The Tyranny of the Living Dead

I have, up to now, purposefully resisted writing about our current political crisis both out of sheer nausea and the fact that I do not want to have written Thinkpiece # 6,734,595,409,215,179 about a certain president and how America is falling into fascism (it is). What I want to write about instead is what I think is going to happen to the people who voted for him, and what has been my emotional state as a liberal Democrat when I watch them get economically erased.

There are a few sources, first of all, that I would like to draw from, as a background for why I think they voted for Trump, and how the Republican party has thoroughly captured them and entirely alienated them from their history. The first is Thomas Frank's wonderful What's the Matter With Kansas?, which tells the story of how Republicans use social issues as a smokescreen to entice voters before turning around and exacting economic devastation upon them. This, I think, despite being written in 2005 (The "Before" Time, if you watch South Park), tells a story of exploitation that continues to be accurate into our current Black Mirror universe. The second source is A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn, which tells the history of labor in its conflict with capital since before the birth of the country, and before the Republicans conned voters and alienated them from their history. The third source is Nothing to Fear by Adam Cohen, which was about FDR and the creation and implementation of the New Deal.

I would also like to remind everyone of who voted for Trump: Union members voted for Trump. Veterans voted for Trump. Farmers voted for Trump. And, in fairness, we also have to point out that women also voted for Trump. HOWEVER, the reason why I do not crucify women the same way that I am willing to crucify other groups is that they have now mobilized against him and are now leading the resistance against him and running for office in record numbers because of the shock of his election.

The shocking and sad part about many of these groups isn't necessarily that they were duped, but rather that their attachment to their oppressors had been cultivated--literally a cult--over a period of decades. This is what Frank wrote about in his book: The strategy is to promise to fight for them on social issues (which Trump is actually doing) and crush them economically. Except that at the same time that they are passing legislation designed to hurt them, Republicans will turn around and blame "market forces" or "the Free Market" or other such nonsense. And they believe it! Steinbeck had reportedly remarked that "socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires"

It cannot be overstated that the very principle of the free market ideology and the "self-made man" is specifically designed as propaganda intended to bestow a false sense of power in the people at the bottom, and provide moral justification for the ruthless machinations of capitalism. It turns the very goal of ethics on its ear! It serves only to give license to oppression in its Nietzschean ideal:

"I made my money, so I have a right to treat you like this. But don't worry! With enough hard work in the mines, the factories, and the farms, you and your children can be as rich as me."

Here I would like to make one detour and talk about the teacher strikes in the southern midwest. There is a simple reason why teachers are able to strike when no one else is, and that is that those teachers are the only people who remember, who are connected to knowledge. And the fact that they are successful means that the rich have forgotten as much as the people they have erased.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, both before and after Karl Marx wrote his books, workers in the United States began to organize in the factories, in the mines, and on the farms. People staged strikes, boycotts, and picket lines in order to win higher wages and better working conditions. In response, the United States government, at the behest of the capitalists, routinely resorted to violence. In 1914, a miners' strike in Ludlow, Colorado lasted for 6 months before it was suppressed by the National Guard and their Gatling guns. Howard Zinn also points out that the wages of the soldiers ordered to suppress the strike were provided by Rockefeller. This kind of violence, as I noted before, was routine all the way up until FDR and the creation of the New Deal. It is worth noting that A People's History of the United States is banned in prisons, and last year the Arkansas legislature wanted to ban it.

What I am trying to demonstrate is that the people who voted for Trump are ahistorical; they are severed from their history with no real way to recover. They have no way to relearn, and no way to get away from the garbage that has replaced their knowledge (Fox News and Alex Jones, among others). Knowledge is power, and if people lose their knowledge, they become the living dead. The reason that there is no return for for the people who lost this knowledge lies in the emotional strength of what has replaced it; the knowledge purged from their minds has been replaced by complete and utter nonsense that, to outsiders (people living in the nontotalitarian world) is absolutely unintelligible. In this way, even their very humanity has been stolen from them. Evangelicals (who love Trump more than Jesus) now do not believe that the US should accept refugees, and are completely OK with Trump and Stormy Daniels.

This is a big reason why I never understood why we say that there's a "liberal bubble" while we deny the existence of a "conservative bubble." Let me ask: Which ideology incorporates the existence of different people? Which ideology incorporates objective knowledge? Is the only real crime of the liberals the denial of the existence of poor white conservatives? Do they in fact deny it, or do they--for reasons of maintaining sanity--merely deny their power? But that, again, is a conservative feint: The FBI chose to prosecute Timothy McVeigh as an individual, and deny his connection to a wider fascist movement, despite the fact that these movement were--and are--powerful.

