I like this piece by Umair Haque as it works well with my earlier post on the Allure of Fascism. Of course fascists never think they are what they actually are. Haque is an economist and not a psychologist, but he takes a good stab at at least some of the dynamics that undergird fascism.

To this, I would add the work of T. W. Adorno (2019) of the Frankfurt School. He wrote a widely-read book in the wake of Nazi Germany titled, The Authoritarian Personality. In that text, he writes of individuals who are uniquely predisposed toward fascist ideologies in that they are rule-governed, conformist, and aggressive. Gordon Allport's classic book on The Nature of Prejudice, also comes to mind.

The short of it is that they have authoritarian personalities that make them vulnerable to leaders that are themselves authoritarian. While still touching the surface here, my friends, I think we all know people like this, right? Plus, the alignment across these two posts caught my attention.

-Angela Valenzuela

References

Adorno, T. (2019). The authoritarian personality. Verso Books.

Allport, G. (1954). The nature of prejudice. New York: Addison-Wesley. 

Why Fascists Never Think They’re Fascists — But Victims and Heroes

The Psychology of the New Global Wave of Fascism

umair haque

·

·

“I’m not a fascist! They’re the real fascists!! The students, the leftists, the woke mob, the anti-fascists, the teachers, the LGBTQ! They’re putting me in danger! They’re taking away my rights! My rights matter most of all! I’m being persecuted, violently and viciously!! I have a right to be heard — and what I have to say is that I’m superior, and they’re inferior! And if you don’t allow me this view — then you’re the real fascist!!”

LOL — do you see how funny and warped all this is the moment you think about it?

Needless to say, what makes a person a “fascist,” at least in terms of beliefs, is pretty straightforward. That some people are biologically inferior, inherently less valuable, hence need to be dehumanized, and cleansed away from society, their personhood, livelihoods, socio-cultural existences, and possibly even lives, removed. Nobody on the left is saying any of that to the kind of person I’m describing — and so quite obviously, the “real fascist” is the one who believes these crackpot theories of inherent supremacy, and then desires political “solutions” to the “problems” of people who are not human. The question we are answering today is: why would anyone believe in such obviously false notions, to begin with? Why would they need so desperately to?

Let’s start at the beginning — I’ll try to really explain the psychology of the new wave of fascism. You can judge for yourself whether it carries any water — I’ll only say this much: if you see these traits in yourself, you should stop and yourself: “Wait, am I what he’s describing?”

Fascists never think they are fascists. A fascist never thinks of himself or herself as a “fascist”, anything at all carrying a negative or malicious connotation. They think of themselves, first, as victims. Victims of great and grand conspiracies — the Great Replacement, the LGBTQ+ destroying them, women murdering babies as birth control, woke teachers indoctrinating their kids, immigrants out to destroy their culture, the liberals want to drink the blood of kids, the Jews are doing this, the Muslims are doing that, blah blah, and on and on the insanity goes.

To the fascist, those behind these conspiracies are not regular people — they are especially cunning and vicious especially greedy and unscrupulous, especially seditious and slothful, especially bad. They are especially powerful, in other words. They have the power to completely destroy the way of the life, the whole existence, of the person being victimized.

The allure of fascism: why do minorities join the far right? by Edwin Rios, May 22, 2023

This entire piece is worth reading considering that it focuses on Latinos who are drawn to the far right with a growing list of names like Afro-Cuban Proud Boys leader, Enrique Tarrio, who was recently found guilty for "sedition conspiracy" for the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.  

In particular, read Dr. Cristina Beltran's analysis below of how this has evolved over time, pointing to  a dynamic that she terms, “multiracial whiteness” that helps capture much of what is playing out currently with far-right men of color. While provocative, we shouldn't at all be surprised about this since we've always had language for this, including "internalized oppression" and "internalized racism." Simply expressed, multiracial white people adopt the dominant group's pejorative perspective of their own group.

