I feel like the reason Umberto Eco brings up syncretism in Ur-Fascism is that it must be incredibly discombobulating to live under a regime which has a syncretic, ideosyncratic world view that doesn't trouble itself much about internal iconsistencies AND ALSO demands ideological purity using immense violence.

I mean...it's not actually demanding ideological purity, right? It's demanding displays of loyalty, which sometimes look similar but are definitely not the same, and some of the ways in which they're not the same involve consistency and fidelity-to-ideals.

(This is explicitly in contrast to certain other kinds of ideological movements, including both many leftist movements and many actual religions, which absolutely do care a lot about orthodoxy.)

To go back to what @throwsahammer posted, the question to me is, "How does a disagreement with the Mormon church on vaccination constitute a statement of loyalty to the mormon church?"

Like, my go to example, not being a Mormon, is Eric Trump (And other Trumpists like Alina Habba, Kash Patel and Michael Flynn) speaking at the ReAwaken America tour, alongside Ian Smith, who has said things like,

Bolding mine. Smith also is a holocaust denier and supporter of Adolf Hitler

The Trump administration imprisoned people and started deportation proceedings for less than what Smith has said.

Part of what orthodox thought does, even in deeply dysfunctional and violent organizations, is allow you a rational way to frame individual thoughts as an expression of loyalty to underlying principles. "I believe that the bible calls on me to do [Whatever]" is a way of framing [Whatever] as an expression of loyalty to biblical principles.

So the question in certain systems is "How do you even know what constitutes a display of loyalty?"

What is it that causes Clay Clark, Eric Trump, and Ian Smith to see each other as allies despite a fundamental disagreement on a keystone issue of the Trump administration?

I mean, this is pretty much the thing at which I'm gesturing. It's directional, right?

The Trump regime knows that it has enemies at places like Columbia, and it wants to crack down on them. At this particular moment, maximally-"disloyal" leftist actors are inclined to be involved with anti-Israel political protest stuff, because that's the leftist cause du jour. In the context of an elite American university, anti-Israel = anti-Trump, pro-Israel = (relatively) pro-Trump (that "relatively" is of course doing a lot of work there).

(It's a bonus that this particular issue tends to feature foreign-born activists taking leading roles, which allows the regime to make it an immigration issue and use its beloved deportation weapon. It would be - interesting - if the issue du jour were instead, e.g., police brutality against black people.)

But in the context of general American discourse, crazy right-wing Holocaust deniers like Ian Smith are way more Trump-aligned than almost anyone else! Their brand of antisemitism is a badge of factional allegiance to the Chud Right! They are super-mega-ultra on board with the Trump vibes and with almost every part of the Trump agenda, even if not with Israel support specifically, and can be counted upon to defend the regime against its enemies!

...there are a few, uh, principled antisemites who genuinely have trouble here. Tatsuya Ishida, after being briefly on the MAGA train, has apparently decided that Trump is just another puppet of the Zionist conspiracy. But antisemitism rarely runs on an engine of consistent principle, so.

I feel like the reason Umberto Eco brings up syncretism in Ur-Fascism is that it must be incredibly discombobulating to live under a regime which has a syncretic, ideosyncratic world view that doesn't trouble itself much about internal iconsistencies AND ALSO demands ideological purity using immense violence.

I mean...it's not actually demanding ideological purity, right? It's demanding displays of loyalty, which sometimes look similar but are definitely not the same, and some of the ways in which they're not the same involve consistency and fidelity-to-ideals.

(This is explicitly in contrast to certain other kinds of ideological movements, including both many leftist movements and many actual religions, which absolutely do care a lot about orthodoxy.)

On reflection, I find myself kind of awed by Dwight Eisenhower's meta-level thinking. Which is not a thing that I ever expected to find myself saying, I assure you.

Everyone, meaning absolutely everyone, loved him for winning World War II. Both major parties tried to get him to run for president, because he was almost certain to win and he had no discernible ideology tying him to one faction or another. Many people advised him, at that juncture, to go with the Democrats, on the grounds that the GOP was a terrible party for losers. Which was just true, at the time. The Republicans hadn't held the presidency in decades; the Herbert Hoover stink still clung to them; they were generally seen as an organization that mostly catered to rich reactionary cranks.

And Eisenhower, after flirting with the idea of remaining apolitical, decided to become a Republican. Not in spite of the GOP being a terrible party for losers. Because the GOP was a terrible party for losers.

He wasn't ideological, but he did have certain issues that he cared about deeply, such as robust US support for NATO.

He saw that even though the GOP was in the doghouse, it was still a pillar of the American political system; its role in the FPTP system couldn't be evaded, and it couldn't be kept out of power forever.

He saw that any political issue that became a factional issue, a bone of contention between the two big parties, would be a source of perpetual instability. Anything meant to last would require bipartisan supermajoritarian support.

So he went and made the Republican Party what he needed it to be. The Democrats could handle their role in the pageant on their own, but the GOP couldn't.

