shinelikethunder:

Re-reading The Authoritarians is making me wonder all over again whether the Gen X / Millennial gap will ultimately end up being far less significant than the split right down the middle of the Millennials: do you remember the world before 9/11?

More to the point, before the United States’ epic authoritarian meltdown in response to 9/11. Because there is a whole psychology of fear, attack, and solidarity that most of us have fallen into at some point, but at least have the ability to retreat from. And I fucking worry about the kids born into a world that’s never run on anything else. I worry that they don’t have a working model of a civilized, pluralistic, individualistic society where there are rules that apply the same to everyone, no matter how afraid they are or how vehemently they disagree, and where not every risk is a risk of annihilation.

I worry because before 2008, pretty much all the factions who weren’t the Religious Right or the neocons were at least standing united as a voice of anti-authoritarian moral clarity. And then the Democrats inherited Cheney’s imperial executive branch, the security state, and the siege mentality, and completely, utterly, catastrophically failed to dismantle any of them. All they did was get corrupted by trying to use them “responsibly.” (Helped along, of course, by the Republicans’ scorched-earth descent into obstructionism, extremism, and delegitimization.) And everything just… splintered and went muddy. It’s not a coincidence that 2008 was when left-wing authoritarianism, rebranded as “social justice,” really started taking off. Monkey see, monkey do, especially in the tumult of an anti-establishment faction that suddenly became the establishment, and found out that being on the right side of history didn’t make the opposition go away.

I’m only starting to figure out how angry I am that the left has been pissing away its energy trying to put out every last ember of trashcan fires like homophobia when the entire edifice of American democracy is in flames. I’m gay. Given a choice between keeping Obergefell v. Hodges or repealing the Patriot Act, I would happily throw gay marriage under the bus. There’s an entire generation just coming of age who point-blank do not understand that, who think it means I don’t give a shit about something that affects me personally, because to them the Patriot Act is background radiation. It’s bad, but it’s not shocking and it’s not an aberration–it’s part of the normal fabric of their reality.

And it’s going to take a long time to unwind all the implications of how terrifying that is.