In Reply to: There are no answers that make sense, but... posted by Gainsborough on September 20, 2025 at 07:54:34
mystery to me. I can see white folks resenting a system they see as benefiting minorities, and they can get really really mad about it and then demand that whites should benefit more. They can, in principle, make "we want more rights" their centerpiece, but instead they go for "they shouldn't have those basic rights". In the case of teachers unions, for instance, where I first noticed this tendency, the issue is not even a government program. It's the fact that teachers have a union and ordinary workers don't. How they go from there to "so they shouldn't have a union either" instead of "we should have a union too" is the mystery to me.
So I think the desire to take down programs that benefit people is an extension of that. They're not demanding a better government program for whites, which would be a positive way to respond (not in the sense of a value judgment of course, but that they want something more),[*] but demanding that no one should get the benefit (a negative demand in the sense that it negates the program). It's guided by a negative, destructive instinct that seems to be built into our cultural DNA in a way, passed on from generation to generation in varying degrees across different groups, perhaps.
I think another instance of this drive is the way the right wants to destroy existing cultural institutions. It turns out they can't produce better educators and better researchers to the scale they need to take over the educational institutions (they can't because they are generally driven by the urge to make money as opposed to being a humble servant of the youth to dedicate their hours to teach the young or get mired in working on problems that don't have any immediate market application). Same thing with entertainers. They can't create good comedy, period (not easy when your sense of humor is stuck in the middle school years and what you find funny is insulting people like the bully that you are deep inside[**] -- impersonal you, by the way, I don't mean you as a person).
So how do they respond: if they're not good at something, they need to take down what is already out there and good but not theirs. If this ends up being the end of late night comedy on American television, a form of entertainment that I'm guessing America invented, or a 51-year institution like SNL Is brought to an end, no problem. If they're not good at it, no one can have it.
Same instinct coming from the same deep pathology hiding in the crevices of a nation's collective subconscious, maybe? I dunno. I'm kinda stumped why this happens.
[*} This is something, by the way, the moneyed class has no reservations about as they constantly demand more benefits for corporations as well as a larger share of political and economic power.
[**] Sure there's a fascistic urgency to that right now, and it's dialed way up, but we have been living with this thread for decades now. Trump and Project 2025 didn't invent this. They figured out how to implement it effectively.