I have some quibbles with the @jacobinmag’s piece on QAnon for various and sundry reasons but I think this is accurate — QAnon is a statement of faith, unmoored from reality but centered in an idea of heroism and righteousness. jacobinmag.com/2021/01/q-anon…
My biggest objection is the piece’s conceit that the solution is political:
People do not succumb to conspiracy theories (or extremism, for that matter) for reasons that can be answered by politics.
Socialism would not make bad things not happen. Conspiracy theories are efforts to create order out of abject chaos, and you can’t de-chaos existence.
I understand the drive to frame this conspiracy theory through a solution you already favor — but QAnon isn’t a political problem, and there is no real political solution.
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Perhaps I am alone in this but I argue that marriage equality was largely used as a dishonest cudgel by people who had no genuine views on the issue, not an issue that spoke to large swaths of America.
A whole swath of people gained fame and infamy for their full throated opposition to marriage equality and they were abandoned the second it stopped working.
Maggie Gallagher now works at an institute for the development of the “spirit and craft of liturgy,” for example.
There is, for many, a defined line between their ideological beliefs and their policy desires (see: the swath of human events.) QAnon people who are convinced that the Pope was arrested for incest are not going to be dissuaded from thinking that by introducing postal banking.
Also, as anyone who has been alive might know, people can be economically comfortable but still driven by a ceaseless rage to do violence and cause pain for other people whom they do not like for various reasons.