Any gambit like that would be much harder, these days. No one has been in Eisenhower's position since...Eisenhower.

But it's true that the hyperpolarized world, the world in which the parties are toxoplasmically driven to maximum frothing conflict over literally everything, has not been good for the stable stewarding of anyone's agenda.

Trump is in Eisenhower's position, which is a sign that we are being tested by a vengeful God.

He's really not, though.

For one thing, he's the opposite of a unifying universally-beloved leader. He couldn't have gotten elected dogcatcher as a Dem. Even before he became a figure of odium on the left, he was a figure of contempt, and all the serious people regarded him as totally unserious.

(There's an argument to be made that in fact it's currently too hard to become a major political figure on the Dem side - there are so many maximally-well-qualified-on-paper people interested in going down that road that the credentialism creates a barrier, that you have a party that can't hear outside voices or make use of needed outside talent because it's so swamped with people who have spent their whole lives becoming perfect insiders.)

More importantly, though...

...yeah, it's true to some extent that Trump can reshape the Republican Party in his image. He says something insane about tariffs or election-stealing or whatever, and suddenly a giant chunk of the country believes it fervently, and many legislators etc. feel compelled to get on the bandwagon.

But

(a) this works only so well; to a large extent he's riding the tiger rather than leading, and he even knows it; he pushes things that flatter and excite his base because he gets into some trouble when he does things the other way; and more importantly,

(b) Trump absolutely cannot stabilize his agenda items by getting widespread bipartisan support for them. He has made himself so violently loathed by his opposition that they basically can't work with him at all without courting major backlash. Even his administration's rare straightforwardly good ideas and helpful initiatives - which do exist! - are toxic to Democrats, because Trump is Trump. Which presumably sucks for anyone who would like Trump's accomplishments, such as they are, to be more than fleeting. It certainly sucks for anyone who would like for the country to stabilize at all.

Story below the cut to avoid a paywall.

Can’t help but think of the @argumate thread that strong borders is inherently xenophobic. It’s not, politely turn away criminals and drug runners at the border. It’s byzantine, arbitrary, cruel, and designed to be maximally financially exploitive. Designed to create that underclass who can’t dream of anything better because it’ll expose them to torture.

right, strong borders don't stop criminals, they create criminals.

do you think that people who want "strong borders" want people to enter the country illegally and then be threatened with deportation

do you think that people who want "strong borders" consider the current state of the US border, where people frequently cross it illegally, to be a "strong border"

do you actually literally believe that to be a true statement about reality

"do you think that people who want 'strong borders' want people to enter the country illegally and then be threatened with deportation"

I don't think they want that as a primary goal but they certainly don't seem to mind deportation as a tool to enforce "strong borders" as 80% of Republicans support mass deportation of everyone who is in the country without legal status.

As for your second question, it looks like no since only 18% of the population thinks the US government is doing a good job on the border.

I do want to point out that focusing mostly on unauthorized border crossings doesn't really address the issue since a large chunk, if not most, of "illegal immigrants" are people who have overstayed their visas. If you want "strong borders", you're going to want something in your policy toolkit that deals with people who overstay visas since they're such a large part of the system. Those 80% of Republicans seem to understand that deportation is needed for a "strong border" better than you do. Because, if you don't enforce this law, it signals to other immigrants that you can just stay in the country indefinitely if you make it across the border.

Looking at your other arguments with people on this post, you seem to be expressing confusion at why progressives consider wanting a "strong border" to be inherently xenophobic and/or racist. To me, it's because undocumented immigrants are actually less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. If you are seriously concerned about crime, looking at undocumented immigrants thus doesn’t make much sense. Hence why I and other left-leaning people don't give the benefit of the doubt to "strong border" advocates that their true concerns about undocumented immigrants aren't of a more racial or xenophobic bent.

of course they want people to be deported. that wasn't in question. argumate appeared to be saying that "strong borders" people wanted people to enter the country illegally, so that ICE could be mean to them and deport them. the statements he made only made sense with that interpretation.

"I don't think that focusing on border entry is the problem" and "illegal immigrants are not really a significant crime risk" are valid arguments you can make! maybe we could talk about them, too. but they have nothing to do with what argumate was saying, which was accusing people of being evil racists who want a perpetual subhuman slave caste.

for those two points to be evidence that people who want "strong borders" are racist, you would need to show that they A: are aware of those claims and B: believe that they are true but C: are, as a large and uncoordinated group who have no ideological discipline, choosing to ignore those things they believe in order to be racist and tell a lie to cover it from progressives when they know progressives are not capable of believing someone is not racist.

the vast majority of pro-border people are unaware of those claims and those who are do not believe you are telling the truth. this is because progressives have such an astonishingly low hit rate for accusations of racism that they should all be assumed to be untrue.

"Strong borders" create an underclass through *exactly* the process described above, creating groups of people who are in the country but may be subjected to intense penalties at any time for any reason.

