This is why I've been all but screaming at people (mostly on the left, frankly) for years that these people are not the "forgotten men" of the rural working class or whatever. They're middle/upper class, trying to gain even more power.
The common denominator is not being part of a forgotten working class, it is largely a politics of whiteness that adopts a specific lifestyle as an in-group solidarity marker. It may, at times, pantomime a fun-house mirror view of working class life, but it's not proletarian.
It's as authentic as Kelly Loeffler's faux-trucker aesthetic or Don Jr.'s faux-rancher pantomime for Twitter, and deployed for the same reason: pretending to salt-of-the-earth authenticity while being privileged as all fuck.
And yet lots of folks, from the NYT newsroom to the DSA, mistake these people as representing some winnable constituency of "working class voters left behind by Democrat identity politics."
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So, just some additional info sci research notes here. For years I've been asked by people who work at tech companies how to improve platform moderation. When I use the word "context" many people threw their hands up and said "but who decides!?"
Now Twitter just... did it.
And that's good! But it also shows you how, frankly, easy this all was. "Who decides?" is not a worthless question but it's often deployed in a worthlessly self-paralysing way, as an excuse to avoid hard decisions or challenging conversations.
Context matters because not every abusive or threatening piece of material online contains easily-searched slurs or swear words or immediate threats. Interpretation matters; symbolism matters; in-group signification matters; slang and codewords matter.
I've studied online harassment for years and Trump's Twitter account was the Sauron's Eye of online abuse, an unending fountain of incitement that could have literally pushed us to the brink of war.
I wrote in an academic paper, way back in 2012, that the notion of online speech being unreal, that it's "just words" or "just the internet" was causing a lot of harm and that things would get worse. Trump became the Ur textual example of how bad it could be.
You're already hearing this a lot, I imagine, but those of us who have warned for years that what's said and done online is consequential, that people like this were not 'just trolling,' have known something like this was inevitable if nothing was done.
And I will add: this did not in any way start with GamerGate, as some are claiming. GG was an inflection point, a moment when the far-right online invaded a mainstream hobby for recruitment. But it should be blatantly obvious that today's events didn't *begin* there.
The alt-right predates GG, despite what you may commonly hear. And, as for the long arc of American history, there are deeply alarming analogues. It's all part of a long history of white supremacism in this country. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmingto…
The Republican Party has proven its spinelessness many times over, but after tonight's election it looks even more pathetic. Trump was an actively *destructive influence* on the GOP's chances. Trump's fans/cult will never support them. Time to cut bait.
There will be many stories to come from this election. Black community organising, groups like Voto Latino causing a big bump in Latino votes for the Dems, Trump depressing GOP turnout, they're all factors.
But for Republicans who privately scorn Trump, the argument for their ongoing, grovelling support, was that he won them votes. He turns out his fanbase for them.
Except, clearly, he didn't. He weakened the GOP against a *strong* Dem challenge.
Honestly, this argument gets worse the longer one stares at it. The US has had a markedly *de*centralised approach to the pandemic. A lot has been left to the states, and even different cities and counties in the *same* state may have different policies.
I won't stand here and pretend that central planning has no limitations, but the US has applied far too *little* of it in this crisis, and where power *was* centralised, it was not with the "bureaucratic elite" but in the hands of people like Jared Kushner and his pals.
The more mealy-mouthed GOP apologists for Trump's fraud claims treat the perception, the *feeling* that the election was fraudulent as prima facie evidence.
As always, the right does everything they falsely accuse the left of, and they pursue it to the hilt.
Like, of course the "facts don't care about your feelings" crowd would stoop to this, because what they really want is a world where *their* feelings ought not care about facts. And that's all its about: ego spiralling wildly out of control.
That's the unshakably attractive fantasy Trump has always sold them: a world that bends to their will, where they never have to hear a word they don't like, where what they say and feel is always true and determinative.