Clearly, Latinos and other communities are on the receiving end of a continuous "complex and contradictory cocktail of misinformation." This is exactly what helps create space for these far-right identities. 

Relatedly, what is not at all addressed is the vacuum in identity that is engineered by a white chauvinist K-12, and to a great extent, higher education, curriculum that systematically excludes the knowledges, histories, stories, identities, languages, as well as prior and ongoing contributions made by our nation's Black and Brown, minoritized communities.  

I've always said and it's worth mentioning anew: The antidote to extremism is an Ethnic Studies curriculum—in both K-12 and higher education institutions—that provides the conceptual tools and frameworks needed to understand self in relation to family, community and society. Plus, rather than victimization or victimology, Ethnic Studies—along with gender and ability studies—empowers our youth, beginning with an enhanced sense of self that is pro-social, pro-community, pro-democratic, and an important avenue through which to perfect the union.

Sí se puede! Yes we can!

-Angela Valenzuela

The allure of fascism: why do minorities join the far right?

by Edwin Rios | The Guardian | May 22, 2023

A white supremacist ideology would appear to be antithetical to people of color, but there’s a perverse logic at play when they join extremist groups

While investigators search for a motive behind a Texas man’s mass killing of eight people at an outlet mall near Dallas earlier this month, they and groups such as the Anti-Defamation League believe they have uncovered social media posts in which he spewed white supremacist, misogynist and antisemitic rhetoric.

Experts say Mauricio Garcia’s apparent expression of hate-filled rhetoric fits into a modest but increasingly alarming pattern of largely men of color drawn to far-right communities. Since the election of Donald Trump, they say, more men of color have taken on leadership roles in far-right and militia groups and participated, and in some cases led, violent protests, most notably during the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.

For people of Latino descent like Garcia, who self-identified as Hispanic, the allure of rightwing proto-fascist politics comes from a complex and contradictory cocktail of misinformation within Latino communities, the presence of authoritarian influences from their countries of origin, and a proximity to whiteness in the US that relies more on dominance over people than one’s skin color. In this world, violence is an apt political response to threats to such dominance.

“Part of what we’re seeing – not just in the militia groups, but all across, including a clear upsurge of people of color voting Republican party – is that there’s not a necessary connection between racial identity and your beliefs,” Daniel HoSang, professor of ethnicity, race and migration and American studies at Yale University, says.

He added: “It is complicated. It means disentangling your presumptions around race and political identity. We had an entire civil rights movement that was grounded on combating laws that were racially segregative. Now, we’re at a moment where it’s a bit more muddy and requires more nuance.”

Garcia, who was killed by police, wore a patch on his chest that read “RWDS”, which stands for “Right Wing Death Squad”, a nod to glorifying violence and an allusion popular among far-right and extremist groups to violence by Central and South American paramilitary groups against communists and what they saw enemies on the political left from as far back as the 1970s, the Associated Press reported.

The Anti-Defamation League found posts on Russian social media of Garcia with neo-Nazi tattoos and misogynist language, including those used by “incels”, a subculture of men who blame women and society for their inability to form romantic connections, a phenomenon that federal law enforcement sees as a rising threat that could escalate to violence, often against women.

“White supremacy itself is not just about membership, about who is and isn’t white,” says HoSang, co-author of the 2019 book Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity. “It comes with a politics and ideology of division … It’s also their beliefs about the nation and of the role of violence in enforcing that hierarchy.”

Unlike the white supremacists who rioted in Charlottesville in 2017, men of color attracted to white supremacist ideologies believe less in a white ethnostate and more that the state has failed them in the past and it will take violence to suppress threats and restore their perceived sense of order, HoSang says. Scholars have described their connection to these extremists as the “multiracial far right”

Cecilia Márquez, a history professor at Duke University, was less surprised than others when it was revealed the Texas mass shooter was Latino and had peddled white supremacist views. She has tracked the involvement of Latino people on the white nationalist website Stormfront, particularly since the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, whose mother was Peruvian.

