An issue that has simmered in the military for years
Surprise surprise, there’s a surge in trumpish ideologies in the US military.
The Pentagon is confronting a resurgence of white supremacy and other right-wing ideologies in the ranks and is scrambling to track how acute the problem has become in the Trump era.
It’s an issue that has simmered in the military for years, but is now front and center following signs that former military personnel played a role in the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol last week.
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In another sign of the challenge, the Army on Monday announced it was ousting a junior officer who was investigated for posting a video to his 3 million TikTok followers joking about Jews being exterminated in Nazi concentration camps.
These are the people with the weapons.
See, that doesn’t surprise me. It may be the part of the world I live in, but something like 95% of the military active or veteran that I know is racist, misogynistic, and religiously insane.
It doesn’t surprise me either. (The first two words of the post were sarcastic.) It’s probably inevitable, too, but it can be either encouraged or discouraged by the brass and the civilian government.
Yeah, I didn’t think it surprised you, but it seems to be surprising a lot of people. People think the military and sports and things build character; they can, but so often they seem to build something else. Like religion, they are insular and exalted, and believe they are right. That’s a dangerous thing. Coupled with the fact that they get so much adulation, and in the military they get to use assault weapons, it’s lethal.
I recall that one of the ex-bloggers at FTB used to talk extensively about the attempts over decades by adherents of the Dominionist movement to insert their people into the Air Force Academy – with some success. you only plan her that period if you plan/hope to have military units on your side at some point.
I have to say that generally conservative political and social movements have been better at long term planning and activism over the last few decades. Sure, there have been liberal and progressive gains in many areas, but economically, politically and judicially much of the structural power base has moved rightward. That limits the extent of current gains that liberals can make and in the US at least looks likely to roll back some past gains.
The thing is, Rob, a lot of the right-wingers who did that started out on the left, but switched to the right. They took a lot of the tricks and tools that had been successful on the left with them, and put them to good use. And they have spent tons of time, money, and energy recruiting in the colleges. All the screaming and shouting about the liberal colleges, and the reality is that a lot of the right wingers came out of those very colleges, nurtured on a worldview that thrives in academia outside of the liberal arts and the sciences. Business departments, economics departments, and some law schools all foster conservative thought, and the law schools particularly work to get their students internships in the corridors of power so they can move in smoothly and become the power brokers of the future.
The left is too fragmented right now; our tent is so big, and so few people seem willing to work with anyone who isn’t pure enough. Sure, I can despair of some of the views of people who agree with me on some things, but if they are on my side on, say, global warming, I’m willing to work with them. And I will vote for someone who will be less likely to break the social safety net or kill off abortion rights even if he isn’t perfect in every particular (or she, but we all know how that went, right?)
I wish I could believe this election would be a wake up call for the left, but I think that’s hopeless. Besides, it would take decades to undo, so I won’t live to see it. The current political situation dates at least to 1935, when some Christians got together and decided to control American politics. They’ve been at the helm in some issues for quite some time.
Yet another legacy of the Iraq war and our vaunted “all volunteer” military… They used to try purging them but there weren’t so many recruits in the aughts.
I liked iknklast’s remark, which is spot-on:
‘People think the military and sports and things build character; they can, but so often they seem to build something else. Like religion, they are insular and exalted, and believe they are right.’
Some of Edward Bond’s plays, The War Trilogy, for instance, describe very well the kind of attitudes fostered by military life.
Here’s Wikipedia on the man:
‘At fifteen, he left school with only a very basic education, something from which he derived a deep sense of social exclusion that contributed significantly to his political orientation. Bond then educated himself, driven by an impressive eagerness for knowledge. After various jobs in factories and offices, he did his national service in the British Army occupation forces in Vienna between 1953 and 1955. During his time in the army he discovered the naked violence hidden behind normal social behaviour, and decided to start writing.’
iknklast @5, I’ve certainly seen the influence in colleges, and home schooling. The two work hand in hand. Home schooling used to be a tiny number of families – mostly leftist ‘hippies’. It’s now incredibly common and mostly religious and right wing families. There are colleges that pretty much specialise in sweeping up those home schooled kids, so they never get overly challenged by the real world until the hit work and if they’re lucky and get placed in the right internships and opportunities not even then. those colleges tend not to specialise in the hard sciences either. It takes a very special person indeed to hold creationism and evolution/plate tectonics in their head at the same time (I’ve met a couple that said).
How many right wing activists started out on the left? I’m sure there were some, but I struggle to believe it was vast numbers. The influence of an organised block of conservatives in law, business, politics and religion working in co-ordinated lockstep for decades is key. They may have picked up some ideas from the left. but it’s not as if the right has been incapable of planning and activism ever.
It will be ‘interesting’ to see if this is the beginning of the end for the ‘small tent’ conservatism. The last few and next few months are not turning decent conservatives Democrat, but it’s certainly made them want to “nuke the GOP from orbit, nuke the rubble and then salt the earth” (T. Greg Doucette). Even the likes of some of Trump’s closest advisors have had enough, of him at least. Many are clearly not prepared to go full Qanon, while others are leaping with both feet. Others have proven themselves to be craven cowards. Deploring what’s happening in private, while enabling in public for fear of political, or maybe even physical, death.
