature of reactionary (I'll use that term rather than "fascist" because people love to pointlessly debate semantics) movements is an *inversion of power*. They cast the weak as looming threats & status-quo powers as the trembling victims.

This is a familiar move, in macro & micro terms, in every reactionary movement. You see it in the US when they talk about gay or trans people imposing themselves on everyone, "forcing their lifestyle down our throats." Or when they talk about how white people face more racism.

Or, on a grander scale, when they talk about how social justice warriors have taken over *every institution in the the US*, ruthlessly imposing their woke worldview.

It's self-evidently ridiculous, but why do they do it so consistently?

The point is to justify their own escalating violence & lawlessness. They hate difference, they hate the status quo being challenged, they hate the *existence* of Others in their midst, so they need to convince one another that it's ok to cast off norms & let the violence out.

This is why the only mode of moral argumentation you ever see from a reactionary is whataboutism. The point of "they did it first" (for whatever "it," censorship or voter fraud or whatever) is not that "it" is bad & no one should do it, but that *it's ok for us to do it too*.

It's not even really a moral argument. It's just a permission structure -- they did it, so we can't be held accountable for doing it too.
So when they create this mythology about Dem voter fraud, the point is not "voter fraud is bad," the point is, "it's ok for us to do it too."

The long-running narrative about left bias in the media is not about "bias is bad," it's about, "it's ok for us to make full-on propaganda." The point about violent rioting urban lefties is not "violence is bad," it's, "it's ok for us to be violent."

The cliche goes "every conservative accusation is a confession," and that's kind of true, but it's more accurate to say every accusation is permission -- permission for the right to do in reality what it has worked itself up to believe the left is doing.

Oh I forgot to mention the classic example we're living through: endlessly accusing the left of censorship to justify banning books & rewriting history.

It's all a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place -- a way of defending & reinforcing status quo hierarchies by exaggerating the power & efficacy of the marginalized & vulnerable, the outsiders trying to reform the status quo in an egalitarian direction.

I was thinking about this the other day listening to the @IfBooksPod episode on Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism." Goldberg desperately wanted to be taken seriously as an intellectual, but literally the only thing he could think to do ...

@IfBooksPod ... is the World Biggest Whatabout. It's "we're rubber, you're glue" puffed up to hundreds of pages. It's just how their brains work. It's never "people should be good." It's always, "you can't call us shitty because you're shitty too."

@IfBooksPod And that is the most primal & formative feature of reactionary psychology: the belief that everyone is selfish, everyone is out for themselves, it's a zero-sum world in which tribes compete for dominance, & all the progressive talk about universalist values is just a clever con.

@IfBooksPod They *have* to believe that. Their worldview has no room for people of good will trying earnestly to do good for humanity. They *need* for all the Others they hate to be sinister & powerful & right on the verge of taking over & destroying everything.

@IfBooksPod They need it because it gives them permission to indulge their base instincts. "We have to do this violence/censorship/lawbreaking, it's the only way to stop the gays/immigrants/professors from destroying our way of life." Every time it's the same.

A friend reminded me that I forgot the most perfect example for this thread: all the "Flight 93 election" stuff! If you're not familiar, this is the RW idea that US culture has been hijacked by the left & is headed for some grim end, so ...
nymag.com/intelligencer/…

... *anything* the right does to regain control is justified, *even if it crashes the plane*. The danger from the left is so severe, so immediate, that even blowing everything up is better than the alternative. Again, the point is always to create that permission structure.

Just gonna add this to the thread...