clearly is a real thing. Nazism and libertarianism (for the wealthiest white men, as libertarianism mostly always has existed in reality in European and American life) isn't the contradiction that political science or social science would have it to be because they make the mistake of thinking rational coherence or consistency is at work in such things. That has always been a weakness of the habits of discourse flowing from the "enlightenment" and making believe you can treat such subjects with scientific methodology. One of the most basic of features of all political oppression is the foundation of it in unequal treatment based in unequal power, the more unequal that treatment, privileges for the rich (and therefore powerful) allowing them to do things that the poor, the middle-class and even many of the rich but not as rich would never be allowed to do - and thus selective libertarianism - is intrinsic to the very thing that it is.
The most irrational and rationally absurd contradictions abhorred by academic discourse can comfortably exist in real life even as it could not in the purely imaginary coherence of academic abstraction. Black white supremacy (as embodied in Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell), Jewish Nazism (as embodied in Stephen Miller and David Sacks), Gay queer bashers (Lindsay Graham and any gay man or Lesbian who is a member of the Republican-fascist party),* as compared to that the reality of libertarian-fascism makes all the sense in the world. All of those merely logical incoherencies are a product of the privilege of wealth and its ability to shield the rich boys and gals from the very laws and powers they promote and which would destroy them if they were poor.
As an aside, the duping of poor whites into supporting their own oppression is, I think, related to this phenomenon, though often without conscious calculation being a part of it.
And it's not a very big shield that the wealthy have to use to shield them against the law, they barely need one at all. It is one of the stupidest things in the rules of how the legal system works that it regularly ignores or denies such privilege and permissiveness for the rich (and so powerful) AS THE VERY METHODOLOGY OF THE LAW, LAWYERING, JUDGING, "justicing" CONSISTS LARGELY OF PRACTICING THAT PRIVILEGE AND PERMISSION. That the rich are permitted to to into court represented by more and more skilled lawyers (who always work for the deepest pockets)to go up against legal opponents who have everything from one less skilled and wealthy lawyer with fewer resources to no legal representation of all, setting up a system which is unequal from the start is never really addressed by the legal and judicial systems. And that's not counting the bias of lawyers who become judges, most of whom are both in favor of the rich and so powerful and who are everything from OK with the inherent inequality of legal and judicial procedures to so habituated into it that they operate as if those were unknown to them. If you think that's untrue, what is there about the Thomas and Alito scandals revealed this past year AND THE COMPLETE IMPUNITY FROM CONSEQUENCES FOR THOSE CRIMINALS INVOLVED which does not prove every point made in this paragraph?
The inbaked corruption of the legal system is so much a part of it it that the life-long mega-criminal and con-man rich white boy of very little brain, Donald Trump has flourished in it through a lifetime of litigation and law breaking to arrive at the pinnacle of legal impunity (largely invented for him by Supreme Court fiat), even though he was finally convicted of felonies and adjudicated a sex criminal. Donald Trump is the absolute proof of the inherent corruption through inequality as the law of the land. Removing that slogan over the doors of the goddamned Supreme Court building the Roberts Court sits, among the biggest lies ever told on this continent, is a moral imperative but one which will never be acted on.
I can remember the incident quite well, though I can't find the post which is somewhere at Echidne's blog in which I first made the point that the true foundation of democracy was equality and not some of the more common and often entirely daffy notions of "liberty" or even libertarian"freedom." I don't remember what I was thinking over as I wrote the piece but I remember the idea came to me like a lightening bolt and after that the focus with which I saw so much more about how so much was going so wrong had a clarity that it had never had before. Among other things it enabled me to understand such supposed contradictions in classification. With inequality any contradiction, even the most damaging and consequential are permitted and enabled and facilitated by those in power.
Equality is the true foundation of not only democracy but ANY legitimate government, ANY legitimate legal systems and ANY legitimate or even decent social conventions and practices. That is equality of PEOPLE, not of their ideas. Any idea which contradicts of damages equality, democracy, doing to others what you'd want them to do to you can rightly be rejected and even suppressed because the equal rights to legitimate government and a legitimate legal system and an equally decent life surpasses the right to damage those. I would bet that most of the old-line liberals and most of the lefties of my youth would reject that and one of the bases of that rejection is in their desire to protect some aspects of privilege that they enjoy at the cost of those who are not so privileged. They would piously blather on about liberty and freedom but it would, in the end, be in service of THEIR privileged lives. Or they'd just be unable to think so unconventionally. The Golden Rule is really about as radical a statement of politics and economics as there is, I can't think of anything more radical or more of a guarantee of good. It took me a while to realize that answer had been lying there in plain sight my whole life as all of the academic, civics and theoretical bull shit was mounted as a distraction against that reality.
* Female misogyny is so commonly expressed and observed that it is an indication of how something that is inherently irrational can become a ubiquitous habit of thought under the power of grinding inequality. I think Sowell's internalized white supremacy is a similar phenomenon but one which is far less subtly ingrained into the culture of Black People and so is a bizarre rarity as opposed to female misogyny. As a Gay Man, I know how consequentially damaging such socially-instilled habitual self-hatred can be (it is a major theme of pornography and other media) and how difficult it is to even notice.
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