EFFORTPOST Scott Alexander expresses a desire to punish Trump for January 6th

On his blog's open thread, one of the poor confused SFBA Rationalist Cultists contemplates voting for Trump, and Scott Alexander has this to say.

I agree it's unlikely (not impossible!) that Trump does something worse than January 6, but I kind of depart from consequentialism here; it seems like this sort of thing ought to be punished regardless; the next person who considers something similar ought to know it will make them a pariah. If we can't manage pariah, it should at least lose them a few percentage points of the vote.

So Scott Alexander seems aware of the facts of the Jack Smith briefing on the subject, but there is an extremely obvious opening for Scott Alexander to punish Trump for defecting from democracy, and that is of course using the word 'fascism' to describe the movement of Trumpism.

But that would require Scott Alexander to call wolf, and Scott Alexander is never wrong. He couldn't possibly have been wrong when he wrote "You Are Still Calling Wolf," because he is definitely rational, his cult doctrine says so, and he follows it scrupulously.

Here's what we have:

A country has fundamentalist, evangelical religious people who have blind faith in their creed. They believe whatever their leaders tell them.

Fundamentalist: especially prone to doctrine-based 'fundamental' arguments or reasoning.

Evangelical: especially prone to evangelizing their religion.

The SFBA Rationalist Cult has elements of fundamentalist, evangelical religion. They have a bishop in the form of Scott Alexander who tells them what to think, or at least, everyone sure does seem to believe the same things Scott believes about whether or not there is a wolf in our politics!

This is why it matters that Scott got it wrong.

So these cultists basically have this doctrine called "The Sequences" which are overtly spiritual in nature, they inscribe a definition of virtue in those who read it. The trenchant criticism of their doctrine is 'what is novel is not good and what is good is not novel.' It's a re-implementation of Christian ethos with a secular mindset, but these people believe they discovered everything for the first time and are the originators of a new philosophy. Because of this they have a horrid myopia of thought, an incapacity to relate to normal people and normal politics.

And Scott Alexander evangelizes his "Effective Altruist" philanthropy wing of the cult. They used to be more evangelical, it used to be common for you to encounter some myopic person who on stumbling in conversation would say "Have you read the sequences? If you read the sequences you'd understand." They got this bullied out of them a bit over time.

But the most horrifying part of the story is that these are people who by and large participated in the New Atheism movement, a sort of online revival for the disaffected religious of the United States.

People who saw up close the authoritarian nature of blind religion.

And these are the people who when fascism came to the United States were unable to perceive it as fascism. There were times you could get Scott to admit that Trump, that Trumpism, was dangerous, though it was never clear on exactly what Scott thought that danger was, only that he had been bullied by wiser people in his circle into saying "Trump bad" grudgingly in vague terms.

The problem is that Scott Alexander, when he looked at leftists freaking out about the fascism, loaded all of his denialism about the wolf on one single point: racism. "It's not quite as overtly racist as Hitler, therefore it's not fascism!" said Scott proudly; "Well reasoned!" cried back his cultists.

Fundamentalist, evangelical Christians gather around a strongman type in 2016. Our politics gets more violent because violence begets violence and Trump glorifies violence. The media is discredited as an institution in away that evokes linear comparisons; "Lügenpresse" and "fake news."

The ugly truth is that Scott Alexander's skepticism of woke ideology obscured, for Scott, the wolf. After all, proclaimed Scott, isn't the media lying about IQ and race? "Well reasoned!" cried back his cultists.

The distinction between avoiding uncomfortable or irrelevant topics and accusing the media of fabricating lies when they report the actual truth of Trump's actions was lost on the SFBA Rationalist Cult.

So a 'policy of cruelty' was enacted in internment camps and 1000 children are still not reunited with their parents. This doesn't count as fascism for Scott Alexander. (Obama's child separation policy was restricted to incidents of suspected human trafficking.)

And now we're at:

• Trump wants to mobilize the military to deport illegal immigrants

• Trump wants to mobilize the military to deport legal immigrants, the Haitians here legally

• Trump wants to mobilize the military against public dissent

And on January 6th Trump launched an insurrection in denial of the election he lost. Is that not fascist enough for you, Scott? Why not? Because he didn't talk enough about race in his speech that day?

