By now, I presume nearly everyone who is not in a convent, monastery or otherwise off the grid has seen the footage of Elon Musk performing a Nazi salute.
This tendency to hide racist views through “irony” (aka its only a joke, bro) has been around since at least the 1990s and probably before that. That, combined with the fact that the mainstream media is falling all over itself to explain away Musk’s clear Sieg Heil gesture illustrates to me that any desire of the past sixty years or so to remedy racism has always been superficial. Once the fairly barebones laws that existed got repealed or gutted, there was no need to keep up appearances. Much like the New Deal and Great Society programs, I believe that the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were always meant to be concessions that would be revoked once they lost their propaganda value.
The Democrats have no fight in them to challenge this. Indeed, I’ve always thought that the geriatric Democratic leadership (such as it is), like Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, and the Clintons yearn for the old days of the Solid South, and view minority voters as the electoral equivalent of Diet Coke (ie all empty calories that probably cause cancer). Since liberals consider civil and human rights to be transactional, they probably think minority voters deserve to suffer for not being sufficiently thankful for Joe “most progressive president since FDR” Biden.
Hi, LM. Thanks for responding. My apologies for taking a bit to get back to you.
I must confess that I took a bit to process your reply, because it struck me that nowhere in my essay did I bring up Democrats or liberalism or leftism or any of that. This was squarely focused on Elon Musk, fascism, and the media's response to his signal. So I was taken aback that you made a turn toward criticizing Democrats here. That's so far from what I was actually speaking about and seems almost kneejerk. Forgive me for my straightforwardness here, but it was really surprising.
I think that the media situation at the moment compounds our current moment and is a recent phenomenon. It's true that the media and the political class share a symbiotic relationship, but even thirty years ago journalists prized their position as being the fourth estate. This fawning that we're seeing now is not normal and I think a good portion of our populace recognizes this. The question is, will they be able to withstand the media's effect on them if they continue to allow its daily influence into their lives with only the barest amount of critical engagement.
I ... just don't share your cynicism about the social contract that Democrats forged with minority groups, particularly that of the African-American community but also others. Your read is reminiscent of something I might come across in the annals of Caitlin Johnstone, whose work I realized just this week I've quietly set down.
I think the lack of fight that the Democrats are suffering from right now -- which is a different situation from its 60+ year commitment, after all this time -- is directly a function of the across-the-board loss that it suffered this last cycle, particularly when so many were reassured that the election was in the bag. People are reeling. This is a form of catastrophizing, where a person is so struck by panic that they just go still or lie down (what Stephen King once described as "going tharn"). Something will have to kickstart them back into fight-back mode, and I actually think this Sieg Heil by Musk may have done just that for many in the grassroots. The folks in elected office may be a different kettle of fish -- we'll have to suss that out. But we needed a shock to the system to get reoriented.
Thank you for your reply. I guess I didn’t make the connection between the first paragraph and the second one clear. What I was trying to say is that the Democrats and the “liberal establishment” as a whole lack the fighting spirit to fight against the normalization of racism, whether it’s of the bullhorn or the dog whistle variety (and keep in mind, that these are bigoted acts done by individuals, not even systemic racism that they won’t even try to confront). If there was basically no pushback against Bush I’s Willie Horton ad, why should we be surprised that this same establishment is trying to explain away what is obviously a Nazi gesture? A refusal to cut these attitudes down decades ago, whether at the institutional or individual level, has led us to this current situation.
When you realize that the reforms we were able to obtain in the 1960s were just temporary concessions based on the geopolitics of the time, then it becomes apparent why there was not a serious attempt to go further. The Civil Rights Act ended the de jure segregation in the South but left the far more influential and nebulous de facto segregation in the North untouched. So far, no politician or movement has been able to crack the de facto/systemic racism. Not MLK with his failed “End the Slums” campaign in Chicago, not the Black Panthers, not Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow Coalition, not Obama with his supposedly post-racial hope and change, and not Black Lives Matter. The conversation basically ended in 1965. I think many whites deeply resent the Civil Rights Movement and genuinely believe that they should have a “right to discriminate.” Since there is no Soviet Union to challenge the US on the matter, I expect to see the Civil Rights Act repealed or gutted to the point of toothlessness in the near future.
This is why Bill Clinton’s announcement that “the era of big government is over” was so pernicious. The only way civil rights laws could ever get enforced was through federal intervention (ie the aforementioned big government) contra states’ rights. The Democrats lost the Solid South once they began kind of, sort of demanding that these laws be enforced across the country. The current lackluster response to the announcement that the Department of Justice will no longer prosecute civil rights violations is the logical end of a disavowal of “big government.” The total success of the Reagan Revolution can be seen in the fact that our supposedly “left-wing party” is completely unable to envision a future that doesn’t involve neoliberalism and neoconservatism.
To bring it all together, this is why the right’s whining about “cancel culture” is so dumb. You don’t get cancelled for being racist, sexist, or homophobic. At this point, it will probably make you more popular. You can get cancelled for real for being against racism or capitalism (eg Paul Robeson) and when that happens, you don’t come back from it. The ultimate arbiter of who gets cancelled is not consumers, but TPTB, however you want to define it. Elon Musk is too big to be cancelled, because he is one of the powers that does get to decide on these matters. Like all billionaires, he donates to Republicans and Democrats, so he has the ears of the government no matter who wins. So if Musk wants to Sieg Heil, everyone has to clap for him.
