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Failure Begets Supremacy [1]

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Date: 2023-05-16  

In analyzing the drivers of white nationalism, commentators seem to be drawing upon the tropes of the Jim Crow era. European culture, dominated by people from northern climes with low melanin production, provided technologies and social processes that facilitated the transformation of America’s natural resources into wealth. This wealth was not considered an accident of circumstance, but a reflection of eugenic superiority. As a result, Europeans deserved their privileged position in society, and were justified in suppressing less advanced cultures seeking to unseat them.

While this reasoning still lurks under the surface of white nationalism today, I think that the subscribers are no longer among the privileged. The reasoning that drives white nationalism today seems to be rooted in failure. They still buy into the assumption that Europeans should achieve higher levels of success. However, we live in an era of declining standards of living driven by concentration of wealth. Confronting the differences between their station in life and the generations that preceded them, they are susceptible to claims that less advanced peoples have organized through democratic institutions to deny them what is rightfully theirs.

Reasoning constructs narratives that justify existing behaviors. It is not susceptible to the tools of rationality: logic and calculation. Disruption of the narrative, when first encountered, will actually harden attitudes. Currently, this disruption arises most directly from the competence of non-white leaders. White leaders that celebrate this competence are seen as traitors. All are considered, under the narrative, as a threat to survival, and thus justifiable targets of violence.

The endpoint of this process attains only when the reasoning is repetitively invalidated by experience. This is where we are with the 1/6 prosecutions.

Watching white nationalist slip off the shoals into the dark waters of oblivion is painful to me. The best that I can do, under the circumstances, is radiate empathy for them, hoping that at some point that will recognize me as a fellow human being, rather than a “socialist.”

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/16/2156295/-Failure-Begets-Supremacy

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