Márquez had seen a small but rising number of Latino men, and men of color broadly, being drawn into white nationalist forums and becoming radicalized. Márquez, whose research has found Latino participation in white supremacist groups as far back as the 1980s, described how Latinos on the website would identify as the heirs to the Spanish conquest in similar ways to how white supremacists would relate to Norse or Viking mythology.

She added that the internet “made it possible for white supremacists throughout the Americas to be able to talk to each other” in ways that were not possible before, noting that that communication through messaging apps like WhatsApp had “accelerated” not just the spread of misinformation but also of “information designed to radicalize people”.

“It felt really, really scary,” Márquez said. The Texas shooter, she added, was “not a single actor. He’s not by himself. He’s part of a growing community of people who are engaged in this kind of thinking, and increasingly this kind of violence.”

She emphasized, however, that Garcia’s views represented a fraction of this small population and fixating on him missed the larger story of how Latinos in the US have largely consolidated around Democratic political views. Still, experts say, Garcia represents a paradox of squaring away one’s racial identity with one’s political identity.

Like others, Cristina Beltrán, an associate professor who studies race and the right at New York University, emphasized that the experiences and views of Latino communities in the US are not monolithic, and being Latino is one part of a person’s identity.

“We know that experience alone doesn’t produce an identity. That is how you interpret your experiences,” Beltrán says.

What could also draw young men of color to the far right extends beyond perceived views of racial superiority. Beltrán argued that they could also be drawn to the practice of “domination” that is tied to American history and the subjugation of other groups such as women, noting that it was part of a “history of being able to feel free because some groups are below you”.

In a Washington Post op-ed, Beltrán, author of Cruelty as Citizenship: How Migrant Suffering Sustains White Democracy, also wrote that the rise of Donald Trump offered this form of what she called “multiracial whiteness” to far-right men of color like Enrique Tarrio, an Afro-Cuban former leader of the Proud Boys who was recently found guilty of seditious conspiracy in relation to the January 6 insurrection. Márquez and Beltrán both questioned whether those views opened pathways for men of color into more extremist ideology.

What’s more, Beltrán argues that the expansion of jobs within the US security and carceral apparatus in the past few decades have both inspired movements to dismantle those systems and reinforced the perception of a nation under threat, as people from communities of color both fill those jobs and are disproportionately affected by the prison system .

She added that those communities have certain views on how to resolve problems and are skewed to conservatism.

Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, wearing a shirt proclaiming support for Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd. Photograph: Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty Images

“In Texas, you have a lot of migrants who are being brutalized by our really terrible immigration and border policy. But you also have over half of the border patrol being Latino,” Beltrán says. “They’re employed and being socialized into a brutal regime that is very dehumanizing to migrants.”

Within the histories of their countries of origin are moments of anti-Blackness and anti-Indigenous sentiment, as well as reactionary politics that led to the violent suppression of progressive views by dictators.

Beltrán says that within Texas, where the shooting took place, Latinos, particularly people of Mexican descent, have a complicated history as both having a proximity to whiteness and being subjected to lynching and brutalization by the Texas rangers.

“Latinos have always existed as a population that’s both been under assault, and also been brought into practices of racial domination,” Beltrán says.

In Garcia, Márquez saw a difficult tension: Garcia’s hate-filled views rest on the extreme end of a spectrum of conservatism that separates one’s connection to their racial and ethnic identity and one’s political views. She added that his hateful views, shared by an increasingly visible minority of people, were not representative but also should not be discounted.

Experts have pointed to Latino Republicans who have touted their own identities on the campaign trails while they supported former president Donald Trump’s anti-immigration policies.

“Maybe not everyone has a swastika on their body. But many of us have aunts and uncles who say inappropriate things at the table, or have someone who voted for Trump or doesn’t want to live in communities with other people,” Márquez says.

