“There will always be some people who feel they need someone to be above, and an egalitarian society cannot grant that; privilege must be earned, and cannot be permanent. That group will necessarily be resentful in an equal society. But if the majority loses ground they have common cause with that resentful faction.”

“We cannot have an upper class without also having a lower class, and that must be forbidden, but we can see that everyone is fed, housed, and clothed, and that everyone has the freedom to live a full life.”

Also, “There are few things in modern conservative politics that cannot be explained, in whole or part, as expressions of threatened masculinity.”

And, “Humans can fall back into instinctive ape tribalism.”

This is what Trump’s base is rebelling against. The Fat Tonys (in Taleb’s sense) just see through it.

Some people might then just go down the spiral in a self-reinforcing loop of acting in a brutalist way, and resolving cognitive dissonance by adopting brutalist belief systems (or the other way round). Of course, participating in brutalist belief systems itself needs to be resolved by further going down the rabbit hole (e.g. by starting to believe that brutalism is the only thing there is, which absolves you from any responsibility). Again, there is perhaps something counter-intuitive in this view: Exactly because a system is so toxic, and because many of the participants deep down know that something is wrong about it, it can exert such pull (something less toxic induces less dissonance, and thus less need to resolve it by doubling down). See moral disengagement.

Perhaps it is worth noting that while this view might not rely on the existence of “true” brutalists (whatever that may mean), it certainly does not exclude the possibility that such people may exist

1. Empathy (this one I see already reflected in the discussion here, but perhaps putting it in different words helps):

I have been starting to think about the topic once I caught myself in brutalist thought as you might see it in yourself (how to defend democracy against brutalists? they are scary! etc etc).

To me, the presence of this brutalist shadow in most (or all?) of us is a rather encouraging fact, as it allows us to empathize with “them”, and imagine “them” to “switch sides” (through direct interactions with “us”, changing societal conditions, etc). The other way round, it is not too difficult for me to imagine a parallel universe where I might be one of “them”, although that is of course impossible to tell. Perhaps a little counter-intuitively, or perhaps trivially, the presence of this shadow within us may point to a way for how to live with people who by all appearances have become their shadows.

2. Eating animals
I have been living vegan for a year now, and well, this opened up a whole different viewpoint at the world. There are billions of individuals who are enslaved, genetically modified, and killed. Now eating meat is positively correlated with social dominance orientation and right-wing authoritarianism (see publication “meat-related cognitive dissonance”), but there are way more than 35% of society actively engaged in supporting this utterly unnecessary and damaging system.

This raises a few questions which are well suited to damage a clear sense of separation between left and right. In fact, in vegan spaces it is a well-known trope that leftists often defend their participation in this system by borrowing from “conservative” (brutalist) thought. Oppression is being defended on grounds of arbitrary qualities, most strikingly of course the quality of who can breed with whom (see speciesism). How is this possible? Are these people bad, do they want to in fact oppress other species? Are they afraid of nonhuman animals taking over?

The answer which I believe every vegan believes in is: no, these are not bad people, even if they on the surface of it support steep social hierarchies. After all, most vegans used to be meat-eaters at some point as well. It seems rather the case that the pull of cultural patterns can be so strong as to completely overwhelm individuals in their sense of direction, to the point where these individuals perform actions and voice opinions which are actually inconsistent with their core believes.

If you have asked yourself how this perspective is relevant to the topic at hand, this is where I believe it is: This inconsistency is very very stable, which may seem as if there was some deep belief somewhere down there. But there usually is nothing of substance (I won’t go through the trouble of convincing you of this in case you don’t believe me here). The one thing which all meat eaters have in common is that they are eating meat, and there is experimental evidence showing that once you are participating in something, you feel the need to justify it (this has also been confirmed for eating meat, see “meat-related cognitive dissonance” again). And that’s it.

So a big junk of what we are seeing might be due to people resolving their cognitive dissonance. You start participating in a movement for a set of rather random reasons (being born to a conservative couple), and once you are in there the way back is rather difficult. At some point you will go out of your way to defend an ideology even though it contradicts your deepest-held values at a fundamental level. This is not yet taking into account social phenomena such as peer pressure and so on, which often add to that.

Taking into account what I just said, and taking into account the other things you said, I believe there is no need to posit that 35% of the US population deeply adhere to brutalism in the sense I believe it is discussed here. Perhaps that distinction becomes rather meaningless once a person is so deeply entrenched in toxic belief systems that there is no way to tell anymore what lies (or laid) beneath, but it might be a healthier approach.

This was written rather ad-hoc, forgive me please if something doesn’t add up 🙂

But whatever, you got the gist of it.

Peace out and try not to kill anyone 🙂

The answer is not 35%. It is 100%. Everyone.

The very notion of “exterminating millions to install logic/liberalism/progress/etc” as countless would-be Dr. Timothys throughout History murmured in a secret wish, is that the exasperation they feel is precisely the mirror image of their opponents, who also have their plans endless descriptions of their enemies wretchedness and squalidness. This feeling is, of course, what every organism in this Universe will ever feel. Life is precisely exploitation, the will-to-dominate, and even tragic, sappy descriptions of this fact — as Dr Timothy as done in a manner so prosaic in this vert post — are themselves just strategies to in this endless game of power and dominance.