You’re right that this is inter-generational though. We tend to react against the sins and perceived sins of our parents and grandparents. political movements take time to build and bear fruit. They also take time to wither and die.
Because the reports we’re seeing here are so fragmented and watered down (thanks MSM), many do not realise exactly how tragic and dangerous the last few months and weeks have been in the US. Even many of those who do are rolling their eyes in disgust at the awful joke America has become.
A small number of us are resigned to seeing a consequential erosion of the influence and power of western democracies that will accelerate in the years to come, unless somehow the US becomes reinvigorated with purpose and commitment to a better democratic and prosperous future for all. As this stand, even your allies regard you more with fear and trepidation than respect and goodwill.
it’s a tragedy and not even all trump’s fault. He’s just torn down the facade of the crumbling edifice and encouraged others to set it on fire.
Geoffrey Kabaservice in the Graun:-
“What, really, does the Republican party believe in now other than the imperative of maintaining Trump in power? So long as the party clings to Trump’s Lost Cause, it rejects business, law and order, national unity, the constitution, fiscal responsibility, traditional morality, democratic norms and nearly everything else that Republicans once claimed to stand for.
If the party has an ideology it’s what the French call je-m’en-foutisme, a contemptuous indifference toward others. It was exemplified by the House Republicans during the Capitol siege who, sheltering with colleagues in a secure location, mocked requests that they wear masks; now three of the Democratic lawmakers who were there have become infected with Covid-19. If Trump’s Republican party has a motto, it’s the Arizona state Republican chair Kelli Ward’s urging the president to “Cross the Rubicon” – that is, to imitate Julius Caesar’s treasonous action that led to civil war and the collapse of the Roman Republic.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/15/congressional-republicans-trump-lie-overturn-election-riot
” je-m’en-foutisme” sounds more elegant than “I’m all right, Jack.”
Trump is supposed to have been in touch with Steve Bannon, who would rather fancy himself as raising a revolutionary movement, with Trump as the front man. However whether they would find corporations mad enough to finance something like that is another thing, not to mention social media expelling them.
It’s more than you might think. A lot of the prominent conservatives from the latter part of the last century were leftists during the middle part of the century. This is something that isn’t even all that widely known here, so I’m not surprised that you might not be aware of that. By no means all, of course, but they are definitely there. They tended to be from the non-communist left, and what attracted them to conservatism is never clear, though I suspect from reading about or the writings of some of them, it was the perception of being an outsider. They liked the left when it was outside the mainstream, then moved to the right when the left started gaining ground (not that they ever gained all that much, honestly), and in some cases, I think it happened when they got jobs in the establishment and the conservative views simply fit their desire not to pay taxes. But I don’t want to assume motivations in other people’s heads, so I won’t extrapolate the few where I’ve read their motivations to the others that I haven’t.
As for the home schooling, yeah. We get a lot of those kids here – religious area, dominated by Lutherans and Catholics, and not the nice fuzzy Catholics of the eastern cities where they mostly ignore what the pope says and are much nicer than their god. These are hard-line Catholics. If a parent thinks the Catholic schools in the area are too fuzzy and liberal (they are anything but, but the hard right won’t even accept them, probably because they do teach science), then they will home school. I will say, they are better at doing online classes, because they are used to working without a formal class, but their social skills are non-existent. If they don’t land in a Christian bubble in the job world, they are in for some bitter surprises. As for their “smarts”, most of the administration, and far too many teachers, at our school think they are far and above the rest of our students. That hasn’t been my experience, but then, I am a science teacher, so that might have something to do with that.
Mikey Weinstein has been battling this for the last 15 years. A career air force officer, he was ‘radicalized’ when his own children encountered organized anti-semitism in the Air Force Academy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_L._Weinstein
iknklast, sadly I believe your analysis is spot on.
The left lacks the kind of least common denominator talking points that can be repeated ad nauseam to rally a consistent block of troops that the right has found with ‘white genocide, and fetuses’.
The right has been relentless in their attacks on science and public education, demonization of progressive values, false victimization, fear of government, and marginalization of truth for decades. How do you re-educate a bloc of millions with guns?
The right wing in this country, including most of the Republican party, lost any claim to being conservative long ago. They are radical right wingers, or reactionaries, or fascists, but they are not really trying to conserve anything. The true conservatives in the US (at least in a Burkean sense) are the moderate Democrats, led by Biden.
I think the left has a better idea of what the right actually stands for than vise versa. At this point in time it is not an exaggeration at all to say that an alarmingly large percentage of the US right is fascist or leans that way. In its characterization of the American left, the right throws around “socialist,” “communist” and Marxist” so much as to render them meaningless, much like the TA use of the word “violence.” It’s too bad that more Americans don’t have a better understanding of the kinds of benefits every advanced, industrialized nation enjoys, benefits that are being withheld from them by their own politicians and political parties at the behest of corporate greed. If more people said “Oooh, I want me some of that, TOO!” they’d be a lot healthier and happier. But just call it “socialism” and it’s the tool of the devil. It’s tragic.
Thanks iknklast, interesting.
YNNB@14, spot on at every point.