Opinion | White men refusing to share power is a silver

stake piercing the heart of American democracy

By John Stoehr - Commentary
Published October 09, 2022

Kevin McCarthy on Facebook.

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Thursday’s post borrowed a concept from a new history by Jeremi Suri called Civil
War By Other Means. With it, I wrote about an either-or thinking seemingly
ingrained in the Confederate brain.

When Black people were slaves, white people were free. When Black people were
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free, white people were slaves. Slavery wasn’t just the basis of the plantation
economy. It was the basis of democracy for the well-mannered overlords of elite
southern society. For them, without slavery – without suffering – civilization would
collapse.

Among the many obvious problems with this way of thinking is something less
obvious. If you believe that what’s bad for Black people is good for white people,
what do you have when they, through means internal and external, achieve their
freedom?

READ MORE: MAGA Republicans are not conservatives

The answer is nothing.

There’s no there there. There’s no moral constitution that can go on in the absence
of a social and political order built on Black bodies. Yes, not just slavery. Black bodies
stacked up over centuries – were the foundation. Take them away? Civilization really
does collapse.

Now apply this binary mode of thinking to a subject much in vogue these days
thanks to redhat propagandists like Tucker Carlson. Of course, the subject I’m talking
about is “The End of Men” or, as David Brooks put it more mildly, the “Crisis of Men
and Boys.”

At the root of this subject is an assumption that, if given a hard look, would be seen
as gonzo nuts. Anyone with eyes that can see – or senses that can sense – can discern
that men, especially white men, are doing fine. To be sure, problems remain,
societally and individually. But relative to others, white men are still on top.

READ MORE: The GOP's 'Commitment to America' contains Confederate solutions to

made-up problems

Here’s an example: I’m 48, white, tall, bald. (Not bad looking.) When I go to pick up
my daughter from school, where she’s in the racial minority, nonwhite parents,
especially mothers, see me coming and hustle themselves and their kids out of the
way, even apologizing as if they’ve done something wrong by standing still in public.
This … just happens. It’s not natural, though. It’s a culture white men created.

That culture is complicated, but I think it boils down to this: white men deserve
whatever they desire – money, sex, power, whatever.

This is somewhat scandalous to talk about openly, so we invented all sorts of ways of
pretending that white men work as hard as other people do; that we aren’t the center
of a political culture built for us centuries ago; and that we don’t accept at birth a
rich inheritance.

Of course, we do.

The question is whether we want to know that we do.

Because if white men don’t know, what happens when they don’t get their heart’s
desire? Some men turn inward to religion. Some to politics. But others don’t have
what it takes to reconcile themselves to the consequences of democratic politics. So
they reach for a gun.

Still, others discover ways to profit from telling these white men that democratic
politics has cheated them of their birthright – that when women gain a fraction of an
inch of political power, it’s castration; that when Black people succeed, in business or
sports or politics, that’s a sign of societal disease and rot. It wasn’t this way back in
the day. Something's gone terribly wrong. We gotta do something.

To be sure, propagandists like Carlson influence these men in various and sundry
ways, but propaganda doesn’t work unless there’s already a kernel of truth to build
on. In this case, there are two kernels.

One, as I said, is a political culture telling white men that they deserve everything.
But the other is perhaps more important: an understanding, though likely
unconscious, that if white men do not dominate – that if women and nonwhite
people have equal political power as a consequence of democratic politics – what do
they have?

Nothing.

They don’t have moral cores that exist independently of the lives and fortunes of
their supposed inferiors, because the political culture permits them to grow up
without bothering to develop moral cores. What do they have when women are
strong and independent?

Due to either-or thinking, nothing.

 g, g

Worse, they are nothing. Zeroes, ciphers, blanks.

That’s so terrifying, you’ll believe anything.

The reaction among Democrats and liberals, to things like the funny
recommendation for men to beam red light onto their genitals, is by now
conventional. We say that this wouldn’t happen if these men weren’t so sexist, so
racist, so something-ist. If they only sought to be as “enlightened” as we are, this
farce would be self-evident.

What some Democrats and liberals – especially Twitter hard*sses – don’t account for
is that this reaction feeds into the either-or thinking that seeded a political culture
at the root of the problem.

We keep telling them to not be something. But not being something terrifies them.
The more we say don’t be X, the more they double down on being X. We see the
former as the solution. They see the former as the problem. Either-or thinking
becomes a vicious cycle.

Instead of telling them not to be something, we should tell them to be something. In

other words, we should admonish them to develop a moral core – a rich inner life –
that can exist independently without being conditioned on democratic politics.
Instead of sharing power being seen as losing power, it would simply be seen as
sharing it.

Developing such a thing is a heavy lift, though.

Living in your inheritance takes less effort.

READ MORE: Tucker Carlson argues that teaching children about LGBTQ culture
should be a sex crime

John Stoehr is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative; a contributing writer for the Washington
Monthly; a contributing editor for Religion Dispatches; and senior editor at Alternet. Follow him
@johnastoehr.

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DriveBy
15 minutes ago
White supremacy and supremacy of the Christian faith are inseparable Siamese twins.

https://time.com/5929478/christianity-white-supremacy/

White American Christianity Needs to Be Honest

With Itself
time.com

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1 reply

PV Publius Valari
12 minutes ago
SHARE?
That’s funny
Reply · 1 · Share

Mnyama
50 seconds ago
Well? Someone said it out loud.
Throughout trump's regime, you saw nothing but white faces in positions whether they were
qualified or not. The majority of them were not. Didn't matter, they were white. There was a
token POC here and there. The January 6 people were white. The only people being ja...See more
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Y Yavo
1 minute ago
 When Clinton got a blow job the Republicans hair was on fire. Now comes Trump and Walker and
Republicans don't care about the behavior of both men they just care about having a clown
secretary. If a Republican loses an election it's voter fraud if they win it isn't voter fraud.
Republicans don't c...See more
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H Herbsistah
11 minutes ago
Exactly 💯🎤
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