Who's to Blame? Ask the Far Right--They Have a List.

[Nevilledog]

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/whos-to-blame-ask-the-far-right-they-have-list

FOR ALL ITS CLAIMS TO REPRESENT the interests of the People, the far right sure doesn’t appear to like a lot of them.

The movement’s list of enemies is so capacious it would put Richard Nixon’s to shame. Some days, it seems as though it encompasses most of the human race. You might wonder how to square this with the right’s commitment to tradition and order. How can a society be justly ordered if it has been set up to exclude most people? The answer is that much of the far right’s social vision is fundamentally volkisch: Homogeneity and unity are goals that override democratic inclusion, and this is where the movement’s resentful agonism comes from.

“Resentful” is a key term here: Anyone who has read or listened to the movement’s leading figures is familiar with the tone of endless aggrievement. This owes to their mental habit of combining snobbish elitism with deep anxiety about dispossession. You are this country’s natural aristocracy, the grifters and thinkers of the far right tell their supporters—well, you would be, anyway, if not for all the wastoids, welfare queens, demonic leftists, and nonwhite people playing blockbuster movie roles that should, for reasons they never quite clearly explain, go to white people. “The bottom 2 percent of society have caused all of the manifest problems in your lives” is a perfect distillation of this view.1 The sense of prevailing threat from below nourishes the far right’s siege mentality.

While there is real variation—and sometimes even creativity—in far-right thought, certain features remain consistent. One of these is that there is always an enemy who is primarily responsible for our “manifest problems.”

The primary enemy role can be played by just about anyone, and a large cast has been forced to cycle through it. Until his recent defeat, Viktor Orbán fearmongered about Muslim invasions, LGBTQ and feminist activists, “citizens of the world,” and George Soros. The People’s Party of Canada, led by Maxime Bernier, attacks “woke ideology” and immigrants, imagined as lazy bums eager for the dole. In the U.K., the Reform party likewise traffics in heavy doses of Islamophobia and attacks out-of-touch liberal Europeans. MAGA in the United States has a genius for finding enemies everywhere it looks: Mexican immigrants, left-wing professors and journalists, Communists (in 2026!), socialists, and Hasan Piker. Glenn Ellmers, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, has argued that “more than half” of the people living in America today “are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term,” which is why “overturning the existing post-American order” has become a patriotic necessity.

*snip*

[Norrrm]

1. The party of personal responsibility.

To conservatives/republicans, personal responsibility means finding some other person to blame.

[underpants]

2. Wow. Great read. A line from the last paragraph.

In the end, the far right believes that most humans are unworthy and incapable of self-rule, and so ought to be ruled by the worthy.

I’m not faulting the author since this was about the Far Right, but the patriarchy took me back to the “Promise Keepers”. I ran into a few in a corporate setting innyhe late 90’s. I think was during the rise of “The Family”. Oddly, the Promise Keepers weren’t as based on merit but righteousness. They were as successful because they were simply better people and more deserving than through intelligence, hard work, and persistence. The Promise was that as long as their wives were subservient to them, they wouldn’t cheat on them or dump them from the wives’s opulent life.