Conservative America is the Rich World’s Taliban

Conservative America’s Descent Into Lunacy, Violence, and Fascism

Here’s a tiny question. Was Jan 6th America’s rock bottom?

To help you answer it, here’s a striking, sobering, disturbing fact. Since the attempted coup on Jan 6th — the one where death squads roamed the halls of Congress looking for “enemies of the people” to massacre — where would you expect Trump’s support, among Republicans, to be?

Maybe, giving Republicans the benefit of good faith, you’d expect it to fall. After all, this was more or less one of the most shameful and grotesque chapters of American history. You have to go back centuries to find the last time the Capitol was attacked — and attacked by fascist militias? Allegedly incited by a President? That’s never happened. Jan 6th was a singular moment in American history.

And you might reasonably therefore expect it to be rock bottom, and you might further infer that by thinking to yourself: “Even Republicans have to think this has gone too far. Right?”

Wrong. Since Jan 6th, Trump’s support amongst Republicans has risen.Dramatically. And that is an ill omen of things to come. What kinds of people, after all, support a violent, bloody coup? The kinds of people, it turns out, who were OK with concentration camps, kids in cages, Gestapos on the streets — the whole classical textbook sequence of fascism. When you’re OK with…concentration camps…it’s hardly a surprise you’d be OK with a coup. It’s all part of your…weltanschaaung. That’s an old fancy German word for what’s now a simple idea: a worldview.

What’s happening to America?

Conservative America is being radicalized. You know it and I know it. Pundits know it, and mostly, they invent excuses for it. The truth, though, is as grim as it is dire. Conservative America is being swiftly, severely, massively radicalized.

As a social group, conservative Americans now hold beliefs that are more in line with the Taliban than they are with, say, their peers in Europe, Canada, or Australia. No, I’m not kidding. Conservative Americans seem to believe all the following things should be human rights: carrying an assault rifle to Starbucks, having as many guns as you like, having the “freedom of speech” to practice bigotry and hate, the idea of white supremacy embedded in institutions and enforced by law, the imposition of fundamentalist religion via the state.

Here’s what they don’t believe should be basic human rights. Healthcare, education, retirement, childcare, transport, income, housing, food, water, sanitation, medicine.

I want you to really see how perverse these views are. They are completely and totally the diametrical opposite of majorities in every other rich country. In Europe and Canada and Australia, people by and large believe that healthcare and retirement and education and so on should be basic human rights, not guns and hate and fundamentalism. We know this because, as a whole, they vote for them. This is totally the opposite of America’s conservative majority.

Hence, I’m not kidding when I say that American conservatives resemble the Taliban more than “conservatives” in Europe or Canada or Australia.American conservatives really are different. Who else believes assault rifles are a human right? That religion should dictate law? That hate and supremacy should be cultural norms, social values, and political institutions? The Taliban does.

Again, this isn’t a joke. It’s a warning. Conservative America, which is much of white America, is being radicalized.

You might shrug to yourself, and say: “So what! I already know that!” But somehow, I doubt you really do. Those of us who have lived through the terrifying, disorienting experience of a society being radicalised around us can tell you: what is happening in America is the real thing. If it feels to you like a large part of America has just lost its mind, that’s because…it has.

What does “radicalization” mean? It goes way beyond what many Americans imagine. It means something like the following. Over a period of years, maybe decades, people are conditioned and brainwashed into believing that a) violence is the answer to all political problems; b) hate is the answer to all social problems; c) bigotry is the answer to all cultural problems; because d) the strong and pure must survive, by overwhelming the weak and impure; so that d) a magical, often religously anointed kingdom on earth comes to prevail.

Radicalization is a strange, toxic cocktail of many, many things — all the flavours of human stupidity and folly. It combines Social Darwinism with a Nietzschean ubermensch ideology. It preaches fundamentalist religion while forgetting the basic tenets of any religion. It justifies itself with increasingly outlandish “theories,” which just mean, in plain English, Big Lies — the messiah is coming, and so forth — whose point is to bind together the chosen ones in rituals of mindless indoctrination. It openly embraces violence and brutality of medieval kinds. It seeks an apocalypse now, here on earth, because that is the best way to sort the pure from the impure — a Final Solution.

Does all that sound like American conservatism to you? It should. I shouldn’t have to say it again, but I will: American conservatives seem to now be the kind of people who believe things like this — putting brown kids in concentration camps is a good thing, because it serves Trump, and Trump serves God, and America is God’s Promised Land to the pure.

None of that has changed. They still believe all that. They appear to believe the tenets of truly radicalised belief systems in increasingly hardening and extreme ways. Take the idea that’s spreading amongst Evangelical Christians, that Trump is some kind of religious hero. Take QAnon, which says — if you don’t already know — that Hillary Clinton filleted kids’ faces off to harvest their adrenalised blood to drink to stay young forever.

The simplest way to understand the radical mind, though, is with a very simple question. What are the rest of us to the radicalized? The answer to this question is usually as simple as it is revealing. Take a radicalised Muslim. What are the rest of us? Infidels. Where are we going? Hell. So what do we deserve here on earth? Nothing. Except maybe suffering, pain, and hate.

