So far right did politics float that Richard Nixon is now a moderate and Pat Leahy looks like Che Guevara. The furthest-left there is to be is what conservatives call “radical liberal.” This should be an oxymoron, but given the span of the possible, it is not. With political possibility, language too is squeezed. The signature Trumpian gesture is hyperbole. But understatement is equally pernicious. White nationalism that comes to power through the electoral process—like Nazism did—is now called “illiberal democracy.” This strikes me as an obscene euphemism, like “ethnic cleansing.”
This year a lot of white people woke up. But it is hard to stay woke. So many outrages are committed every day that outrage becomes a chore. So much violent hatred—the shooting of Indian engineers, the desecrated Jewish cemeteries—is ignored and excused that demands for condemnation feel like nagging. So regular are the deceptions that lying is a joke, so acute the anxiety that boredom would be a relief.
The distance stretches between that horizon and the place where you are standing—between what you desire and what is on offer. Radicalism turns to fatigue, fatigue to pain. To feel less pain, sooner or later you have to feel less. What you have to feel less of is desire.
Then, before you know it, the Wall Street Journal is an oracle of truth. You’re rooting for Cold War II. The FBI is your BFF. You’re a Democrat.
And hopes? At the moment my fantasy is Jeff Sessions blindfolded before a firing squad, about to be executed for treason. Then I remember I despise patriotism and oppose the death penalty.
[Judith Levine, "Descent into Liberalism", n+1]
If we continue to define our group's identity by what has been done to us, we will continue to be object rather than subject.
[Jessa Crispin, Why I Am Not a Feminist]
Seattle WTO protests, 1999
The press, like the Democratic Party, is an appendage of the consumer society. These institutions are not about politics or news. They are about imparting an experience. They create political personalities, marketed as celebrities, to make us feel good about candidates. These manufactured emotions, the product of the dark arts of the public relations industry, determine how we vote. Issues and policies are irrelevant. It is marketing and entertainment. Trump is a skillful marketer of his fictitious self.
[Chris Hedges, "Donald Trump's Greatest Allies Are the Liberal Elites", Truthdig]
One of the jokes at Partisan Review was “Dwight is looking for a disciple who will tell him what to think.” Even in his Marxist period, Macdonald was not a systematic or even a consistent thinker. But he was drawn to Greenberg’s scheme. He adopted the avant-garde and kitsch, or highbrow-lowbrow, distinction, and the historical account that went along with it: a story about the emergence of something called “the masses,” the destruction of folk art, and the rise of a debased commercial culture and its profit-seeking manufacturers—“the Lords of Kitsch,” as Macdonald came to call them.
Louis Menand, "Browbeaten: Dwight Macdonald's War on Midcult", The New Yorker]
“I never had an abortion, but my mother did. She didn’t tell me about it, but from what I pieced together after her death from a line in her F.B.I. file, which my father, the old radical, had requested along with his own, it was in 1960, so like almost all abortions back then, it was illegal.”
[Clara Jeffrey reviews Katha Pollitt's Pro for New York Times]
“The twenty-first century is basically defined by nonessential human beings, who do not fit into the market as consumers or producers or as laborers,” he said. “That manifests itself differently in different classes and geographic areas. For white, middle-class, male, useless people—who have just enough family context to not be crushed by poverty—they become failsons.” The “Chapo Trap House” guys are sincerely concerned with American inequality; at the same time, their most instinctive sympathies seem to fall with people whose worst-case scenario is a feeling of purposelessness. “Some of them turn into Nazis,” Christman continued. “Others become aware of the consequences of capitalism.”
[Jia Tolentino, "What Will Become of the Dirtbag Left?", The New Yorker]
“I support white power, black power, brown power and yellow power,” Heimbach says. “All races should be the dominant political force in their region. That is why America needs to be divided into smaller, ethnically and culturally homogenous states. In countries where races are mixed, one race will always dominate the others. That is why we need separation. Not because the white race is better than the black race. We need to stop the hate and separate.”
Still, for all his talk about respect for other races, his politics, like most others on the far right, has a prominent streak of anti-Semitism. He firmly believes that the Jews are working diligently behind the scenes to eradicate the white race, faith and culture. “We can’t win against them by arguing,” he said at the Stormfront conference. “You can’t out-Jew the Jew. It’s like playing chess with a pigeon. No matter how good you are at chess, eventually someone’s going to knock the board over and poop on it. Let’s stop worrying about out-Jewing them or outsmarting them. Let’s just stand for what we believe in, which is faith, family and folk — the three things that make us a nation.”
[Vegas Tenold, "The Little Fuhrer: A Day in the Life of the Newest Leader of White Nationalists", Al Jazeera America]
