[griffmccoy5607:]
Centrists/Libs enjoy the "White Man's Burden" and "White Savior" narrative because it reifies their view that they are still superior.
Why don't people talk about making things in the USA concretely better? There's an ongoing cultural civil war between the left and the right. Your suggestions lines up with the nationalism of the "Right" these days. This view is verboten in polite society now. Neither NeoCons nor NeoLibs will allow it. They hollow out society from within for profit. Then divide the people with IDPOL. Same as the British did to their colonies.
[à-bas-le-ciel:]
The French still send rice farming experts to Cambodia, as if Cambodians wouldn't know how to farm rice without them (I AM NOT JOKING). I met a team of American volunteers painting a school in Laos and asked them if they really thought we had nobody with the skill set required to paint a wall without their help. Re: "Centrists/Libs enjoy the 'White Man's Burden' and 'White Savior' narrative because it reifies their view that they are still superior." The extent to which the mainstream left now demonstrates the same racism that the mainstream right was notorious for in the 1950s is truly tragicomic: it is comparable to the racism that the Chinese demonstrate toward Tibetans and Mongolians, i.e., "those people wouldn't be able to accomplish anything without our help" —even if this is stated in the most compassionate and politically correct terms, it presupposes both the delusion that "they need us" and that "we are implicitly superior to them". Re: "Your suggestions line up with the nationalism of the 'Right' these days." None of those people would even eat lunch with me. Re: "Neither NeoCons nor NeoLibs will allow it." I think all of those people would eat lunch with me, by contrast.
[griffmccoy5607:]
@a-bas-le-ciel NeoCons and NeoLibs might indeed eat lunch with you, but it'd be as a curio. You respect the same Shibboleths of "high culture". But they low-key panic when anyone suggests something that'd actually disrupt their carefully constructed wealth pumps.
As for nationalists not eating lunch with you, I wouldn't be so sure. it's an eclectic group. And, as you say, part of what defines nationalism in the USA is an embrace of "Melting Pot" ideology, so they accept eclecticism. I imagine there's a half-decent chance you could get on "Subversive w/Alex Kaschuta". I think the issue is more that you wouldn't deign to associate with them, more than the reverse, even if their views are closer to yours than anyone else's. Such populism/nationalism is "low class" in the West
[à-bas-le-ciel:]
Just how little common ground I have with anyone (and everyone) on the guest list on Alex Kaschuta's show provides a very telling sort of "test" for where I now stand in relation to the American right wing; conversely, how much I have in common with Bernie Sanders is also telling —although the vast majority of his supporters would despise me (and I would despise them, too, I suppose) for reasons I need not recapitulate in this comment. Alex Kaschuta's guests have consistent attitudes toward women, even though some of them are women, celebrating models of marriage from the dark ages (opposing feminism, modernity and "the enlightenment" as they define it) and toward religion, regarding it as a positive aspect of nationalism, rejecting the French Revolution as a step in the wrong direction away from the clerical nation-state of Louis XVI. I do not think she has had a single guest that does not oppose democracy (in the style of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, even if they are less libertarian and more authoritarian than Hoppe) with vague statements about antisemitism, racism, Nietzsche, etc., hinting at what else they might have in common. If we draw a dotted line with Voltaire on the left and Louis XVI on the right, my own position is far to the left of Voltaire, far further down the road indicated by the French Revolution, and my attitudes toward marriage, sexuality, religion and "tradition" as such (even Buddhist tradition, etc.) tend to reflect this.
[And although it might seem irrelevant at first, I could provide a link to my video on Stendhal's book, La Chartreuse de Parme, as a sort of salient discussion of the extent to which we're all living in the shadow of the French Revolution, even now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjY2RB3T2Fc]