This tendency to hide racist views through “irony” (aka its only a joke, bro) has been around since at least the 1990s and probably before that. That, combined with the fact that the mainstream media is falling all over itself to explain away Musk’s clear Sieg Heil gesture illustrates to me that any desire of the past sixty years or so to remedy racism has always been superficial. Once the fairly barebones laws that existed got repealed or gutted, there was no need to keep up appearances. Much like the New Deal and Great Society programs, I believe that the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were always meant to be concessions that would be revoked once they lost their propaganda value.
The Democrats have no fight in them to challenge this. Indeed, I’ve always thought that the geriatric Democratic leadership (such as it is), like Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, and the Clintons yearn for the old days of the Solid South, and view minority voters as the electoral equivalent of Diet Coke (ie all empty calories that probably cause cancer). Since liberals consider civil and human rights to be transactional, they probably think minority voters deserve to suffer for not being sufficiently thankful for Joe “most progressive president since FDR” Biden.
Hi, LM. Thanks for responding. My apologies for taking a bit to get back to you.
I must confess that I took a bit to process your reply, because it struck me that nowhere in my essay did I bring up Democrats or liberalism or leftism or any of that. This was squarely focused on Elon Musk, fascism, and the media's response to his signal. So I was taken aback that you made a turn toward criticizing Democrats here. That's so far from what I was actually speaking about and seems almost kneejerk. Forgive me for my straightforwardness here, but it was really surprising.
I think that the media situation at the moment compounds our current moment and is a recent phenomenon. It's true that the media and the political class share a symbiotic relationship, but even thirty years ago journalists prized their position as being the fourth estate. This fawning that we're seeing now is not normal and I think a good portion of our populace recognizes this. The question is, will they be able to withstand the media's effect on them if they continue to allow its daily influence into their lives with only the barest amount of critical engagement.
I ... just don't share your cynicism about the social contract that Democrats forged with minority groups, particularly that of the African-American community but also others. Your read is reminiscent of something I might come across in the annals of Caitlin Johnstone, whose work I realized just this week I've quietly set down.
I think the lack of fight that the Democrats are suffering from right now -- which is a different situation from its 60+ year commitment, after all this time -- is directly a function of the across-the-board loss that it suffered this last cycle, particularly when so many were reassured that the election was in the bag. People are reeling. This is a form of catastrophizing, where a person is so struck by panic that they just go still or lie down (what Stephen King once described as "going tharn"). Something will have to kickstart them back into fight-back mode, and I actually think this Sieg Heil by Musk may have done just that for many in the grassroots. The folks in elected office may be a different kettle of fish -- we'll have to suss that out. But we needed a shock to the system to get reoriented.
Thank you for your reply. I guess I didn’t make the connection between the first paragraph and the second one clear. What I was trying to say is that the Democrats and the “liberal establishment” as a whole lack the fighting spirit to fight against the normalization of racism, whether it’s of the bullhorn or the dog whistle variety (and keep in mind, that these are bigoted acts done by individuals, not even systemic racism that they won’t even try to confront). If there was basically no pushback against Bush I’s Willie Horton ad, why should we be surprised that this same establishment is trying to explain away what is obviously a Nazi gesture? A refusal to cut these attitudes down decades ago, whether at the institutional or individual level, has led us to this current situation.
When you realize that the reforms we were able to obtain in the 1960s were just temporary concessions based on the geopolitics of the time, then it becomes apparent why there was not a serious attempt to go further. The Civil Rights Act ended the de jure segregation in the South but left the far more influential and nebulous de facto segregation in the North untouched. So far, no politician or movement has been able to crack the de facto/systemic racism. Not MLK with his failed “End the Slums” campaign in Chicago, not the Black Panthers, not Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow Coalition, not Obama with his supposedly post-racial hope and change, and not Black Lives Matter. The conversation basically ended in 1965. I think many whites deeply resent the Civil Rights Movement and genuinely believe that they should have a “right to discriminate.” Since there is no Soviet Union to challenge the US on the matter, I expect to see the Civil Rights Act repealed or gutted to the point of toothlessness in the near future.
This is why Bill Clinton’s announcement that “the era of big government is over” was so pernicious. The only way civil rights laws could ever get enforced was through federal intervention (ie the aforementioned big government) contra states’ rights. The Democrats lost the Solid South once they began kind of, sort of demanding that these laws be enforced across the country. The current lackluster response to the announcement that the Department of Justice will no longer prosecute civil rights violations is the logical end of a disavowal of “big government.” The total success of the Reagan Revolution can be seen in the fact that our supposedly “left-wing party” is completely unable to envision a future that doesn’t involve neoliberalism and neoconservatism.
To bring it all together, this is why the right’s whining about “cancel culture” is so dumb. You don’t get cancelled for being racist, sexist, or homophobic. At this point, it will probably make you more popular. You can get cancelled for real for being against racism or capitalism (eg Paul Robeson) and when that happens, you don’t come back from it. The ultimate arbiter of who gets cancelled is not consumers, but TPTB, however you want to define it. Elon Musk is too big to be cancelled, because he is one of the powers that does get to decide on these matters. Like all billionaires, he donates to Republicans and Democrats, so he has the ears of the government no matter who wins. So if Musk wants to Sieg Heil, everyone has to clap for him.