Does the rabbit not hate the wolf’s brutality? Does the wolf not hate the rabbit’s stubborn “uncooperative” disposition?

Behold how little it took for this anodyne “liberal” to get the bayonet out — and scream charge at the brutes! Yet, the primordial irony is what drives him is exactly what drive his opponents. How ecumenical, one would think, each man truly equal to one another. That is the tragedy of the human race, forever united in the same hunger, in the same WILL to keep fighting and tearing each other apart.

That’s a good challenge and it would take quite a while to answer it, because I’d have to come at it from several angles. One of them would be sifting through some of the other common attempts by interlocutors who see themselves as liberal democrats to try and understand the Trump base or its predecessors–George Packer’s The Unraveling of America, Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers Among Us, and many recent other books and essays, including quite a bit of online writing, sometimes by people formerly ‘inside’ the right or associated with right-wing groups like the Proud Boys. Across that broad space, I think a couple of themes recurrently come up. First, what I offer here as the first logic of devotion to Trump–a sense of alienation and marginalization from the globalized, knowledge-worker-favoring, urban-cosmopolitan political economy that was to some extent a joint creation of both Republicans and Democrats in the recovery from the oil shock and recession of the 1970s. That goes along with the sense that I think Rick Perlstein among others captures well of bewilderment in the years between Goldwater’s rise and Reagan’s ascension of rapid cultural-social changes that felt like they couldn’t be “real” or “natural” but were somehow orchestrated. (And here the “paranoid style” in American politics has its own venerable school of analysts who see it going back very deep into 20th and even 19th Century sociocultural roots.)

Where I get the “but they are also authoritarians” is that I think this whole line of explanation (alienation from the globalized, cosmopolitan, multicultural, urban, etc. in American life and a sense of economic marginalization attributed to that change) is insufficient to explain the devotion not just to Trump but to many figures on the right since Gingrich’s “Contract With America”. Because what the allegedly alienated and marginalized seem to seek is neither the restoration of a stable set of cultural and social signifiers and values (they abandon many hobbyhorses quite easily) nor is it the actual remedying of their marginalization via a coherent set of policy reforms that would actually favor their interests. (Trump has had to spend frantically to try and soften the consequences of some of his almost random or unfocused foreign policy and economic policy, and his appeal has always rested on thinking so magical that I just feel many of his supporters must know it is not going to and cannot happen.

So there’s an alternative line of thinking that you see reflected here in the comments from others: that this is the consequence of a devoted project of 24/7 propaganda (which as Corey Gallagher argues, might be seen as turning 19% support for Nixon in his last days into 35% support for Trump). I think there’s something to this but that it is simply a line of explanation that I am never comfortable with as a historian in any case (that any ideological project ever transfers intact into the consciousness of its viewers without their agency and their creative adaptation of what they hear to their own ends; I at all times want to credit all human beings with a significant measure of agency and responsibility for how they listen to and use what they hear and see.

There is also just my life of listening and observing to Americans across the political spectrum and I suppose this is a major influence on this analysis as well. What I am responding to in part in this essay is in particular the way that many white, conservative Americans have been talking for at least two generations about law and criminal justice–an outrage at the idea of the expanded legal and Constitutional protections provided by the Warren Court, a support for the building of a massive carceral apparatus, an indifference to the findings of groups like the Innocence Project who have turned up so many cases of deliberate misuse of evidence to produce false convictions, and a comfort with ideas of self-defense that lead to support for moments like George Zimmerman’s killing of Trayvon Martin. A devotion to a fear-based conception of American society even as crime rates have fallen. Race is predominant in most of that, and yet what’s striking is that it’s one of the few things where small fractions of Black, Latino and Asian-American communities find common cause with the right, even when they are unfairly targeted by police and the justice system and even if they live in varying situations of precarious exposure to criminal violence. I think that’s where I see the strongest manifestation of what I here term brutalism, and I think it has roots that go back to lynching, to vigilante justice, and to the mythology of the Western frontier. A notion that it is better to do what you need to do, what you want to see done, by direct force–even if it isn’t legal and maybe even if it isn’t in any sense moral, and that you want a political system that not only forgives such action but is aligned with it. In more recent years, you could see some of this seeping through the support for American commission of torture and extrajudicial confinement in “the war on Terror” but also in an appetite for a “man on a white horse” who could cut through the stagnation in Washington by decree. We use other words for that sentiment–“populism”, for example–but it is at its heart an impatience with liberal democratic institutions and a belief that direct action by a single leader above us all is the only hope for society. I also do think that ties into a belief that authority is in some sense cruel that you can particularly hear in strongly conservative evangelism that brings Old Testament stories more prominently into worship and engagement with scripture–that the world is hostile, that God’s mystery includes the cruelty of his judgement and that the righteous must be as prepared for his wrath as his love. I think you can see it in prepper culture–that to survive the future that is coming, one must prepare to be the last man standing. Each of those subcultures of ‘brutalist’ thought has its own bibliography, and I’d be glad to talk more about the ones I have more knowledge about where there is something of a literature (both primary sources and scholarship) to reference.