“Seeing [Garcia] as part of this spectrum is important. Yes, he is aberrant in so many ways – in so many ways. But to look away from him and eschew him from our community gets us off the hook because there is a lot of racism within the community and anti-Blackness and anti-Indigenous sentiment that we have to reckon with.”

"Culture wars are making it harder than ever for the small number of Latino professors," By Raul A. Reyes, NBCNews.com

I respect those voices expressing deep concerns about the direction that academia is taking with its incorrect and injurious anti-woke, culture-war agenda. Echoing Dr. Louis Mendoza and others cited within, I would like to counter this message with the notion that to the extent possible—considering that very individual case is different—it is our patriotic duty to pursue careers as faculty in higher education. 

Democracy itself depends on an educated, civic-minded  citizenry. Plus, this is ultimately a winnable battle. However, we do need all minds on board.

Thanks to National LULAC President Domingo Garcia for sharing this piece with me today.

-Angela Valenzuela

Culture wars are making it harder than ever for the small number of Latino professors

The backlash against diversity in education in states like Florida and Texas makes it a treacherous time to teach American history, a Latina scholar said.

The University of Texas at El Paso.Carol M. Highsmith / Getty Images file; NBC News

By Raul A. Reyes | May 27, 2023 | NBCNews.com

Some Latinos in academia are assessing the impact of the increasing attacks on and measures against diversity initiatives amid low numbers of tenured Latino professors and a difficult career path. 

This past semester, Maria Chávez didn’t think her assignment for her Latino politics course was controversial. Chávez asked her students to write an op-ed on an issue facing the Latino community. As the class wrapped up, one extra copy of the assignment was accidentally left behind. The next day, Chávez found the spare copy of the homework defaced with rants about “illegal aliens” and “Stop teaching victimization!” The paper was unsigned.

“These are the kinds of actions that people are emboldened to do now,” said Chávez, professor of political science at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. “The racialization and stigmatization that Latinos experience in the U.S. are often replicated in the classroom.”

Chávez is part of the relatively small group of Latinos in the academic world. Achieving academic tenure, professors say, is a difficult and challenging process. Now, they're also grappling with how to navigate the increased politicization of education as states like Florida limit diversity initiatives and place controls on educational content and courses, particularly those on race and ethnicity.

“The direct attack on the knowledge about the experiences about people of color is something that is very antidemocratic, and it is very personally harmful to students in a way that impacts who they are as people, as academics, and as future academics,” Chávez said.

Maria Chávez, a political science professor at Pacific Lutheran University, said the backlash against diversity and anti-racist education "makes it hard for everybody." Michael Artime

BBDP Teach In, featuring NAACP President Gary Bledsoe, Esq., Emilio Zamora, Ph.D., and Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D., Moderator

Colleagues:

I am happy to share with you this

full video of an April 4, 2023, presentation, featuring NAACP President Gary Bledsoe, Esq. and Emilio Zamora, Ph.D., and myself as moderator.

This Black Brown Dialogues on Policy (BBDP) Teach In took place with UT Austin Policy Analysis masters' and Ph.D. students sharing opinions on the 88th (2023) Texas Legislative Session, addressing Texas politics, history, electoral power, political strategy, and Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) bills that are currently at play in the Texas State Legislature.

Besides moderating, my specific contribution is to suggest how the role of Gen Z youth in the current moment might could get amplified.

Thanks a million to BBDP member and documentarian, Lana Husband, for recording this important conversation.

Enjoy!

-Angela Valenzuela

#GenZ #Diversity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdGvgHus8tA&t=1616s

The Return of the Emerging Democratic Majority? by By Eric Levitz

Interesting—and indeed, hopeful—analysis of how the vote is trending across generations. Key quote:

 "If Republicans do not reconcile themselves to a more modern set of cultural values (and/or less plutocratic set of economic policies), generational churn will eventually make it very difficult for them to compete in national elections."

