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Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 10h

a thing that Trump's political and tech's current business strategy have in common is confident reliance on the enthusiasm of the public for being told comforting lies.

turn that photo of your kid into an endearing video of a moment that never happened!

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Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 12h

i don't think an "ordinary" reactionary necessarily thinks they personally would be better off, but they do think the people they think of as good and best, perhaps justified as most capable of leading, would rise in the hierarchy. /fin

Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 12h

i think we need a distinct name for this, the negative reactionary, i don't want to refer to a past because it is better for me or mine or my values, but because it is worse for my enemies. 1/

Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 14h

just tell me this, do they eat quiche?

Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 14h

sometimes they talk that way, but so far i don’t see a lot of the herrenvolk socialism they could very effectively, very dangerously, deploy.

Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 14h

“libertarian futurists!”, the reactionaries laugh, checkbook in hand. /fin

Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 14h

yeah, i think guilded-era restorationists qualify as reactionaries. but i think they are a small, albeit much too influential, group. the people they finance pursue objectives consistent with theirs, but do not conceive of the project the same way. 1/

Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 14h

Maybe my glasses are tinted by my own commitments, but I don’t see a lot of people mad about talking about the ways Trump is screwing the working class, only people mad when the destroying democracy / having masked paramilitaries round people up stuff gets characterized as “distraction”.

Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 14h

but the soil was fertilized by something quite new, and that new thing is still the dominant part of the “alt right” or MAGA or whatever, although i’d guess it has little defense against and will easily succumb to the culture and hierarchy that championed chattel slavery. /fin

Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 14h

it’s an easy path a lot of them have now tread. but i think it’s a misreading of that movement that it started there. like a poison seed, an old form of American reaction, antebellum in fact, has sprouted and taken firm root. 8/

Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 14h

obviously that all bleeds and blurs into over white supremacy you can characterize as reaction. if you were discriminating against people who look like me but people who look like me were still disproportionate at the top, maybe that just means we’re genetically better. 7/

Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 14h

right populism criticizes the former neoliberal center not so much from an overt claim of white supremacy, but from a claim of liberal hypocrisy, of failing to honor ideals they too thought they bought. when you said antidiscrimination you just meant people could discriminate against me. 6/

Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 14h

those people are reactionaries — they sat atop a Jim Crow racial hierarchy, lost that position, want it back. but i don’t think that characterizes most of the politics of the contemporary right wing. 5/

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Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 14h

i don’t deny that old school reactionaries have latched onto them. a whole universe of quiet KKK sympathizers rides along with Candace Owens but has a tree in mind if she gets “uppity”. 4/

Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 14h

that’s why i do think reactionary is the wrong word for them. they were not winners of any past. they were losers then, losers through the neoliberal period to, were casting about in the early 2010s for some outsider politics to latch onto, that’s all MAGA really is to them. 3/

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Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 14h

the main relationship the contemporary right has with, say, William Buckley is adopting race as a kind of totem of hierarchical position. it’s like Trump is a poor man’s version of a rich man, a steampunk version of the 1950s is their idiot version of a world they could stand atop. 2/

Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 14h

i don’t think the people you’re calling reactionaries want a wealth / birth elite back, though. nick fuentes, ben shapiro, candace owens, jd vance, donald trump. these people don’t represent the apex of a prior hierarchy. they were either subordinates or also-rans then. 1/

Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 14h

the florida citrus industry has basically been wiped out by a blight. there has been an impact, orange juice has become less culturally ubiquitous, no longer a default nonnegotiable component of breakfast. but we’re not dead. don’t even have scurvy.