I've been thinking a lot about this, about how the whole left/right conservative/liberal whatever-you-want-to-call-it divide is built on this
People the culture just says intrinsically belong here, deserve to be here, are the kind of people who live here
And people who aren't
The big tough manly dude and his pretty innocent housewife and their adorable kids
The good Christian family, "all-American", blonde hair and white skin and Anglo names, red white and blue
Everyone unconsciously defers to them, gives them extra credit
It's always like this
People who swear up and down they don't have a racist bone in their body still unconsciously think it's "normal" for people like that to be in charge and pushing back is always walking uphill
Terry Pratchett captured this really well in Discworld
The deep dwarves, the hardcore reactionary religious fundamentalists, are a tiny minority among dwarves and yet they get a ton of deference
People know they're "crazy nutters" but let them go about their business
Cheri, who is the dwarven equivalent of a trans woman, is HATED by their movement (a "ha'ak", a heretic) and they've outright threatened her safety
And yet she privately admits in her heart of hearts she can't imagine the world without them
Nobody else believes shit like that letting sunlight touch your skin contaminates you or that all trolls should be genocided and their bodies ground to powder and whatnot
But it would *feel wrong* if they just ceased to exist
Like the "liberal" dwarves feel slightly reassured someone else believes all that so they have someone to compete themselves against and be more liberal than
They're the measuring stick authenticity is counted by, they're what you know as a deviant you're deviating from
And if they were just GONE, well then
You wouldn't know anything at all anymore
Everything would permanently change
And as much as people might claim otherwise people are really scared of permanent change
They like to think this system is stable - "Well, they can be old-fashioned, and I can be more liberal and tolerant than them, and they can condemn me and I can be smug about being freer than them we can just keep on going that way and everyone's happy"
But, well, it isn't
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There was huge drama between the Booths over this, like shortly after New York audiences "canceled" John over making a public anti-Lincoln rant Edwin had a huge fight with him in private and told him he was no longer welcome at his house
And then he went and got himself arrested on suspicion of sedition in St. Louis and had to spend a ton of money to get out of it and Edwin had to do the whole "Famous actor refuses to comment on estranged controversial brother" thing
The story goes that when the news of the assassination got out, Edwin Booth read the papers and blurted out to his family, "He's done it, he's ruined me, he's ruined all of us, our family name is destroyed"
For every one of him there's two or three cops who were joking around taking selfies with the attackers moments earlier and there's a dozen off-duty cops from all over the country who flew to DC to participate in the attack
I'm thinking of that awful paragraph in that article about a Black Capitol PD officer venting to one of his colleagues "You just let this happen!" and breaking down in tears
Goodman did what he did because the system he signed up to be a part of did not actually have his back and did not actually stand up for the values it claimed to exist to protect
I still remember a line from a speech that "heroism is always a failure of leadership"
The upshot is really just that you can't leave anything on autopilot and expect that institutions and norms will protect you from fascism in and of themselves
The simple existence of hate speech laws is no reason to relax and neither is the existence of a "free market of ideas"
I would actually be fine with the First Amendment fetishists' demand that state action always be off the table if they actually kept their promise to always oppose Nazis by every other possible means (public shaming, deplatforming, ostracism)
I hate to be the gatekeeper but there's so many fake Orwell fans these days
I hate people calling 1984 a "big tech" dystopia
The only real Big Tech is the telescreens and they play a really small role in the plot - the point of the book is everyone is very poor and aside from the telescreens people live like it's the Great Depression still
If you know ANY history it's really really fucking hard to find anything funny about the Capitol attack, even with inherently hilarious self-owns like the dude accidentally tasing himself
The anti-Chinese riots in LA in 1871, the Wilmington insurrection of 1898, the Tulsa Massacre in 1921
Scenes that at least some of the rioters were deliberately evoking
Symbolically attacking the Capitol building is the ending of The Turner Diaries
Running all the Black elected officials out of the state house is the ending of Birth of a Nation (based on the 1898 uprising)
These chuds were parading around a noose and chanting "Murder the Media" - by which they mean him and his colleagues! - and he's so deep in his bubble of privilege and security he feels the need to dole out humanizing anecdotes
I actually mean it when I say people have a duty to push back on the relentless humanizing of the right wing
That's the whole asymmetry here - they *start off more humanized*
The definition of being right wing is being the kind of person people reflexively think of as authentic
Normal, decent folk
Salt of the earth
Everyday old-fashioned red-blooded Americans
People with a picture postcard version of how the country should look in their heads, based on what they think is the country's history since its founding, and hate to see it change