I suspect there's a few things going on with these remaining denialists:

• These people all think about what they would do if they were to launch a dictatorial takeover of the government, and the one thing they would not do is say so many things with fascist vibes. "Since Trump is emitting fascist vibes, we can safely conclude he is engaging in 'kayfabe' to trick Democrats into overreacting, and will not be fascist!" they proclaimed. "Well reasoned!" replied the cultists.

• Total woke derangement capture: fear of a communist purge keeps them more afraid of Democrats than of Republicans. This is another inability to perceive a real difference. There's a moderate center and an extremist fringe in much of politics, and the scary thing happens when the extremist fringe gains the center. This is what Trump represents, the extremist fringe in the center. Neither Biden nor Harris is communist and the woke moral panic has to come to a stop. ("You Are Still Calling Wolf About Communists")

The consequences of Scott Alexander's writing is essentially that everything his cult touches is tainted. When one part of the country is either deceived by the lies of a fascist or endorses those lies as authoritarians do, another part of the country which reads books can recognize the wolfish characteristics, and you are unable to recognize the wolf, you have a credibility problem.

Why should anyone take you seriously on your list of existential threats to the human race if you can't even notice the threat to the human race that has demonstrably occurred before?

Like it's pretty simple: the howling murder monkeys swarm and kill a bunch of people under a strong murder monkey. It's not more complicated than that until you give the murder monkeys a military industrial complex. Genocide is in our blood this way, and when the howling murder monkeys swarm (do you agree that they are swarming? What was January 6th if not a murder monkey swarm?) it is irresponsible to believe they would not conduct a genocide.

What would be hundreds or thousands of enemies of the new regime being put to death by the howling murder monkeys (King Herod comes to mind) becomes millions. It's not complicated. It's just not.

So the people who were freaking out in your clinics, Scott, might have gotten some details wrong, but they were "directionally correct" and now the SFBA Rationalist Cult has a credibility problem because you faceplanted hard when it came to politics. "Rationalists should win, why don't they?" Because of congenital failures in their doctrine: they believe they received a revelation, they're constantly receiving revelations, but only in a secular way, you see, because they're not religious, because religious people are irrational, and rationally a rationalist must believe they are rational: they followed the spiritual practice, they receive the spiritual result.

If you make the motions of evangelizing for your cult, you are evangelizing for your cult.

@Impassionata3 wrote about "microfascisms" or "millifascisms" in the context of the Pledge of Allegiance

The pledge of allegiance is the activation, as in oral practice, of the national mythos cult ideology. I loosely consider it harmless. is it fascist? because all national myth is supportive of a jingoistic narrative, it's a little fascist; you can measure it in microfascisms but you will still have to measure it thus. In school you have the option not to say it. This is an introduction to the notion of freedom of speech and questionable allegiances; for this I think it good education. But there's no denying that because it is 17.76 microfascisms, it marks the danger.

Democrats who try and put an end to this have a certain right to their opinion. There's nothing wrong about the motivation to reduce the microfascism exposure, even if I personally don't think eliminating that source of microfascism emissions would have prevented the current fascism.

Let me see if I can just dash this out:

• Trump is called fascist by a bunch of people. Bush did not vote for him.

• The child separation policy, a deliberate policy of cruelty, is implemented. Over 1000 kids are still separated from their parents.

• Trump summons his militia through Steve Bannon (January 6 documents out of Chutkan case show) and many people have gone to jail already for his attempted coup.

• Bush called January 6th an insurrection.

• Trump indicates he will mobilize the military to round up undesirable people.

If you placed your bet on "Trump is not a fascist" in 2016 and have not figured out that you lost, too bad!, you lost, it was fascism. It was at least 1000 millifascisms and it didn't come from the pledge of allegiance.

So my question for Scott Alexander becomes something roughly like:

How many millifascisms have to accumulate before you have a full fascism?

or

If the right word to use to describe the threat of Trumpism isn't fascism, why not? What word would you use instead?

@Impassionata3 again has a scoop here with POST-POST-POSTMODERN QUASI-MARXIST NEO-FASCISM

Though I think I prefer:

Postmodern Proto-Marxist Neo-Fascism

Postmodern

Broadly speaking there is modern thought which reaches its terminus around the horrors of World War I, and there is the alienating nihilism with regard to national narrative necessary in the post-WWII political landscape. Jacques Ellul wrote about "The Victory of Hitler": even if Hitler was defeated, the military industrial complex and its attendant mass murder machine lay waiting for the next genocidal dictator to emerge. It can happen here. Scott, pull the darn fire alarm.

