Tonic

Tonic OP wrote

Reply to A Night At The Garden by Tonic

"In 1939, 20,000 Americans rallied in New York’s Madison Square Garden to celebrate the rise of Nazism – an event largely forgotten from American history. A NIGHT AT THE GARDEN, made entirely from archival footage filmed that night, transports audiences to this chilling gathering and shines a light on the power of demagoguery and anti-Semitism in the United States."

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Tonic OP wrote

Reply to Are We in Denial about Denial? by Tonic

Contains a thread around some of these thoughts

What the far right promises is, in short, an anti-systemic politics for people who do not really believe the system could change in any major way: everything stays essentially the same, but yields better results for those who feel left out now.

But the processing of information is itself constrained by a number of cognitive biases that respond, in turn, to unconscious needs. The question we should ask ourselves, therefore, is: What needs do the far right’s narratives meet?

To the extent that they speak to this pervasive anxiety, the far right’s lies sound more truthful to many than any arguments claiming that things are generally getting better and this is only a bad patch that we will soon pull through. But they also do more. By locating the source of the problem in the misappropriation of resources by various others (countries, ethnicities, religions, cultures), and the solution in a fight to exclude those others from access to resources, the far right tells a story that is well adapted to a world in which inequality grows, resources decline, and those at the bottom have to compete for increasingly meager scraps.

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