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marmar

(78,049 posts) Sun Aug 18, 2024, 07:37 PM Aug 2024

Donald Trump and JD Vance: Decoding a double dose of right-wing racism

Donald Trump and JD Vance: Decoding a double dose of right-wing racism
Old-fashioned "paleoconservative" racism and neocon-flavored pseudoscience, united at last on the 2024 GOP ticket

By Paul Rosenberg
Contributing Writer
Published August 18, 2024 6:00AM (EDT)

(Salon) The Republican ticket of Donald Trump and JD Vance is currently being subjected to well-deserved ridicule, but even if their venture ends in defeat, powerful antidemocratic forces behind them — such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk — aren’t going anywhere, and Trump’s base won't suddenly melt into nothing. Despite what looks to be their failure (so far) to score with racist and misogynist attacks on Kamala Harris, it’s worth taking a closer look at how two distinct streams of conservative racism have come together this year.

Two recent books I have covered for Salon shed light on these distinct forms. First was David Austin Walsh’s “Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right,” (author interview here), which explains that the “mainstream” conservative movement never rid itself of its fascist element and the "paleoconservatives" who have re-emerged in the Trump era. The second book is Annalee Newitz's “Stories Are Weapons” (interview here), which features a chapter about how neoconservatives (ideological rivals of the paleocons) tried to make racism great again with “The Bell Curve,” a 1994 book whose style of racist pseudoscience has flourished in Silicon Valley, including among JD Vance’s most significant backers.

I reached out to Walsh and Newitz in an effort to expand our understanding of the present moment, what brought us here and what may lie ahead. What they told me was both simple and complex. Here’s the simple part: The paleocons can be understood as old-fashioned, antisemitic white nationalists, representing a form of instinctive racist conservatism that resents and resists all change. The neocons' first intellectual leaders, on the other hand, were Jewish, and their "model minority" assimilation into the conservative movement typified the adaptive dynamic of a more pragmatic conservatism that accepts change and seeks to master it. Among other things, this involves intellectualizing racism in evolving ways — new bottles, same old whine. Yet at root, both forms boil down to denying the humanity of Black people, Native Americans and Muslims, along with a long list of racial, ethnic and religious "others." The differences are largely about how best to do this.

....(snip)....

JD Vance fits the neocon model on multiple counts. First and most obviously, his Silicon Valley backers not only embrace the eugenic arguments advanced in “The Bell Curve,” but center those arguments ideologically. This connection, bringing Silicon Valley wealth and social media influence into the picture, is clearly a dominant consideration. Newitz offered several intertwined thoughts on the subject:

While researching my book, I found that techniques the military had used for psyops had become common in culture wars. ... Before that time, psyops had been reserved for use against foreign adversaries, but now they were being used by Americans on other Americans. Psychological war became culture war. And we're still seeing the results of that, with industry moguls taking up the cause in the present day. [Elon] Musk and [Peter] Thiel are doing essentially what rich industrialists such as Henry Ford did, when he bought a Michigan newspaper and used it to publish Nazi propaganda during the 1920s. ...

I think the ruling class always wants to justify its power with a mystical or pseudo-scientific story that suggests they are truly the chosen ones and that they deserve to rule. Of course the barons of Silicon Valley are drawn to myths about their superior intelligence because they work in an industry that values smarts and rewards brilliant inventors. The "Bell Curve" myth is also a story about meritocracy — it suggests that white people control the majority of our nation's wealth because they deserve it, due to their mental prowess. It has nothing to do with luck or inherited wealth or an unequal playing field.

