Philip Green
7 min readAug 7, 2024

WHY? Why? Why? Why”

Part I: The “Other”

As I write, Tim Walz has just been named as her Vice-President candidate by Kamala Harris–a choice to which I was looking forward. Walz is a long-time Democratic office-holder who is known, as he puts it for “working across the aisle,” i.e., respecting your opponents. My own practice, for better or for worse, consists of thinking of “the other side” of today’s political division as being dominated by harbingers of Fascism, which many of their spokespersons openly extol–cf. J.D. Vance. Their dreadful view must be understood, but not politely accepted. I make no apology for that–and wish it could be different, as it once often was. So:

Back in February I wrote the following lament–or screed–after it became clear that the Supreme Court majority was going to make the gift of immunity to the would-be autocrat Trump, and thus overthrow the American political system.

“So make no mistake about it: The heat is on. It’s on women, who are in the sights–might as well be gun-sights, of the rabid evangelical Christians and Christian nationalists who are the totalitarians of sex and gender. Hitler is their guide; and when they (all men in this case) march in Nashville they’ve stepped across the line–with no one standing up to stop them. And now as for the overweight, over-reacting Hitler himself–here he comes, and until and unless they do something different to separate themselves from him–that is where they are, the vicious, murderous enemies of the people: of we the people. But maybe no more.”

Looking at that paragraph months later, I’m struck by the difficulty I–and everyone else–have in answering the obvious question: why is Fascism and violence so attractive to Americans (and a hell of a lot of other people).”

There are obvious answers, which I’ve traded on over the past few years. To summarize, Fascism is the result of a transaction: a powerful man–whatever that means in a particular society with a particular version of power at stake– achieves the support of other men by offering them a reward for supporting him: that reward being absolution, or a blessing, for exercising violence on his behalf. Or Gods. As the Op-Ed writer (and ex-Republican) David French. put it recently:

“The Atmosphere of the ‘Manosphere’ Is Toxic”

Yes, quite evidently. Or as Joe Klein put it on the very same day:

“…the societal trends that have fertilized the ground for political violence are well known: a near-religious worship of the AR-15 semi-automatic-military-style rifle and a cult of apocalyptic militarism that surrounds its marketing, the toleration of armed paramilitary groups, the spread of extreme anti-government sentiments among those in uniform, the morass of conspiracies disseminated for financial and political gain, and the open embrace of explicitly anti-democratic ideas by the Republican Party.”

Or, on the insane misogyny of J.D. Vance, in Ginia Bellafante’s satire,

“Leaving aside the novelty of rich, power-hungry, overachievers living in one-bedroom apartments, the framing relied on a trope that is hundreds of years old — one that imagines female autonomy both as a kind of self-regarding myopia and a dangerous civic unraveling….How the ambitious, impressively employed child-free woman of Tribeca or Georgetown manages to be at once distraught and pathetic while remaining fantastically skilled at imposing her will is an aspect of cat-lady studies that would seem to warrant further clarity.”

In this exposure of self-unraveling, what’s missing is what I began by calling the “Why?” — and the unexamined modifier is “extreme .”

We have to step back for a moment. There is such a thing as oppression, that is, the use of armed force to suppress dissidence or resistance; or to abolish democratic institutions in favor of tyranny. How to resist is up to the resisters. That is, it’s not possible to reason, in some objective manner, the rights and wrongs of, say, the National Liberation front against the French authorities in colonized Algeria.

We can question means: vz., the film “The Battle of Algiers;” or October 7th and its genocidal aftermath in Gaza. But we cannot reason our way to apply some ethical principle independent of the facts, or our interpretation of the facts, in an armed conflict about which we’re asked to take sides. That’s the way things are.

But “extreme anti-government sentiment?” In opposition to what? It will sound like a cliche, but where a free and fair election has taken place, and the persons prevailing in it have instituted legislative or administrative policies that they are thereby authorized to create: we call the result “democracy.”This is what happened in the United States in 2020.

