Again, Black people are an exception here, as basically anyone who stayed in the Jim Crow South has a living memory of living under what amounted to fascism, including the “always walking on eggshells/lack of social trust/long periods of boring endurance/randomized terrifying violence”
Pretty much. What it mostly boils down to is that most Americans really don’t have the faintest idea what living under modern authoritarian regimes actually looks like, and how it’s often at the same time way more boring and way more scary than they’d imagined.
The United States has always been a democracy for some and a brutal authoritarian regime for others, and the effort to expand it to democracy for all has led to a 70+ year backlash culminating in SCOTUS claiming that kings are totes cool and also judges are the ones to coronate them
Kaitlin, do you ever get bored with how tedious racism is? Just like soul suckingly tired that this is the evil they fight for? It's not even for something interesting or profitable for most of us white folx.
Notorious racist LBJ had a great insight into it:
“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
"tedious" isn't exactly the framing i'd use for "welp kid the talk doesn't work anymore, you can't tom your way out of a streetside execution no matter how grovelingly placid you pretend to be"
you guys gotta start handling your own beyond being bored and sad about it
I like to think about the role the demographic transition plays in this too. It’s like, as the US become majority non white, a plurality of white Americans are like, okay, actually let’s do authoritarianism for everyone.
As pointed out elsewhere, a surrender got signed at Appomattox in 1865. Then one side went right back to fighting (just without the marching armies) the very next day & hasn’t stopped since
I suppose in some ways I'd hoped the majority would come to empathize how we feel and address those experiences, but I had not expected them to so readily surrender that privilege to get mistreated with us in the long-term ahead. Sigh.
Everyone needs to go the Legacy museum in Montgomery and sit with all that. There were so many lynchings in so many more places than people think there were in the 20th century.
Sometimes I think I'm utterly divorced from this history as a Midwesterner, and then I remember that my great-great grandmother (who lived long enough for me to meet her) fled here after her father was lynched
I think there was a conscious effort on the part of much of my family (and many Northern Black ppl) to leave tragedies like that "in the past" because they hoped younger generations would be free of the mental burden of that violence.
White people, of course, have different priorities!
I’m sick of “American” just being a stand in for white for folks like this. Someone mentioned “Americans” were going to be lynched en masse today because “we” didn’t understand the oncoming danger… like Jesus Christ. Surely that’s never happened before or continues to here!
My MAGA aunt complained to me about race relations these days and told me there were no problems getting along with Black people when she lived in Alabama in the early 70s.
It feels like folks view American history through the lens of some prestige Oscar bait drama. All the progress and struggle, condensed into a tidy 3 acts.
100 fuckin years between the end of the civil war and the civil rights act. The ebbing and flowing and grinding reality isn’t Hollywood enough
In the spirit of “yes, and”: I wouldn’t have called it fascism, but the list at the end of your post also describes the experience of some gay communities in the period where people were out but not widely accepted. There’s some living memory of that.
The trouble is that the Republican party has somehow radicalized from supporting a new Jim Crow to outright supporting Nazism, and we will be lucky if Trump wins and the US doesn't turn into a hybrid of Nazi Germany and present day Russia.
With the advent of an accelerated/deregulated tech industry (for capitalism!) and the “post-truth” of conspiracy theory/authoritarian fanboy talking heads like Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens, even the poorest are rooting for their own subjugation. Thinking it won’t apply to them if they support it.
"The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not."
—Christopher Hitchens