With the Texas Republican party in mind, the irony is that they see their cultural values and plutocratic economic policies as the very tools through which they can preserve their incumbencies, allowing them to use elective office for power hoarding and personal, as opposed to civic, gain.

In light of these trends, they would do well to re-think their strategy.

Angela Valenzuela

#GenZ #2024election

The Return of the Emerging Democratic Majority? 

by By Eric Levitz

Photo: SOPA Images/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Gett

The 2022 election was strange. Historically, the president’s party tends to suffer large losses in midterms, as its base grows complacent and swing voters indulge their fetish for divided government. And there was little reason to believe that last year would be an exception.

After all, last November, Joe Biden was a historically unpopular president presiding over exceptionally high inflation. Polls showed widespread disapproval of the Democratic administration in general and its economic management in particular. A “red wave” appeared to be cresting.

And yet that wave ebbed before it touched the nation’s most highly contested races: Even as Republicans won the two-party national vote for House control by a 51 to 49 percent margin in 2022, Democrats won 40 of the 64 races that were deemed very competitive by the Cook Political Report.

And in the closest Senate and gubernatorial races, the outcomes were even more odd. In the contests that Cook deemed either “toss-ups” or merely “leaning” toward one party, Democrats won 51 percent of the two-party vote — a higher share than they had secured in such races in 2020 — while claiming victories in 13 of 18 elections.

Altogether, this increased the Democratic Party’s power in the Senate and at the state level while leaving Republicans with a relatively meager nine-vote majority in the House. Had a few thousand more votes (in very specific places) shifted from Republicans to Democrats, Biden’s party would have retained full control of the federal government. As is, it still mounted one of the strongest midterm performances for an in-power party in modern American history.

By now, election analysts have produced plenty of compelling explanations for how this came to be. One is that the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade scrambled conventional midterm dynamics. Major policy changes often spur short-term electoral backlashes. This is one reason why the president’s party has often struggled in midterm elections, which frequently follow ambitious legislative sessions. But in 2022, even though a Democrat was in the White House, Republicans delivered the year’s most disruptive policy change. Thus, in purple states where abortion policy was a live issue, swing voters in general (and women in particular) gave Democrats unusually strong support.

Another explanation for the red ripple was Donald Trump’s singularly bad taste in general-election candidates. In various competitive Senate and gubernatorial races, Republican primary voters nominated MAGA extremists at Trump’s request. This predictably rendered the party less competitive.

But a new analysis from the Democratic-data firm Catalist points to another critical factor: the political ascendance of millennials and zoomers.

America’s youngest adult generations had been integral to the 2018 blue wave. Millennials saw their turnout rate surge from 22 percent in the 2014 midterm to 42 percent four years later. In 2018, the oldest zoomers became eligible to vote in a midterm for the first time. And they cast ballots at a higher rate than millennials or Gen-Xers had in their respective first midterms. Critically, zoomers and millennials collectively cast more than 60 percent of their votes for Democrats, helping the party win the national House vote by a landslide margin.

This was an ominous development for the GOP. Still, Republican operatives could comfort themselves with a pair of thoughts. First, while America’s rising generations might turn out in historically high numbers to rebuke President Trump, their participation was bound to fall sharply once politics grew more banal. And second, though millennials and zoomers were currently the least Republican generations that America had produced since Lincoln’s time, they would surely age into a more ordinary partisan distribution.

The 2022 results were not kind to such wishful thinking. As Catalist’s analysis of voter-file data reveals, millennial and Gen-Z voters collectively comprised 26 percent of the 2022 electorate, up from 23 percent in 2018. This was partly a function of aging. More zoomers were eligible to vote last year than in 2018. But turnout among eligible voters was also a factor. Nationally, millennials and zoomers turned out at a rate comparable to their historically high 2018 mark, and in highly contested races, the two generations actually voted at a higher rate than they had in such races in 2018.

