My summary of Ceglowski's posts has an implicit "for federal politics in the United States" attached. For the past few years he only talks about US and Hong Kong politics, but unlike most of the talky universitied people who do that he actually visits Hong Kong and works to get people elected in the United States. Before that he was trying to organize workers at US ad and personal information companies.
His essays / talks were useful for self-governing people everywhere, but his political actions are just academic for those of us outside those two countries.
And yes, I feel like the current Trump supporters' flailing about will subside, but I guess we'll see.
It hurts me to talk and think about this or to try to explain, because I have a unique background, but I will try one more time to give my model.
There are the millions of coloured hat types who are edging each other on to commit mass violence for white male supremacy (
authoritarian followers). There are the
useful idiots who will apologize for whatever a Republican president does like Victor Davis Hanson. But then there are a whole crowd of
clever, dilligent, terrible people like Gina Haspell who are saying to themselves "we can go harder-core on the authoritarianism than we did under Bush II, we don't need to dog-whistle and observe the proprieties like only murdering and torturing people in distant countries." These people don't give a hog's turd for Trump or Trumpism, other than that he is a halfway effective authoritarian leader. And these are the really dangerous ones, because the US state is very good at resisting physical violence (just look at how the domestic terrorism of the 1970s faded away), but so far it is not very effective at resisting fascism from within.
The authoritarian followers can bludgeon, shoot, or drive over one or two people at a time as they have since the 2016 US election and this is terrible and tragic. It is the wannabe authoritarian leaders and office-holders who can build the re-education camps and turn that tragedy into a statistic. Americans are very very lucky that Trump was not interested in picking the useful Berias and Goebels out of the crowd of ruthless, greedy, incompetent people who flocked around him in 2016 and 2017.
I am very sorry and it hurts me to talk about this.
Talking about "Trump supporters" is a superficial journalistic way of thinking about problems which are really structural. David '
Orcinus' Neiwert noticed that the hate crimes and embrace of madness by elected officials and professional sharers-of-opinions increased in
2008 after Obama's election. The kidnappings, murders, and tortures by federal agencies began in the first administration of Bush Minor. The deranged online commentators who we talk about this year are just continuing the work bringing increasingly radical ideas together and sharing them which Fox News, bookstores, and radio shows did in the late 20th century and the 2000s. The conservative movement in the United States has been heading in this direction for at least 40 years, its part of a global network including other national governments and powerful parties, and it won't stop until its publicly humiliated or until the patient sociopath wing decides that the impulsive showmen are no longer useful tools. Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" came out in 1964 right?
And in response to all the dehumanizing language from conservatives, many people who see themselves as liberals or progressives have embraced authoritarianism and started using dehumanizing language. Anyone who says "inevitable" is selling something, but once you descend this many steps into the Pit of Civil Strife its hard to turn around and climb back out.