In these efforts your writings on this blog have been touchstones for me, especially your insistence that “you can’t afford to treat communities and groups that you politically oppose, however fiercely, as if their motivations and habitus aren’t as complex and historically intricate as any other community or group. . . You have to be curious about everything, or you might as well be curious about nothing.” I have tried to incorporate curiosity about the other as a scholarly and personal discipline. I am aware that such curiosity is possible only in conditions where I am relatively safe. Approaching enemies with curiosity is a privilege, not a criterion for being a good person. But, I have maintained, critical curiosity is a vital gear to be able to shift into when you can do so safely. I want there to be someone, somewhere, able and willing to be curious, rigorous, and nuanced about even the most toxic groups/ideologies. When that someone is me, I try my best to rise to the challenge.

It stings, then, to hear you describe your own thinking along these lines–if I understand you correctly–as “climbing voluntarily into a right-wing apparatus of profoundly self-aware tendentious manipulation and contributing indirectly to the moving of Overton windows.” Certainly that is how critically curious studies of/engagements with culturally brutalist groups can appear to those most directly and immediately victimized by those groups. There is a feeling sometimes that attempting nuanced or rigorous representations of “them” amounts to a betrayal of “us.” I’ve resisted such sentiments in the past as too uncomfortably similar to the all-or-nothing worldviews I both study and resist.

That said, I hear–and join–the exhausted disillusionment in your words. There’s only so much nuance I can point to without acknowledging a radioactive core of aggrieved white entitlement (and rapacity, frankly) on today’s populist right. Engaging that core, I’ve come to recognize, risks spreading and being sickened by its radiation. (And, so far as I can tell, those within that ideological/cultural core feel similarly about me and mine.) In multiple ways over multiple decades, many on the right have told us repeatedly and volubly that we have no place in the world they wish to create. Perhaps it is time to be clearer about the reverse: the future has no place for de facto or de jure white supremacists. Dinosaur, meet meteor.

But there’s no meteor, no magic Infinity Gauntlet snap where enemies conveniently crumble into dust and blow away. (And a lot of me is horrified at the parts of me that would even fantasize about such a thing.) There is, at best, long-term demographic shifting and white-minority retrenchment of power-resource monopolies. The 35% is with us–nationally, locally, even familially–regardless of what happens after the election. And, as you mention, “with us” is relative given the reality of clustering.

Some of us live in places where we know mostly or only folk who believe as we do. Others of us do not. Rarely do I hear my East- and West-coast megacity colleagues who call out the privilege of curiosity acknowledge their own privilege of disengagement. They have no one in their personal or professional bubbles who votes for the other person. Those of us in “flyover country” are often obliged to adapt to the reality of everyday coexistence with people who would prefer us gone (and who know/believe we think the same of them).

I guess what I’m saying is that curiosity and careful engagement–even with groups and people who espouse utterly vile ideologies–are the only tools I have. I’m not able or willing at present to take up arms and root them out of my community, nor do I have access to magic gloves that make them vanish. All I have is the discipline of curiosity tempered by the reality of survival.

There’s a performative element here (performative as in illocutionary, not as in “fake”). I must behave as if the brutal 35% can become more than, different than, what they are now, even if I don’t see how that could be so. And–not always, but sometimes–I have found that performative gesture yields results: I do discover things salvageable and precious in the other. I see people stepping outside of aggrieved white entitlement. I sense my own presuppositions shifting in that same painful-productive way that I feel when I successfully grapple with a complicated research question. There are no conversions, no grand reversals. But there’s something.

Of course, that’s mainly on person-to-person levels, and only sometimes. I don’t know if or how that scales up. It certainly doesn’t work at digital media levels. And I don’t know whether such what-I-do-to-get-by measures end up helping or hurting things. Am I normalizing rapacious brutalism? Am I moving the needle, micron by micron, more toward a better world? Both? Neither? My thinking on that question changes from day to day, hour to hour.

The TL; DR: is there any bathwater with that baby of curiosity and engagement worth keeping? And what other choice do we really have? In any case, thanks for your work and vulnerability.

First, yes, 35% of the country doesn’t believe in democracy. They’re authoritarian personalities. But a good fraction of MANY countries are authoritarian personalities. What’s different in America today versus 1974 (when Nixon had 19% support when he resigned) is … rightwing media. I promise that not all of that 35% hates democracy. Some are genuinely brainwashed by Fox and Limbaugh.

If you don’t believe that, and most liberals are resistant to believing that others’ views can be shaped by their information environment, please watch “The Brainwashing Of My Dad”. It shows this effect by anecdote. If you want more data-founded version of the argument let me know and I can send studies.

Second, it’s clear that the minoritarian structures in this country make it possible for 35% of the country to rule the rest. We don’t have to change everyone’s mind (again 19% of the country supported Nixon when all the information was out), we can have a stable country if 20% are authoritarians and the rest support democracy. Although I am not sure that will be stable unless we get our massive lying rightwing media problem under control. After WWII, Father Coughlin was pushed off the air. Will we do the same with Hannity, Limbaugh, and Murdoch?