This is a big long-term problem for the Republican Party. With each passing election cycle, zoomers and millennials will become more likely to vote. As this chart from Catalist illustrates, generations tend to grow more and more electorally influential until they reach their mid-70s and then start aging out of the electorate owing to illness or death. Boomers have already passed their political peak. Millennials will be building toward theirs for a long time to come.

Graphic: Catalist

It is not surprising that millennials have retained their exceptionally strong Democratic lean even as they’ve exited their youth. Although cohorts do tend to grow a bit more conservative when (or if) they have children and buy a home, most voters’ political affiliations are cemented in adolescence and early adulthood, when myriad other aspects of their identities are forged. Millennials spent their formative years watching George W. Bush preside over catastrophic wars and an economic disaster while his party embraced soon-to-be-discredited social crusades (such as opposition to gay marriage). And millennials were also raised by parents who were markedly more socially liberal than the boomers’ forebears. It is therefore unsurprising that the generation has proven durably hostile to a Republican Party that refuses to abandon the cultural commitments of America’s white Evangelical minority.

The durability of birth cohorts’ political leanings means that generational churn by itself can remake our politics. There are many reasons why Barack Obama’s first midterm was a political disaster for the Democratic Party while Biden’s was a relative success. But one is that boomers constituted 69 percent of the electorate in 2010 but only 48 percent of it in 2022.

To this point, Republicans have managed to weather the rise of millennials and zoomers just fine. This is largely because America’s older generations have all shaded to the right since 2012. As a result, the political divide between millennials and zoomers on the one hand, and their elders on the other, has never been more stark:

Graphic: @williamjordann/Twitter

Further, the GOP’s historically high support from non-college-educated white voters — combined with the overrepresentation of those voters in the Senate and Electoral College battlegrounds — has enabled the party to win power in excess of its popular support.

Both of these factors are likely to attenuate the GOP’s millennial problem in the near term. For one thing, Generation X is a right-leaning cohort that came of age during the Reagan recovery and is about to enter its prime voting years.

But Gen X is also a small generation. And the boomers are growing smaller with each passing year. If Republicans do not reconcile themselves to a more modern set of cultural values (and/or less plutocratic set of economic policies), generational churn will eventually make it very difficult for them to compete in national elections.

Here, three other quick takeaways from the Catalist report:

Women were critical to Democratic success. Female voters backed Democrats nationally at levels comparable to 2020, and in highly competitive Senate and gubernatorial elections, Democrats actually won a slightly higher share of women’s ballots than they had in similar races two years earlier (winning 57 percent, up from 55 percent in 2020). Resiliently strong support among white college-educated women helped to compensate for a sharp drop in Democratic voting among white college-educated men, who gave Democrats 51 percent of their votes in 2020 but only 44 percent two years later.

In competitive races, education polarization eased. Beyond America’s generational cleavage, a growing “diploma divide” between college-educated and working-class voters has been one of the defining dynamics of U.S. politics in recent years. This gap remains vast, but in 2022 it declined a bit from its Trump-era peak, particularly in competitive races. In such contests, Democrats gained four points of support among non-college-educated white voters, relative to 2020, while losing two points of support among college-educated ones.

Democrats’ performance with non-white voters was suboptimal in 2022. In last year’s midterm, Democrats lost seven points of support among both college-educated and non-college-educated Asian American and Pacific Islander voters relative to 2020. Their performance with Hispanic voters was largely unchanged from the Biden-Trump race with the party winning 62 percent of that demographic. In 2016 and 2012, however, the party had won upwards of 70 percent of Hispanic voters.

Black voters, meanwhile, remained overwhelmingly Democratic. But both their turnout rate and support for Democrats declined slightly from previous midterms. In 2018, Black voters represented 12 percent of the electorate; in 2022, they comprised 10 percent. In 2020, Black voters delivered 91 percent of their votes to Democrats — two years later, they gave just 88 percent of them to Biden’s party.