Unity, nasty uglies, and the Game Stop events.

A while back, I posted some thought on the topic of unity, about the possibility that really understanding the grievances of those who on the nasty ugly side of the political spectrum, those who some have labeled “deplorables,” so that the possibility of meaningful “for the people” unity might be explored. Such understanding is not easy to achieve because there really are deplorable aspects to the thinking and actions of those so labeled and those who act to promote a nasty and ugly right-wing agenda. Glen Greenwald, to the consternation of a good number of liberals, has offered over time what I think is a thoughtful and important analysis of the deplorable, finding cause for their ideology and actions that goes beyond nasty and ugly to the practical, to their perception of their own position in American society, their inability to prosper in a prosperous land where prosperity is thought to signify success, lack of it, failure. So, there’s is a culture of the failed, their understanding of things being that they have failed because cultural forces prevent them from succeeding. Greenwald agrees with this, that this American society, this capitalist society, has kept good numbers of people from succeeding so that others can prosper wildly. Thus, in regard to the GameStop phenomenon he says this: “In the video below, I discuss what happened and what the implications are. One note about the video: though I do discuss the amorphous and trans-ideological politics driving both the Reddit uprising and the reaction to it, that topic in particular merits much more consideration. Liberal journalists and pundits love to mock the idea that “economic anxiety” drives anything remotely adjacent to right-wing populism — the primary drivers are racism and other types of bigotry, they insist in unison — yet all one has to do is spend any non-trivial amount of time in that sub-Reddit to see genuine and significant levels of rational economic anger often quite untethered, even hostile, to left-liberal cultural pieties and political niceties. Given their recent noble success, everyone now wants to claim these Redditors as their own, but their politics, like many people’s, defy the clean left-right dichotomy on which the professional media and punditry classes depend, the only prism through which they can understand the world.” This deserves some thought.