🐀 Despite All My Rage...
My wife has a sticker on her car that reads: "More rights for others doesn't mean fewer rights for you. It's not pie." It's one of those things that is so glaringly obvious that you shouldn't have to say it. And yet... we live in a country where sizeable portion of the population is voting for an "anti-woke" agenda, even if it will hurt them economically and infringe on their own rights--and potentially end democracy in America. How can people vote against their own self-interest like that? Are they that motivated by racism, sexism, and homophobia? And the answer is no... but also yes... but also no. (But also yes.) The motivation isn't overtly about those things--although let's be very clear that these people are being racist, sexist, and homophobic, whether they're willing to acknowledge it or not. But what's actually motivating them is something more sinister, but also more understandable. It's about social standing.
To Be Poor In The Future
One of the classic thought-experiments-to-break-out-at-a-party is this: Would you rather be rich in the past or poor in the future? (If memory serves this is based on a for-real scientific study, but the source was not something I could find via the googles.) In the logic of the question, we're assuming a continued path of improvements in technology, medicine, social welfare, etc. By this reasoning, you have two different options. If you were poor in the future, your life would be materially better than it is now, but you would have low social standing. If you were rich in the past, your life would be materially worse than it is now, but you would have high social standing.
The fact that people don't automatically pick "poor in the future" reveals something interesting about human nature. Wealth is actually less important to us than relative wealth, because humankind is a social animal and social standing carries a lot of weight. Relative wealth is a key indicator of social standing. But... it's not the only one.
One of the best frames for thinking about race came from Jamelle Bouie on the site-formerly-known-as-Twitter (which I will not link because it's a toxic hellscape now). Bouie is a political journalist and Op-Ed writer for the New York Times and probably the most inciteful political analyst I've ever read. Seek him out if you haven't already. Anyway, he speaks about race in America as a caste system. In a modern context, black and brown people have the same access to opportunity and success that white people do, at least theoretically. But race establishes a hierarchy. A pecking order. And when someone from a lower caste tries to act like someone in a higher caste, there's a word for that. "Uppity."
This framing is what allows white people to maintain their social standing while also denying that racism is a thing, not least because it enables tokenism. Talent, hard work, and connectedness are not in fact bound by race, so there will always be people who succeed regardless of their station. These success stories become the counter-example that "disproves" institutional racism. How can there be racism in sports if Venus and Serena Williams are champions? How can there be racism in the judiciary if Clarence Thomas is on the Supreme Court? Etc.
On a sidenote, if you ever want to ruin the movie Ratatouille for yourself, look at it through the lens of tokenism. The culmination of Anton Ego's villain arc is to reconcile his hatred of Gusteau's maxim "Anyone can cook" by reframing it as "A good cook can come from anywhere." And that is literally just tokenism. Also note that Remy was only able to achieve success by "puppeting" someone who happened to be born into the right family. Makes you wonder which people the rats are meant to be a stand-in for.
And on a sidenote to the sidenote, the way Brad Bird slips his reactionary politics into children's movies is an ongoing fascination of mine. Lalo's line "I hate false modesty; it's just another way to lie" is quintessential Objectivism. Fortunately Linguini then kisses her against her will and everything is great between them after that.
Anyhoo.
The real perniciousness of race-as-caste is that it creates artificial barriers that obscure the real ones. As I'm fond of saying, "Cultures wars exist to prevent class wars." It makes a working-class white man think he has more in common with a billionaire white man than with, say, a working-class black woman. Could he be more wrong? No. No he could not. But if he believes it to be true, then in his own mind his social standing is elevated. And he will fight to protect that social standing, even to his own economic detriment. And that's why people are willing to pull the lever for Trump in spite of his potentially ruinous policies.
And that's also why "wokeness" is so threatening to so many people. This is something that I think it's easy for left-leaning--or even centrist--people to miss. Hard-line conservatives are much more invested in maintaining the existing social order than most other groups. That's what makes them hard-line conservatives. This is how you end up with "law and order" voters voting for a convicted felon. It's not the rule of law that they're interested in, it's in the way the law can be used to maintain the social order. We lefties don't intuitively grok that.
So you see, the sticker on my wife's car is true, but also beside the point. Rights are not like pie. But social standing is. As the world has recognized, expanded the rights of, and even celebrated formerly-oppressed groups, it has elevated their social standing. And even if their social standing isn't quite to the level of white men, it's still higher than it used to be, so the relative social standing of white men has dropped, and that is what they are so upset about. They used to be very clearly at the top of the pecking order. And Donald Trump is promising to reinstate them--not just to reinstate them, but to elevate them further by bringing those "others" even lower.
This is why the GOP is campaigning so hard against trans rights. It's why they are so quick to get in bed with anti-semites. It's why they consider all Haitian immigrants to be illegal pet-eaters. It's why they call Puerto Rico a floating garbage pile. Any "other" who can be denigrated is a boost to the social standing of white men. It's straight out of the authoritarian handbook. And, incidentally, it doesn't actually pan out, because as you tread on more and more people, you have to find new "others" to attack. (If you want to see how this has played out in American history, it's one of the themes in Walter Johnson's The Broken Heart of America.)
But if you're drunk enough on that Kool-Aid, it becomes trivial to dismiss the reality of authoritarian politics. And this is doubly true in a country where the right-wing has spent half a century systematically dismantling public faith in both government and media. If you don't believe that democracy even really exists, then why shouldn't you vote for a man who is threatening to end it. He's probably not even going to do that at all, it's all just a media lie to prevent him from elevating people like me. Why not opt to be rich in the past?
Even if it's going to ultimately make all of us poorer in the future.
That's what I think anyway,
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