Legal immigrants who need to retain a job in order to remain in the country are often exploited by companies that can say, "Accept these illegal working conditions or we fire you and you spend months in a series of concrete cells waiting to be deported, your choice".

Trump is busy revoking the legal status of any number of legal immigrants in the name of strong borders.

He's also revoking green cards for people who say things he doesn't like and sending people to prison in El Salvador.

This is an underclass; a group of people who reside in the US but cannot count on the rights and protections that you and I enjoy, and who can be subjected to, frankly, torture at any time ICE feels like it.

This doesn't require any conception of border advocates as organized racists to be sensible.

And it is as true of legal immigrants as of illegal ones.

OK, look, I'm pretty sure there's an actual failure of communication going on here. Not a disagreement about moral conclusions or even facts, just confusion regarding the meaning of sentences.

(So of course I'm going to stick my oar in, because that's smart.)

If I understand @brazenautomaton correctly, he's saying approximately that -

- is the failure mode of borders, according to the people calling themselves "advocates of strong borders." It is the sign that borders aren't strong enough. If the borders were sufficiently strong, those people wouldn't be an exploited underclass - they wouldn't be here at all! They would have been kept out or deported!

And there's a clear semantic sense in which this is just true. Having immigrants around unlawfully is, just by definition, a sign that your immigration control isn't as tough and rigorous or consistent as it could be. A maximally tough and rigorous and consistent immigration control regime would result in there being zero immigrants around unlawfully.

This is all separate from questions like:

This thought deserves more in the way of serious reflection - I believe - but what it actually gets, right now, is a quarter-baked post while I'm distracted by other things.

We built a world where everyone has access to everyone else's symbolic narratives, and (of course) the narratives made by-and-for the children of the elite are the ones that fare best in that mimetic environment, by dint of craft and reach.

We built a world in which everyone can see how everyone else lives.

We built a world with no castes or official barriers to mobility.

At this point, you can't generate legitimate moral buy-in for - well, for anything, really, but especially not for systems that leave people subordinated.

Who is doing the work of building meaning, in your model, and who is interfering with them?

There's a long and interesting answer to this question, which I'm not going to provide right now due to the aforementioned "this is a quarter-baked post written while heavily distracted" problem, and that's 100% on me.

But for a short and boring answer that at least gestures at some of the relevant issues -

Think about every libertarian / ancap / Master of the Universe type who can't help going on ego trips and yelling about how you're a worthless garbage person if you haven't Made Yourself Successful, if you don't have the skills and work ethic to rise high in the market. One can't help thinking -Do you want to have subordinates who do what you tell them? Do you want them to be sane and functional? Do you want them not to be tempted to murder you in the street? Those people are interfering with the work of building meaning (as per the boundaries of this particular discussion).

The people actually doing that work are, well, all the people who provide things-to-live-for outside the bounds of economic society. Religions traditionally did this, of course, but these days their work in that field has been largely supplanted by assorted cabals and weirdo philosophers.

I think we need to consider the possibility that overuse of the "school" format may be detrimental to personal development.

This would be a high-dimensional problem, and difficult to measure.

The high social conformity of the 2010s created a low-friction environment that allowed a flourishing of bad ideas. My experience has involved encountering a lot of people online who are technically smart, but narrow. They appear to have difficulty thinking broadly, connecting problems across different contexts.

Normally, I would think that this is just how their personality is. You have narrow but deep thinkers, you have wide but shallow thinkers, and if you're lucky, you find someone who is good at both narrow and wide thinking.

However, I've had multiple kinds of schooling. What if it isn't just how their personality is? What if it's the result of overtraining in a low-dimensional context, with worksheets and even essays being relatively well-defined problems, and not training enough in a high-dimensional context, where the problem is not well-defined at the outset, and there are questions about what you should even be doing in the first place?

This would suppress agency and increase reliance on social approval. The teacher says whether the output is correct, not the compiler. You're not designing and building a shed from scratch, and getting burned by your prior design decisions.

I'm not sure I buy this theory. I may be a natural outlier.

You have mined into a vein of forbidden knowledge.

Do you really want to follow it where it leads?

Do you want the petty elites of society to be more disagreeable, more internally-motivated, more inclined to follow their own interests and philosophies rather than [following the herd] / [obeying the teacher]?

...I mean, I do. I'm on board. But you're the one who's spent all his time lately talking up the need for more optimization and more productive capacity. And - as has been previously noted - when petty elites stop walking in lockstep behind a flawed intellectual leadership, they don't just invent their own less-flawed intellectual leadership and keep walking in lockstep. They start carving out tiny fiefdoms for themselves, and wage petty wars-of-the-mind against one another, and fuck off to hermitages in order to pursue mystical projects.

Through a project of intensive cultural legerdemain, our society has mostly convinced the members of its educated intelligentsia that it makes sense for them to be workers. You can think that this is good or bad, but it's true, and it's kind of a remarkable thing.