Thread by @scott_m_coley

With the unwavering support of the religious right for roughly five decades, conservative politicians in the US have engineered staggering levels of economic inequality—eroding democratic institutions and inviting the rise of authoritarian populism.

1/

Reagan leveraged racial resentment to give middle- and working-class (white) voters the false impression that their economic interests are served by cuts to government programs that benefit undeserving (Black) welfare recipients.

2/

(The politics of racial resentment hardly began with Reagan—he was merely the first modern conservative to successfully couch the argument for economic austerity within the politics of racial resentment.)

3/

As downward mobility breeds victimhood, resentment, and nativism, members of traditionally privileged groups take refuge in the politics of “law and order,” which promises to preserve or restore their privilege through violence.

4/

This is why the disaffected young males who blame their problems on feminism and people of color are *not* going to spend the next four years learning just how much none of their problems are caused by feminism or immigration:

5/

They didn’t arrive at this opinion by virtue of evidence, they don’t hold this opinion because of evidence, and the evidence of the next four years isn’t going to change their minds.

They will learn exactly nothing.

6/

This is the fascist death spiral of right-wing populism:

because you blame the out-group for your economic problems instead of the system that basically guarantees increasing levels of widespread immiseration, your problems only get worse.

7/

As your problems get worse, you blame and punish the wrong people even more, and on and on. So, while you clutch your pocketbook and eye people of color with suspicion, economic elites keep robbing you blind.

8/

𝑀𝑖𝑛𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑠 𝑜𝑓 𝑃𝑟𝑜𝑝𝑎𝑔𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑎: 𝑇𝑟𝑢𝑡ℎ, 𝑃𝑜𝑤𝑒𝑟, 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐼𝑑𝑒𝑜𝑙𝑜𝑔𝑦 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑅𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑔𝑖𝑜𝑢𝑠 𝑅𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡

a.co/d/iuSI7Wn