Note:
This is a “think piece” – just the start of a line of thought I’d like to
develop further. So your comments are very welcome.
It’s
natural to want to demonize our enemies, to regard them as less than human, to
reduce their motives to something simple and despicable – cruelty, lust,
indifference, or hatred. Jews have been
accused of wanting to drink the blood of Christian babies in their Satanic
rites, or to be plotting to take over the world. Communists were accused of
wanting to take way our freedoms and make us all the same. Feminists are said
to want to subjugate and emasculate men. Immigrants, especially the brown
skinned ones, are claimed to freeload on our social programs and take our jobs.
Some on the far fight even say that liberals are perpetrating a white genocide.
When we turn real people into caricatures in this way, we save ourselves the
trouble of listening to them and understanding why they do what they do, and we
deprive them of any voice in explaining themselves.
Of
course we on the left can see this when Jews, communists, immigrant and women
are being demonized by the right. But the left has its demons as well: Trump
supporters, the religious right, the alt-right, neo-nazis and fascists – to name
a few. We’re not very good at walking
anywhere in their shoes. In Facebook memes, Trumpers are treated as ignorant
red-necks and trailer trash who have been brought up among racists and sexists,
and are too dumb see through these primitive ideas. Their dominant motive is
reduced to hate, and our message to them often seems to be: Open up your heart,
stupid, and see that love trumps hate. Of course they do not take this advice. They
even seem to resent it, throwing back at us their own simple minded labels:
libtards, snowflakes and worse. Obviously there can be no dialogue here, since
neither side will speak to the other with respect. Victory for the left can
consist only of forcing the haters back under the rocks from which they crawled,
whether by law, moral intimidation, or force of numbers. But forcing them out
of our sight only confirms their sense of themselves as victims persecuted by
the liberal establishment. Worse, it does nothing to address the conditions
that give rise to their anger.
So in
this piece I would like to see if we can understand where the hatred of the
alt-right is coming from. What leads anyone to hate?
The
basic feeling that gives rise to hatred is fear.
Hatred is a substitute for fear because while fear alone is passive and
helpless, hatred is energizing and can be acted upon. So, what is it that
people drawn to white nationalism fear? A recent article in Harpers says this:
The alt-right derives from the same impulses that have
launched other white extremist groups, including a belief that “white
civilization, the white race in particular, is imperiled,” said George Michael,
a professor of criminal justice at Westfield State University, who studies
right-wing extremism. This fear often emerges on the coattails of momentous
change: the post-Civil War era of black emancipation, the transatlantic immigration
waves of the early twentieth century, the Great Depression, the civil rights
movement. Alt-right supporters point out that America was 80 percent white in
1980, but is barely 60 percent white today. They denounce rising rates of
interracial marriage, liberal immigration policies, the Black Lives Matter
movement, and the targeting of “white privilege” by academics and the media.
Social science research sheds some slight on the movement’s
appeal to individuals who profess to be seeking truth or purpose. The work of
social scientists Joseph E. Ucinski and Joseph M. Parent suggests that people
who experience anxiety and loss of control over their personal circumstances
are more likely to adopt fringe beliefs.
…
The
article goes on to point out that
Whites, generally speaking, are the richest and safest
population in America with twelve times the wealth of African Americans and a
lower crime rate than most racial groups. White nationalists nevertheless feel
vulnerable and they are willing to put up barricades to protect their
privileged status.
So on
the surface, it would seem that the minority of white Americans who turn to
white nationalism should feel quite at home in a society that already favors
them, yet they fear the increased numbers and apparent rise in influence of
people of color. Why?
Let’s
consider what it means to feel secure. I think our feeling of security rests our
sense of being recognized and valued, and that this happens in three interweaving
areas of our lives.
First, there
is the circle of our family and friends. Do we feel at home with and cared for
by those we live with? And do we feel that this small circle around us is itself
safe from external threats? This is not merely a matter of physical and economic
safety, but cultural safety: Is the way of life of my family and friends
respected by larger, impinging social forces – such as the State?
Secondly,
there is our location in the larger network of social and economic relations:
our status at work (if we have work), our positions of subservience or
leadership, our education, and, of course, our wealth or lack of it. And again,
we want to know that our way of making a living has a legitimate place in the
world.
And
finally, there is what psychologist R.D. Laing (in The Divided Self) calls our “ontological” security or insecurity.
To be ontologically insecure is to feel a deep,
unspeakable doubt that you really exist, that you have any right to be present
in the world. To quote Laing, you
…may feel more unreal than
real; in a literal sense, more dead than alive; precariously differentiated from
the rest of the world, so that [your] identity and autonomy are always in
question. …[T]he ordinary circumstances of everyday life constitute a continual
and deadly threat (p. 42).
To be
ontologically insecure is to feel as if you can only keep from drowning “by the
most constant, strenuous, desperate activity” (p. 44). Whether one feels this
way, and to what extent, depends mostly on how securely one was held and loved
in the first year or two of life. I think many, and maybe even most, people in
the US were treated roughly enough in childhood for them to have tormenting
doubts about their right to exist. But most people don’t want to admit, even to
themselves, that they feel this way. So we pretend to be fine, and this means relying
on the other, much thinner areas of support: our relations with family and
friends and our place in the larger world of work and politics. If these seem
to give way, we may feel the abyss opening before us, leaving us nowhere to
stand or be. Many people are hanging by a thread from a rickety support system
which they feel compelled to maintain at all costs.
Now unfortunately, the existing social order in which we
maintain our sense of who we are is structured hierarchically in distinctions
of class, race, and gender. So it is inevitable that people whose sense of
themselves is fragile will feel that the existing order of social distinctions
is crucial to their personhood. Many white people, even men, have managed to
rise above this dependence on their white privilege, at least officially, in
their conscious lives. But many others have not, and do not appreciate being
told they should feel differently. And
if it seems to them that their identity support system is being undermined by
some identifiable groups – such as intellectuals and the media – they are likely
to react with some degree of anger fueled by their fear – their fear of having
no right to exist, of being, as one book
title has it, strangers in their own land, So it shouldn’t be surprising that
they organize to defend their ways of thinking and feeling. Subjectively, it’s
a matter of life and death for them. (Of
course I am speaking in general terms here, and there are all manner of
variations – from people who successfully and gladly learn to appreciate human
diversity, to those who always have to work at it, to those who sullenly accept
it but may grumble privately, to those who join white supremacist groups.)
What does this mean for left politics? Most obviously, we
need to stop demonizing people on the right, talking to them as if all they
need to do is listen to reason or feel the love. But we need a way of
understanding and addressing the world conditions that evoke the extreme right
response, while, at the same time, figuring out how to deal with rightwing
actions in diverse contexts. Much more thinking needs to be done.
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