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https://www.salon.com/2024/08/18/donald-and-jd-vance-decoding-a-double-dose-of-right-wing/

2 replies

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Donald Trump and JD Vance: Decoding a double dose of right-wing racism (Original Post) marmar Aug 2024 OP

Interesting jacksonian Aug 2024 #1

"techniques the military had used for psyops" orthoclad Aug 2024 #2

jacksonian

(750 posts)

1. Interesting

Reply to marmar (Original post)

Mon Aug 19, 2024, 12:40 AM

Aug 2024

We need to treat these racist myths as what they are: weapons in the culture war, intended to coerce, mislead and intimidate. They are not good-faith policy arguments or suggestions. But that doesn't mean we should take up arms against them. I argue for a ceasefire in the culture wars, which means that we need to tell different stories — stories about Black history, Black excellence and competence.

But it also means coming up with effective ways of dealing with misinformation and propaganda in the public sphere. ... There is no way to engage productively with psyops — you can't have a reasonable conversation with someone who is telling you that you are stupid or morally defective. I've been intrigued by the Harris campaign's shift away from trying to debate the neocons with logic about democracy — instead, they are telling a new story, about a Black and South Asian woman who represents justice and thoughtful engagement with real political policies. Instead of engaging with Trump's weaponized rhetoric, they are basically shrugging it off as "weird" and moving on. That's a great response to a psyop — decline to engage with it and change the subject to something real.

What lies ahead? Walsh said he has no idea: “If Trump wins, all bets are off,” but if the Democrats triumph, the future remains murky in a different way. “Ordinarily you’d expect an American political party to go through a profound leadership crisis if it loses multiple consecutive presidential elections," he said. "But considering how the GOP is effectively an apparatus of the Trump personality cult at this point, I think he remains the paramount figure until he dies ... There’s no universally popular successor.”

I think when Trump loses this election he is done as a shaker but will spend the rest of life as a GOP gadfly, interfering with any direction the party tries to move towards. For historical context, in Rosenberg's article replace conservatism with late 19th century populism and you see Trump as the GOP's William Jennings Bryan, who's constant desire for nominations pushed the Democratic party to a string of Presidential defeats in the early 20th century (only Wilson until FDR).

orthoclad

(4,728 posts)

2. "techniques the military had used for psyops"

Reply to marmar (Original post)

Mon Aug 19, 2024, 04:53 PM

Aug 2024

Last edited Mon Aug 19, 2024, 08:14 PM - Edit history (1)

This is exactly what I have been saying for years.

The ruling class - including a lot of names we never hear - has studied the 20th century. They have studied liberation movements, and they employ many of the CIA figures who fought them. They have studied Che Guevara and Cesar Chavez, Augusto Pinochet, Henry Kissinger and Allen Dulles. They have access to the reams of covert action strategy developed in the 20th Century.

Bolton let the cat out of the bag when he said that we know how to conduct coups, in a televised interview.

The US ruling class has enough generational wealth to afford both patience and organization: the patience to work for generations in how to seize and hold power, the wealth to buy up independent media and university administrations. The problems we face today were spelled out in detail in the 1971 Powell Memo, and are fleshed out in Project 2025.
https://www.whitehouse.senate.gov/news/speeches/the-scheme-1-the-powell-memo/

The people of the US are now and have been treated by the wealthy like we used to treat people of Eastern Bloc and Third World countries, as pawns to be used and thrown away in the pursuit of power and wealth. This explains the callous sacrifice of MAGAs to covid, and the cynical suppression of human rights in polls, schools, and hospitals.

So-called culture wars are classic divide and conquer tactics, using powerful and legitimate issues of racism, sexism and other issues to monopolize our attention and divert it from the people whose hands are in our pockets robbing and oppressing us. It's necessary to defeat Trump, but the forces behind him will remain threats.

We must walk and chew gum. We must acknowledge and address the special oppressions, including slavery and genocide, of African and indigenous people, and realize that these oppressions are part and parcel of the smothering blanket that lays across all our faces. It's no accident that chattel slavery - the ultimate in stolen labor - and capitalism were birthed together, and that the indigenous peoples of the Americas were extinguished in the pursuit of resources to feed the fossil-powered smoke-belching factories.

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