Philip Green
7 min readAug 14, 2024

Part 2: Democracy and the Other

As noted at the end of Part 1, I’m going to argue here that free and fair voting–democracy–is the key to understanding the historical, and current, Right Wing.

To begin with the “anti-government sentiment” referred to in Part 1. No big deal: I’ve had that all my adult life. That’s what it means to vote “Socialist,” or worse yet, “Democrat” when there’s a Republican government. Nixon; Reagan, and finally Trump, the mobster. What does that have to do with anything? The “Government,” whoever it is, busts up a homeless encampment; puts onerous taxes on ordinary people and no taxes at all on rich guys; sells weapons of destruction for the killing of Palestinians; or Vietnamese soldiers; or drops weapons of mass destruction on Japanese civilians–or…I could go on and on: so it goes. But white Democrats or Republicans as a class are certainly not oppressed.

In my generation you got to vote for FDR, or Herbert Lehman, or Norman Thomas, or you were going to vote for Bobby Kennedy–or Joe Biden; or Kamala Harris. Or on the other hand, Ike, or Reagan, or Bush or not at all. You win some, you lose more, but unless you’re deep into that game, it’s just a part of life, causing nothing to happen. Prices go up, wages go down, you join a union–they don’t keep you from doing that.

There is no one worth killing for in civil society. Worth fighting for, yes, angry all the time yes, but how that turns into a passion for hurting, the lives of other people: that’s what has to be explained. And you, or anyone, cannot explain it by saying that the people I’m trying to understand believe that Trump really won the ’20 election;,and thus that they’ve been feloniously cheated out of their rightful sense of triumph and well-being. Or that women who get abortions are “really” murderers, deploying a word that means wanton killing, rather than ordinary behavior.

No, you can’t really believe that, any more than you can believe that the Yankees won the World Series last year, or Serena Williams won her last singles match at Wimbledon. It didn’t happen, and you can’t find evidence that it did, because there isn’t any. To insist on the truth of what’s manifestly untrue, and to act on that insistence, is to enter a different realm than the realm of belief, is to leave the world of ordinary people behind.

Ordinary people…As an explanation, “Class” won’t do it. If you wanted to see a “working class” in action, you’d be better off going to an auto workers picket line than a Trump rally: go where the camera goes on one of those, and you won’t see many of what the British describe as “the laboring classes.”. And I’ve noticed that whenever we’re shown “anti-government” extremism in situ, we’re more likely to be inside a barber shop than a factory.

The manosphere is just what we think it is (an of course I don’t belong to it and neither do you), but how does one enlist in it? We don’t get anywhere by knowing what people are; only who we are determines our behavior. In that respect, we have to think of the manosphere as though it spreads a contagious disease–quite devastating in our own social order, to be sure. In the logic of methodologists, most members of the manosphere are men, but most men are not. Fortunately for us all, most women do not learn to love guns.

And as for gender, it’s a limited determinant: no more of women than it is of men. One you’ve seen women outside a clinic screaming “murderer” at other women going in for an abortion, and trying physically to block their entrance: you have to ask, where does that come from, that awful desire to hurt others in place of satisfying oneself? Once heard, those screams drown out all notions of “femininity” and “womanhood”

Another Times writer (Charles Homans) put it this way, “This is a country where the language of violence has become too deeply entangled with politics to disentangle with a few pro forma statements, and where a growing share of Americans are comfortable not just with rhetoric but with potential action”.

Like all those Times writers, he cast around for examples on
“the Left” that will help him with this metaphor, but to refer back to the SPLC findings, that won’t do. Ever heard of black policemen bursting into a white person’s house and blasting off rounds? I don’t think so. The Left may be insensitive or hypocritical, but it does not engage in verbal or physical assaults on non-white people.

We also know that he extremist “sentiment,” wherever it comes from is even deeper than a confrontation with one of “the other.” Mostly it’s men, yes, who for instance introduce the bills that authorize the murder of women; rarely women. And the burgeoning Nazi-like treatment of transgendered and gay persons–especially children — transcends traditional gender roles. As does the fear and hatred of immigrants.

