this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2025
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The only problem I have is with the whole "foreign backed" language. It's technically not wrong, but please, as a reminder: It was not simply manipulation from Russia and others, putting Trump into power and creating MAGA. It is a homegrown problem, fascism has been smouldering in the US for a long time, and just as another reminder, it is also glimmering in the EU as well.
The country is "occupied" by its ruling class, and in this case, a specific clique of them benefitting themselves even against other capitalists, but overall, this is much more about class-, than it is about nation-dynamics.
We (the USA) were smoldering fascists prior to WW2. Let's not kid ourselves.
The human race is a bunch of smouldering fascists. Balkans, Rwanda, Chechnya, Iraq, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and Darfur. Nigeria, Mali, Sudan, and other countries in the Sahel region. Take a look at this list of ethnic cleansings.
World history is rife with people trying to gain power so they can kill all the people who don't look like them.
Eh, I actually disagree. The US did a social democratic turn after the Great Depression, I think it was one of the eras where the US was furthest from fascism. It ultimately still created and maintained the conditions of fascist tendencies later on and only very partially did the work analysing their own history of imperialism, but I really dislike overuse of the word fascist, because it blunts the analytical edge. The implicit neoliberal social contract was different than the implicit fascist one (which was different than the more social democratic one solidified under FDR, etc.) - and the system no longer having to wear the mask of humanity has real life consequences and creates its own dynamics.
Indeed, but I think it is a fallacy to use that as an ideological framing of inevitability (unsure if that was your aim here). Ingroup-Outgroup thinking is one of the few things, that I think is indeed fundamental to the human condition, but the way it materialises is dependent on the interaction of that tendency with material and historical conditions. Without colonialism, the specific framing of race, for example, would not have existed in the same way. And universalism as a current within modernity is not just a fluke or illusion, but a proper potential tendency within human behaviour as well, one that relies on cultural and material conditions of its own.
Cynicism is in its own right an ideological distortion, where it leaves analysis and tries to impose its interpretation on reality.
Where does one draw the line between cynicism and experience?
As a categorical answer: Where it conflicts with reality more generally.
As a more specific answer: Good ways to double check are - how does my perspective gel with historians, anthropologists and philosophers, that study that field? Do they also agree on a cynical view there? When they dissent, what are the ways they do so?
Where did I get that cynical view? Is the cynical interpretation one, that benefits the status quo, so it has a higher likelihood of being ideological instead of a proper analysis? Is it backed up not only in contemporary empirical social sciences, but also when processing that data through interpretation. (e.g.: A group committing more crimes can be fact in studies, but racists will interpret that completely differently, than communists for example, concerning causes and solutions.)
In addition to that - personal experience is always valid, take for example someone with PTSD, it would be ludicrous to claim, their outlook on things concerning their trauma is "wrong". However, when applied to larger reality, it may not describe it properly in the whole context. That does not take away the validity of their experience and how it shapes them, specifically.