President Joe Biden is arguing that “there is something dangerous happening in America” as he revives his warnings that Donald Trump and his allies represent an existential threat to the country’s democratic institutions.
“There is an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs of our democracy. The MAGA movement,” Biden says in excerpts of the speech Thursday in Arizona, released in advance by the White House, referring Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan.
Although voting in the 2024 Republican primary doesn’t begin for months, Biden’s focus reflects Trump’s status as the undisputed frontrunner for his party’s nomination despite facing four indictments, two of them related to his attempts to overturn Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.
Oh my god; someone still selling the ridiculous narrative that these white supremacist fascists are being white supremacist fascists because of “economic anxiety”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/24/us/politics/trump-economic-anxiety.html
What they fear is losing the privileged status of white supremacy in America; what they’re desperate to stop is a more equal society. They didn’t march demanding more pay, better working conditions, or more upward mobility in Charlottesville, they marched chanting “Jews will not replace us” and “blood and soil.” They’ve been telling us, loudly, for years what it’s all really about and people still want to believe it’s about economics as if there weren’t dozens of very well-off people arrested for trying to attack Congress on January 6th.
Yeah, because they’re fucking stupid and they don’t know why they have poor pay, poor working conditions, and no upward mobility. They literally believe it’s a conspiracy by Them to keep the white man down. They’re dummies.
But that doesn’t actually mean economic factors aren’t the primary motivator. There’s still an underlying, material problem.
It’s undeniable that more economic opportunity would shrink their pool of possible supporters, even if it would never eliminate that pool. We don’t have to stop every from being a white supremacist; we just need to stop them from coming up with the power to topple our government.
This reminds me of a good saying. The worst enemy of progress is doing nothing while waiting for a perfect solution. I agree with you.
Not having anyone doing hateful things would be better, but that’s a terrible reason to just let the problem grow.
“Extremism” Not just the fascists. If you can’t see the correlation between the shrinking middle class over the past 4-5 decades and the growth of extremism, I’m not sure what to say to that. These morons are anxious, and a lot of that is economic, and historically it doesn’t take much to point angry morons at the wrong target. Just define an “other” (Jews, Immigrants, LGBTQ) for them to focus on and they’ll run with it. I’m not excusing these assholes at all. But fighting the symptoms and not the disease is not a smart way to go about making change.
Also, for what its’ worth, I wanted to look at the article you posted, but I can’t get past the paywall.