Then why--in whose interest--are the conservatives being coddled--against the health of both the society and the United States government itself? Forcing them to participate in society as enlightened individuals, restoring their humanity, is not of economic interest. Above and beyond reasons of capitalism, undertaking such a project would be an immense burden, and it's not like other attempts at nation-building have been successful. On the other hand, it may be necessary, lest the rest of us become their hostages. Reconstruction was in fact successful until it was aborted, but it failed to change the South in any fundamental or permanent way.

This isn't the first time this has happened. A significant amount of time in A People's History of the United States is dedicated to explaining how racism between African slaves, Native Americans, and the European settlers was almost entirely artificial--it had to be manufactured through changing social norms and passing legislation criminalizing any kind of cooperation between Europeans and the slave population. Zinn goes to great lengths to explain the long process of creating what we see in the South and the fear and urgency felt on the part of the capitalist class against the real threat of interracial cooperation. What happened in recent decades, as described by Frank, and that we see in the age of Trump, is simply another manifestation of these same processes.

Their disconnection from reality is indeed frightening, and their ability to discern substance from spectacle is in doubt. Despite the fact that little was actually accomplished at the Trump-Kim Summit, the mere appearance of something could be enough for them. On top of that, they are not even concerned that a hostile foreign government violated the sovereignty of their country; rather, they have embraced their enemy and thanked Putin for the assist. Their sheer indifference to--or even outright hostility to--knowledge that that a foreign adversary attacked us is extraordinarily dangerous. The only people they are willing to believe are their oppressors, and that imperils all of us.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Epilogue

The only thing I haven't touched on is my schadenfreude. In the course of hashing all of this out, if I'm correct, it's not necessarily that any of this is deliberate, but that rather they are enslaved. On the other hand, they chose to believe the capitalists. They were seduced by blatant lies, and, even in the face of brutal economic oppression, they believed them still. Should I laugh? Should I cheer and jump up and down when an entire class of people faces complete economic erasure as a direct result of their own choices? It makes me feel better on the long slide down to Hell. In a way, it's the only consolation, having voted against it, having known that my state voted against it, but other people saw a tsunami as a clear blue sky. I am angry. I am angry that my country is being gleefully debased, that the people we need here in order to prosper are being kicked out, and that we are now facing things that I had hoped we would never see again because a people so completely alienated from their history believed the biggest lie ever perpetrated against them. We can't help them, and sometimes all we can do in the face of such absurd misery is simply laugh.

Atheism Has Failed

This post is a long time coming, as years ago, I've systematically unsubscribed from every atheist Youtube channel I used to follow the minute Thunderf00t switched from lampooning Creationism to ranting about feminists and "social justice warriors."

Every single atheist intellectual that I followed--up to and including Michael Shermer, by whom I have read two books--has been revealed to be a complete and utter fraud. Sam Harris, who is possibly the worst of these, has revealed himself to be a total bigot and a crybaby after he publicized an email exchange he had with Ezra Klein.

Retrospectively, it's not hard to see where atheism went off the rails. It's certainly not the first time that science has provided the justification for bigotry, but it is extremely ironic, given what was  atheism's mission in the climate from which it had arisen.

What could be described as "Movement Atheism" or "A"theism (with a capital A) arose as a response to the ascent of religious extremism--particularly Christian and Muslim varieties following 9/11 in the early 2000s. Michael Shermer's The Science of Good & Evil, which I read in my senior year of high school, was published in 2004. Sam Harris's The End of Faith was published, according to the copyright date in my paperback copy, "2004, 2005". The point is that Atheism's mission had been one of global enlightenment, an alternative to the right wing religious zealotry that had been sweeping both the United States and the Middle East in the aftermath of the WTC attack.

Something else happened instead. An anti-dogmatic movement became relentlessly dogmatic. Atheism became, instead of a viable, liberating alternative ideology, an equally oppressive and, later, extremely misogynistic, ideology. It became the monster it had hated, and participated in the propping up of voices antithetical to its enlightenment aspirations. It has descended into Scientism.

Scientism only allows for what is measurable through physical science, and, as demonstrated in the Sam Harris/Ezra Klein Debate, does not allow for historical experiences or political realities to get in its way; seeking biological justifications which can be measured through a microscope in the place of of sociological and political evidence of long-existing discrimination. Science was supposed to take us forward, but here we are reliving debates from the 19th century. The severity of this crime is hard to exaggerate, as the Neo-Nazis have latched on to this new form of scientism as justification for their policies.

Atheism's callous treatment of political and historical evidence of discrimination against minorities bleeds into its horrific treatment of women both inside and outside its own movement. Atheism has bled into RedPill and MRA cultures, and, if you've read Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies, this is where fascism begins.

Atheism has failed. It has failed so horribly in its original mission that it is categorically no better than the religious ideologies it had originally intended to combat. It has failed so horribly and so completely that it has become the threat to the very thing it had originally promised to defend and uphold. While Evangelical Christianity is paying for the Faustian bargain of electing Donald Trump, Atheism has provided fuel for the resurgence of Nazism in the United States. I would be more than glad to see it go away.