In the end, exercising legitimized power over others to ensure that they are lesser than you: that’s what we’re finally talking about. It think of it as a s a version of whitewashing the self. The alternative is to conclude that whatever it was that happened, it was somehow your own fault, or your own abstention from whatever you might have worked on instead. I’ve had that thought many times over the years; what keeps it from taking over is knowledge–the knowledge that that’s the way these particular opportunities about this particular persons–ones-self–didn’t work out. The universe is not yours for the taking.

And so the authors of The Authoritarian Personality described it, but didn’t explain it. My explanation, whatever else it consists of, is that the guy who wants to pick up the gun because nothing else has worked the way he wanted it to, is a person who cannot live with himself, and survives that hidden insight by trampling on others.

I’m going to be blunt about my own explanation: once you have found access to the Manichean concept of “evil,” you can let others work that out for you; and become a success by following their words, their prescriptions. A leader can serve that purpose; especially when attached to one of the world’s most successful political parties. But most of all, what knits all this together?

Most crucially, when you hear someone talk about Evil as though we might have some genuine acquaintance with it, you know you’re in the parlor: the initial meeting place of Right-wing totalitarianism. It could be some organized religion or cult, as in the case of American evangelism; or irreligious, as in the case of Hitler–whose favorite writings, however, were steeped in the religious lore of anti-Semitism, and the dehumanizations of racism. But it’s real.

Yesterday, J.D. Vance gave a talk in which he was “blunt about wanting to break norms and test constitutional limits to execute his ideas: “We have to get pretty wild, pretty far out there.” You really don’t need a further explanation. A person who wants to be “a man,” and has no sense of self whatsoever.

But let’s face it: how did such a non-being get to be the potential vice-president of a social order that has thus gone completely off the rails? No psychological investigation can explain the explosions of such unequivocal resorts to racism and misogyny. Even invocations of “neo-liberalism” won’t do the trick. And to return to class, there are no parades of “homeless men for Trump” wearing MAGA hats.

In sum, the Manosphere has somehow become a no-man’s land. It is being tested by, of all people, Kamalla Harris. On July 27, a guy most of us have never heard of named Ross Morales Rocketto, opened a Zoom call he called “White Dudes for Harris.” 100,000 men signed up for it and, in a high-tech version of Monte Carlo, broke the bank. Zoom engineers rushed to bring it back to life, and another 100,000 men signed up. All told, they raised $4 million. Trump people made fun of them. To quote another white dude, “Something is happening and you don’t know what it is Do you Mister Jones?”

The manosphere, now to sum up, is like an outdated center of manufacturing that is facing competition from a new means of production. Everywhere its residents look, they find themselves in possession of what used to be a monopoly but is now common property. In the conventional phrase, they oppose the adaptations that would bring them up to date–e.g., more money on community education; access to health care — and substitute accusation for thought and bigotry and scorn for solidarity. Cannot win for losing, and call it theft. Close their eyes, and call it sight.

So, in conclusion what ties all this together? The answer, as I I suggested at the beginning of this blog , is, sad to say, democracy. It is democracy–the choice of governments in free and fair elections–that is the concrete enemy and target of the American Right Wing; the target of its hatred and attempts at overthrow, with more to come. It’s no accident that it was an attempt to overthrow the 2020 election that produced the first violent attack on houses of government in our history; or that the Right has concentrated its current efforts on preventing the certification of votes: the treason next time.

Why? Think again about othering. People who engage in it as a political goal are most definitely not– as we often like to think they are — “acting against their own interests.” “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” unfortunately compose a limited view of “interests.” The Fascists’ goal is to prevent other people to whom they feel superior from being treated as their equals and included in the most decisive realm of all: Political democracy, i.e., the most minimal version of the ideal,–free and fair voting. That is what’s unbearable to democracy’s opponents; and my best effort at uncovering the Why.

It’s totalitarian vision that incorporates Christian nationalism, white racism, and sexual hysteria: a vision of complete triumph over the other:

You, whoever is reading this, may be cynical about democracy. The people trying to destroy it make no such mistake. They have met the enemy, and it is us. This what only our threatened electoral system can prevent.