Arguably @Impassionata3 is correct to use post-post-postmodern, because there are some convolutions. The first convolution occurs in the 60s with the hippies and the establishment of boomer ideology, in which revolutionary/progressive tendencies are absorbed by the machine but mostly people get jobs and have children. The second convolution occurs with the death of punk, you could add a third in the resurgence of grunge, but the 90s "Era of Good Feelings" came to an end with the third convolution in the War in Iraq. Baudrillard is notable here.

Proto-Marxist

Rush Limbaugh, as a warrior of the Cold War, studied his enemy and read Marx. Then he took a Marxist approach and injected class resentment into rightwing politics. Then Fox News took this propaganda technique and it became the defining perspective for the 2000s. This populist movement is Marxist, this is resentment of elites, these people are revolutionaries without a realistic goal besides violence against the system.

But Fox News can't call it Marxism or use the word 'class' because under boomer ideology, those are no-no words.

Neo-Fascism

Why "Neo"? Because it is a 'new' fascism in that it is aware of the reputation problems that fascism, being in my view a general ideology of power through any means possible which glorifies violence and tends towards white supremacy, and is therefore somewhat better at hiding its tracks. In this 'neo' lies a lot of reflection on the strategies it takes to advance the fascist agenda.

When I came to Scott Alexander's culture war threads in 2016, I saw that the fascists were there. This was strange, they don't normally gather. Of course it was later that good journ*lists made sure the public knew what Scott Alexander had done: he invited neoreactionaries, some of whom were overtly fascist, into his political spaces, and they festered there, giving Scott Alexander a deserved reputation for at best being an easily used dupe and at worst a sympathetic pseudofascist. To this day it is strange to me that the people in Scott Alexander's spaces don't know how unusual it is that they are so populated with white supremacists.

See the way it worked was: every Scott Alexander community, the subreddit, the groomercord, had fascists cruising 'mask on' and a sidecar community where they would go 'mask off.' But you didn't even need the sidecar community to see what they were, because in order to spread their message, the mask has to slip. I grew a lot less afraid of fascists because I could see that they were bound by the requirement to eventually spread the noxious element of their message and get unmasked. But I grew a lot more concerned with the idiot moderates like Scott Alexander whose blind obeisance to a logical interpretation of 'free speech' forbade calling fascists 'fascist' and racists 'racist' because these were no-no words in Scott Alexander's spaces, sensitive men who were afraid of wokes becomes woke derangement syndrome this way.

In other words, Scott Alexander's commitment to free speech was tepid and weak, confining discourse to moderate tones which are easily faked by fascists, driving out the people who can perceive the wolf. The resulting evaporative cooling effect leaves Scott being hit with cries of "Well reasoned!" for everything he says.

Bundle up the 'dissident right' and what do you have? "Two movies on one screen" is a postmodern construct. A bunch of people predisposed to denialism about the fascism both overtly and covertly, intentionally and unintentionally furthering the murder monkey hate spiral.

The consequences of Scott Alexander's political writing is indeed this failure in online politics to recognize the threat that Trump and Trumpism face (because, and this is important, the movement is as much in the people around the figure at the center of it.)

And you end up with Elon Musk retweeting someone claiming that during the Harris-Trump debate, Harris "lied" about Charlottesville and a bloodbath sentence.

But the full statement Harris made included:

• the Stand Back and Stand By comment Trump made, connecting him with the white supremacist militia

• January 6th itself: an armed mob with white supremacist militia attendees disrupts the peaceful transition of power and comes close to killing elected politicians

Since then, Jack Smith's briefing has provided this missing piece, that Trump called Steve Bannon who posted a call to arms ("all heck will break loose on January 6th")

So it's an insurrection, a call to civil war, an attempt to overturn a valid election.

That should be 1000 millifascisms. A full fascism. Add the child separation policy, add the threats to round up undesirables, and you should update your assumptions ("priors" implies a rigor that you do not have you frickhead cultists) to be that Trump and the people around him would absolutely turn the ovens on.

The best way you can punish Trump for defecting is to sound the alarm, Scott. You failed to do it before because you got distracted by a photo op with a taco.

The SFBA Rationalist Cult was especially good at rationalizing why they were so rational, and not so good at admitting their mistakes. I don't expect this to go anywhere but I have to try.