2021-02-24 23:33:31
"The key figures in the Capitol attack seem drawn primarily from the ranks of small business owners, military and police officers, politicians’ families, and a familiar rogues’ gallery of petty grifters and violent far-right thugs that coalesced out of the dregs of the Tea Party. These are the representatives of a rapidly maturing vanguard of principled reactionaries within the petit bourgeois. They are members of the middle class who oppose democracy, whether in its mass, working-class form, or its liberal bourgeois one."
"Black Lives Matter and the lockdown protests: here were two starkly different visions of freedom. While the former sought to expand democracy, fight repression, and champion worker demands for universal healthcare, rent hiatus, and more plentiful and reliable unemployment benefits, the latter sought the very opposite in the name of a narrowly circumscribed kind of freedom—the freedom of small business owners to do business. To the extent that any part of the lockdown protesters’ complaint was legitimate, it was true that the federal government’s response largely did hang struggling small ventures out to dry, preferring instead to funnel relief funds to large corporations. But their complaint wasn’t merely that they couldn’t live—it was specifically that they couldn’t live as bosses wielding their monopoly on capital. They wanted to ensure that workers remained “free” of access to material support that might weaken their bosses’ economic leverage over them—and thus interfere with the bosses’ “freedom” to compel poor people to work in unsafe conditions."
"We tend to think of the delusional and irrational nonsense in fascists’ heads as a cause for their behavior. It is instead, quite frequently, a consequence of their aims. To value living human beings so cheaply requires a flight from reason; accordingly, right-wing authoritarians turn away from facts and reality, weaving mental knots that justify their inhumane program. A whole ecosystem of conspiracy and superstition swells up to enable the convenient delusion. Thus Donald Trump is not simply a profligate charlatan and bully but a hero, a champion of children, and an enemy of the Devil himself."
"for all the mysticism, the people who showed up on January 6 made calculated, self-serving, and clear-eyed decisions based on their interests and their perceived immunity from accountability. While recent arrests and Trump’s refusal to issue pardons on their behalf seem to have proven them wrong about their perceived impunity, it was not unreasonable for them to have assumed that the law would look the other way and demonstrate tremendous laxity for affluent whites"
"From the point of view of capitalism, given the choice between far-right authoritarianism and profits on the one hand and socialism, democracy, and human freedom on the other, the former will always emerge as the lesser evil. I do not mean to suggest that fascism is immediately imminent in the United States as a dominant mode of public governance. It is not. Still, we cannot entertain complacency about an increasingly sizable and belligerent far-right authoritarian movement that is confidently putting forward its own fascist solutions to social and economic crisis."
https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/from-the-lockdown-protests-to-the-capitol/
231 viewsKozy Raccoon, 20:33
S