There are two ways that we can challenge the legitimacy of such a conclusion: by appealing to the authority of a written or unwritten constitution; or by reversing the vote, next time around. As Joe Manchin said to Chuck Schumer, “you have to elect more liberals.” But the appeal to democracy does not satisfy the “extreme” right. Why not? Insteaad they resort to violence and fraud: Why?

In that context, alot of threats have been uttered about what will happen in 2025 if Trump is denied re-election; I’ll return to that. What’s interesting, though, is what happened on January 6, 2021. That is to say, when you look at the footage of the event, together with the court cases in which the organizers were convicted, you discover that January 6 was mostly a neo-Nazi event. E.g., abortion does not appear on signs and flags; nor does misogyny. Race is the constant, more even than election denial.

“Oh I wish I was in Dixie, away, away; in Dixie-land I’ll take my stand…”

For years, in fact, the Southern Poverty Law Center has kept track of violence in America, and the finding is always the same: regardless of what else has been happening, 80% or more of organized violence is Right-wing, and White. The urban riots and mass demonstrations of the ’60s and then the George Floyd murder, were responses to oppression; and the instances of murderous violence were almost all expressions of white racism: itself based on the proposition that to resist the aftermaths of slavery is to deserve your fate, to become an enemy by choice.

(NOTE: See, e.g., Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution, By Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin; and the two films about the murder of Fred Hampton: “Judas and the Black Messiah,” 2021, and “The Murder of Fred Hampton,” 1971. And what Wikipedia politely refers to as “The Watts riots,” sometimes referred to as the Watts Rebellion or Watts Uprising,” were mostly disorganized looting when it came to violence; and the names associated with violence–Malcolm X, Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver–mostly displayed rhetoric.)

Looking back now at American violence, including police violence, through the lens of the SPLC, including Janary 6th, it is mostly a subsidiary of neo-Naziism. Yes, that’s the Manosphere. But we don’t want to reify it as the abstract conception. I’ve known many men, but offhand I can’t think of one who manifested the Manosphere. Or neo-Naziism.

So it’s an association we’re looking at, and coincidentally, it’s a word that is much in the wind, as on August 4th, most notably in a long piece by the linguist John McWhorter in The Times. That word, to refer back to where I began, is “othering,” and it comes up in the (mis)-pronunciation of the name, Kamala, as in Kamala Harris. It puts her at the bottom of the barrel, as not being one of us, so that we don’t have to get into a debate with her about immigration, or crime, or anything that might become the subject of serious discourse.

Othering? Yes, my claim is that it is what lies at the base of totalitarianism and the dehumanization that’s required to instantiate it — both of which come up daily in the discourse of MAGA. What we have here then is a linkage; it takes the form of a denial that a particular male, or group of such, is really a man; and a particular woman or group of women — really a woman–or in either case, is a full-fledged human being. Evil is real, and they’re indulged in it. After that, sooner or later, anything goes. That’s the not-so-hidden message of mass religions and religious cults.

As such, this has nothing to do with “anti-government” sentiment in the traditional sense. One of my parents’ best friends was a a soi-disant anarchist whose political action was mostly manifested in the activity of piling up copies of daily newspapers to the ceiling of every room–I assume to stay abreast of sttatist iniquity everywhere. But not, à la John Roberts and Sam Alito, to stop other people from voting: that is “extreme,” and it has some other root.

Take, for example, that favorite weapon of the Manosphere, the AR-15. I’ve never held one, or even seen one. But in the US Army, rifle practice (with the primitive M-16) was my favorite activity; I wouldn’t have minded having it every day instead of just once in basic training. Or maybe twice: I don’t remember. I do remember, though, the tactile pleasure of putting a bullet in the dead center of a target (on those rare occasions). But the idea of that target being a living person? Not an aggressive enemy but just a target, a person “on the other side.” Where does that come from?

Part 2: Democracy, will be posted shortly. My argument there is that democracy and voting are the real enemy of the Right, and that there is a reason why this is so.