Now let’s ask the question for American conservatives. What are the rest of us to them? By the rest of us, I mean all of us. And here’s where things get really ugly, really fast. They seem to think that minorities are racially inferior, which means they are genetically, mentally, culturally, socially inferior. The LGBT are heathens, Godless folk, which minorities of course are, too. Liberals are “enemies of the people,” as is anyone on “their side,” from journalists to intellectuals to politicians. But opposition politicians are the worst of all. They are traitors, who “stole the election,” and they deserve whatever punishment comes their way, even if it’s a coup whose aim seemed to be to massacre them.

Think about all that. What does it say that the vast majority of American conservatives supported the coup? That Trump’s support rose afterwards? Amongst a social group that already has more in common with the Taliban’s attitudes than, say, white people in Europe or Canada? It says that they are being radicalised faster than you or I can blink.

Take the example of QAnon again. If I’d told you a decade or two ago that many of the average American conservatives would have believed Hillary conducts Satanic rituals where she cuts kids faces apart to drink their adrenalised blood so that she stays young forever…that the Jews shoot space lasers at America…that liberals are Satan-worshipping pedophiles…you probably would have laughed at me. But nobody’s laughing now. How many conservatives believe such things? The only right answer to that is: far too many: 56% of Republicans believe some part of QAnon. More than half. Think about that.

The basic tenets of any radicalised belief system are rising and hardening fast amongst American conservatives. The idea that violence is something to admire, because it separate the weak from the strong. The idea that a certain set of chosen people were divinely ordained to reign supreme over the rest, who are inferior. The feeling that they have been persecuted for their nobility and heroism, by invisible and malign enemies — who must be cleansed away in a Final Solution. The notion that democracy itself is something to scorn, and the rule of religious law and sheer brutality should be cherished. The justification of all that with increasingly bizarre and creepy and grotesque lies — whose only real purpose is to shield conservatives from ugly truths, like nobody else is the violent or dangerous or hateful one around here but them.

You might say to yourself: “Radicalization isn’t the right word. Hasn’t conservative America always been pretty awful?” You’re not wrong.What’s happening here isn’t the evolution of a new belief system, so much as the reversion to an old one. And in this case, a not very old one at all. Until 1971 (the end of segregation), as I think should be much more widely known and understood, America was the world’s largest apartheid state.South Africa was a mere blip comparatively speaking.

That was less than one lifetime ago. And it’s vividly clear that many Americans have never evolved beyond the belief system of the ages of slavery and segregation — the belief system of supremacy and hate, justified by religion, exceptionalism, and patriotism. Conservative America appears to be reverting right back to where it was pre 1971, maybe even long before that. It is a social group in which anything goes right about now.

I’m not kidding about that. Who votes for a President, again, after the concentration camps, Gestapos, kids in cages, beatings, disappearances, the textbook sequence of fascism? Conservative Americans. Trump’s share of America’s white voters increased from 2016 to 2020.

There is a feeling among many (not all) Americans on the left: everything is OK now that Biden won. But that is, as the impeachment trial demonstrated, very, very wrong. Why is the GOP still Trump’s party?Why did Mitch McConnell issue a mealy-mouthed apology for acquitting him? Because the GOP has to be Trump’s party. Republican voters are holding their feet to the fire. Because conservative America is being radicalized, the GOP has little choice left to be essentially an outright extremist party, supporting every bad idea in human history, from fascism to theocracy.

And that is very bad news. Because fanatics and extremists who have given up on democracy don’t usually fight using its tools. They resort to more, well, extreme methods. Guns and bombs. Terror and intimidation. Violence and brutality. Stupidity and hatred. A wave of all that seems on the cards now, simply because millions of Americans have been brainwashed into believing all of that is OK. Their preachers tell them it is. Their newsmen and women reinforce the message. Their intellectuals justify it. Their politicians cheer it all on. Who’s left to guide them towards sanity? Nobody.

That is how many, many societies have fallen. That is how the Taliban emerged. It’s how the Muslim World became a hotbed of craziness and failed states. It’s how Russia turned into the mafia state it is today. It’s the story of human history, over and over again.

Don’t count on democracy when the other side has already given up on it. The work to be done goes far beyond simply relying on democracy when the other side believes it’s the problem, and the solution is a Final One.

What kind of work is that? It’s economic, cultural, social, at the grass roots, about changing norms, values, codes, ideas, in every walk of life, in every aspect of society. And then, slowly, maybe, just maybe, minds change, too.

And as someone that’s lived radicalisation before, I know this much. Unless it’s stopped, with a groundswell, swiftly and surely, it overwhelms a country — snap!! — like that. I think that right about now, good Americans need to check their smugness and apathy at the door — no, Biden’s not magically going to fix everything — and get serious about understanding how much trouble their country is really in. Because the answer is: much, much more than they seem to really fully grasp yet.

Umair
February 2021