I get on LinkedIn this morning and the head of another NYC agency whom I follow – creative head of what is probably the number one for creative work healthcare agency right now fwiw – is all “Brazil, we’re hiring.” And I’m like, you know, I like this guy, he’s consistently a notch more outspoken and opinionated than the LinkedIn norm (which, blandness = professionalism blah blah blah; the agency side of this industry is heavily progressive but the client side is mixed enough people tend to tread lightly on LI) and really, especially in his position, that’s a goddamn good; we all stfu too much. I click like and the comments come up. There are 21. This is roughly like hitting five figures on Tumblr: ours is a small niche in a small industry. So I’m all braced for people scolding him for being overtly political on LinkedIn, but exactly one early comment is like that, and only implicitly (it’s literally the 👀 emoji). Three quarters of the comments are from people at Brazilian agencies deadly seriously wanting to interview.
ppl are so annoying “you can’t paint ur bedroom pink you’re an adult” i did not spend my entire life waiting to grow up and control my life to paint my bedroom beige
I had a sales woman in furniture store try and tell me not to buy a hot bubblegum pink loveseat because she wanted me to “think about the future”
Bitch, I am thinking about the future. I already got a hot bubblegum pink couch at home and now I need a loveseat to go with it.
when I first bought my house, I announced my decision to paint my bedroom purple. I had wanted a purple bedroom for thirty damn years, you fucking bet I was gonna have one now. My friends decided, for some reason, that I meant what one of them referred to as “14 year old girl purple” (through what’s wrong with the colors a 14 year old girl chooses, I don’t know, even if they’re not what I want as an adult). They didn’t believe me until they saw the color on the actual wall, even thought they helped me pick out paints. My mother, meanwhile, decided to get worried that if I painted my bedroom a “dark purple”, it would be “depressing”. As if, with an entire house to live in, I would spend all my time in the bedroom, which I wanted to be dark because I would be sleeping in there. In the damn dark.
I had like one, maybe two friends who were all like FUCK YEAH YOU PAINT IT WHATEVER COLOR YOU WANT, PURPLE BEDROOMS ARE AWESOME.
But when they actualy saw the finished bedroom, every single one of them was like, “Oh yeah, that’s really pretty.” (Well, the ones who supported me from the beginning were more like WOOHOO.)
And the moral of the story is: Fuck ‘em, please yourself. Either they’ll come around, or you can safely ignore every question of taste they opine about for the rest of time.
This applies to other adulting activities, too. When I was a kid, I decided that I wanted to have a wedding cake made of doughnuts. When I got older, I figured that I would be “mature” about it and get a traditional cake, which the older adults approved of. Now that I’m 25 and facing the possibility of actual marriage in the near future, I’m just like “marriage is a social construct but it comes with tax & insurance benefits, so just give me that goddamn doughnut cake.” If they don’t like it then they don’t have to come to my wedding.
The fact that the mail bomber had his house improperly foreclosed on by the company of Steve Mnuchin, then-banker and now-Trump’s Secretary of Treasury, is such a perfect encapsulation of how right-wing populism works. You provide cover for one segment of elites by scapegoating marginalized people and a competing segment of elites, who you claim are in cahoots with one another.
Right-wing populism a powerful enough ideological tool that you can literally get someone to join a cult of personality around a man even as he empowers someone who directly harmed them, simply by acknowledging the potential for the redirection of raw anger. The Trump administration literally, personally damaged the bomber’s life, but he likely never even knew it, never even knew that the man behind his foreclosure was now working with the man he idolized. Following the foreclosure, he was probably just angry at the prevailing system, but his anger had no structure, no ideology (it seems he wasn’t even politically active before 2016). In absence of a popular leftist systemic critique, the hard right was able to monopolize the response to anger among many white people, redirect it, and mold it in the shape of producerism. Rather than being led to realize the way the construction of power in society actually functions to disadvantage him along the lines of class while keeping him invested in the system with compensatory privileges along lines of race, gender, etc. (see Du Bois’ “wages of whiteness” argument [pg. 700-701 here]), he instead was led to follow the fraudulent right-wing alternative: that corrupt liberal elites were using their power to ruin his life through their promotion of “globalism,” multiculturalism, cronyism, etc.
Things like this always make me think back to an anecdote from Chip Berlet’s extremely insightful “Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close For Comfort”:
Posse [Commitatus] and [Christian] Identity organizers capitalized on the farm crisis of the 1980s. Rural America faced its worst economic slump in half a century, owing largely to unfair and inequitable policies by the federal government and private banks. While most of society ignored angry and desperate rural families’ legitimate grievances, far-right activists urged resistance and offered ready scapegoats, namely, the Jews who supposedly controlled the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Reserve. In the early 1980’s, Posse activists helped to split the influential American Agricultural Movement, while Identity theology and antisemitic conspiracy theories gained an alarming level of acceptance in rural America. One poll in 1985 found that in the farm belt 27 percent of respondents felt that ‘international Jewish bankers’ were responsible for the farm crisis.
Right-wing populism is an ideological mechanism which mobilizes people who are are wronged by elites to fight in defense of certain factions of elites rather than against the system of elites as a whole by redirecting their anger towards scapegoats who are perceived to threaten privileges that they hold along other dimensions than the one they were wronged on.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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