The message: take your civility centrism out to the desert, put a bullet in the back of its head & bury it in a shallow grave. "Decency" will not prevail when fascism's unleashed just because it's decency. Bourgeois propriety is exactly what the fascists are radicalised against.
https://twitter.com/CharlesPPierce/status/1323908547260940289
Fascism is fuelled by ressentiment and related pathologies. Like narcissism (because arguably it *is* a mode of narcissism, narcissism on a societal level,) when challenged by realities you'd expect to make a reasonable person see reason, that shit just *powers the denial*.
More people didn't vote for Trump *despite* the shambolic shitshow he's made of the last four years. They voted for him--and I include in this *his murderous mishandling of Covid-19*--because of that. Because it causes *narcissistic injury* that makes them double down & lash out.
250K dead & counting is not just a damning indictment of Trump, but of his supporters, their whole cult(ure). In the thrall of societal narcissism, of fucking *course* they're going to react not with a Road to Damascus awakening but as wounded narcissists: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissis…
The failure to understand that reality, the kneejerk "This is not who we are!" or "This is not my America!" is, I hate to say it, the American Dream out of which that full-on societal narcissism has emerged. Trumpism is American exceptionalism acting out in narcissistic injury.
A key point worth bringing into the thread from a response maybe:
https://twitter.com/Hal_Duncan/status/1324046802195271682
Sorkinism is America's claim of being a "stable genius". Literally, it's an idealisation of stability & intellectual superiority, c.f. the article I RTed yesterday. It is just as counterfactual as Trump's & just as fragile. That's the very engine of America's societal narcissism.
What's the societal equivalent of a "stable genius" self-image? It is an image of a nation as the very embodiment of Enlightenment philosophy at its zenith of vision, as that vision writ into a reality so real it's not just a bastion of democracy but a *beacon*, City on the Hill.
An ideal(ised) self-image is maybe no bad thing in and of itself. There's an ethics of honour as integrity in the virtuous sense as integrity *in the structural sense*, all actions *integrated* as consistently as possible to match the model of self as closely as possible. BUT...
The investment of self-worth in that self-image to the extent that any reality challenging it--genocide of Native Americans, slavery, capitalist imperialism--engenders a "This is not my America!" denial... that's the very pathology that will calcify into narcissism if allowed.
If you have that denial as societal baseline, writ into the culture, narcissistic injury may only manifest in an individual liberal in the form of a huffy snit of an article bleating about Cancel Culture, but scale up and out to society as a whole & what you see is ofc Trumpism.
This is the reality:
https://twitter.com/Alyssa_Milano/status/1324054264495263745
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