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this is something I’ve been thinking about a bit lately SO I wanted to expand my thoughts on what I see as a blindness amongst some on the left associated with chapo, jacobin, greenwald, and most recently jimmy dore on their willingness to view the far right as allies 1/16
if you find yourself like me spending way too much time on left twitter you may have noticed there are fundamental disagreements related to race, class, and overall political strategy however my critique is focused on a very specific willingness to align with the right 2/16
greenwald is known for hyping up people on the right who he views as allies against the US security state people like the pauls, trump, josh hawley but dore most explicitly within the past few days has been touting areas of mutual agreement with the boogaloo boys 3/16
there are a lot of reasons why we should be skeptical of this alliance — namely that these groups are openly white supremacist — they also have long histories of violence and using populist language to appeal to “contrarian” types 4/16
the same pundits have downplayed what happened at the capital and indeed have been downplaying the threat of the trump administration since the beginning but christman from chapo in particular basically made the point “who cares it’s the us capitol a very evil place” 5/16
the common link amongst them being that liberals are spending too much time worrying about trump voters who share mutual concerns and not enough time being mad at elite democratic politicians — they want to entirely gloss over that this was a fascist mob with fascist ends 6/16
but why do this? IMO much of it has to do with who these people surrounded themselves with growing up or who they currently associate with essentially they have never consistently been around the type of “small town conservative” ideology that was prevalent at the capitol 7/16
one of my favorite pieces of writing last year was about the “american gentry” by @Patrick_Wyman think the people who own large landholdings, car dealerships, chain franchises and derive their wealth from that ownership and power locally 8/16
It’s important to note because they are the base of the republican party and *they* are who stormed the capitol — grievances with elites in coastal cities who have tens of millions rather than their millions of dollars drive them less than their beef with workers and tenants 9/16
SO when you have people suggesting alliances with them they are actually suggesting political coalitions with petite bougie and property owners not disaffected and struggling rural americans and this is because they aren’t familiar with the power structures in these places 10/16
if you grew up in an urban setting it’s far more likely that the kind of middle class or even wealthier people who your family associated with were of the professional managerial class a group that’s grown increasingly liberal and ownership is less important to their wealth 11/16
one of the freeing components of many large urban places especially for people who grew up in rural or small cities is how much less hierarchal they are and how much less important local power is in many respects 12/16
now it’s obviously not unimportant and vast inequalities exist and aren’t talked enough about (instead the media is too focused on inequalities between regions and not within them) but you escape some of the more toxic masculinity culture 13/16
Indeed @drvolts had a fantastic thread recently about this very point highlighting the culture of the citadel university in south carolina I encourage you to check it out below: https://twitter.com/drvolts/status/1353466743721660416
the point being that this culture based around hierarchy, domination, humiliation, and violence sustains itself in these small communities and in the process creates generations of disaffected and depressed men who people like dore fundamentally don’t understand 15/16
It’s why we get debates about allying with them instead of understanding this is a group that needs to be crushed politically and the best answer to that is alliances with corny liberals and not fascists 16/16
also bonus tweet I forget to link to patrick’s article which is fantastic https://patrickwyman.substack.com/p/american-gentry
