What Does “American” Mean?
There is a battle being fought in the United States of America right now. Yes, I get that everyone’s saying this, but I’m not sure that we all know what that battle is about—based on what I’m seeing in news coverage and what I understand from talking to people in person. I think the battle currently is an effort to define what we mean when we say “American.”
(Sorry, South America, Mexico, and Canada, but generally the term is used for citizens of the United States.)
I’ve been mulling over ideological differences, and here’s what I’ve seen, aggregated here for you so that you don’t have to have the uncomfortable conversations that I’ve had. You might be forgiven for still believing that it’s a battle for small versus large government, but you’d be wrong, though that does play a role. You may believe still that it’s got something to do with career politicians versus people who “don’t need the money.” You’d be wrong there too, but getting warmer.
The true fight here is defining what an American is, and to a further degree, which system of labeling and class protections we should use. In a very real sense, America is deep into a class war, only many of us haven’t realized it yet. This breaks along ideological line in weird ways, and there are rationalizations that occur along the way to some very strange ideological conclusions. I’m going to start by explaining some of these differences by explaining the systems and backing into who believes what, so bear with me.
Rigid Social Structure = Fascism
There’s efficiency in early role assignment. By this, I mean if you can predict reliably what job you will do within society when you’re able to meaningfully contribute, then you can specialize early and train along the way and differentiate quickly. You can also make relationships within that field early and use these to help you become successful in what you’re doing. Likewise, there’s efficiency in preventing mobilization from one field into another. The more difficult it is to move from your pre-determined societal role into another, the more resigned you are to simply doing the work. There’s no need to even try if it’s impossible to change things. And, if an individual is only part of the system of society, and the more important thing is to keep the society functioning, the stability imposed by rigid class boundaries, or “societal role boundaries",” may be considered a positive. This is the rational perspective which I can understand many buying into, and there’s an argument to be made that pre-determined classes is of some benefit.
Extremists who adhere to this philosophy include white supremacists, who enter the philosophy with the (provably wrong) assumption that race somehow determines capability, then these class boundaries break along racial lines. For misogynists, these class boundaries break along sex lines. In the United States, we have a healthy amount of both racists and misogynists, and sexual preference-ists as well, who are perfectly content to implement boundaries along intersectional lines that ultimately put the black LGBTQ+ person in the lowest rung, and the white het in the highest.
Loose Social Structure = Anarchy
Another option for the organization of society is to have none, or as little as possible. This approach obviously trades the efficiencies of pre-determination for a more optimal efficiency of fitting the square peg into the square hole, and the round peg into the round hole. This idea is that people will gravitate to what they are naturally good at, and that positions within society will attract the right people to do the right jobs. There’s little to no sense of duty in this world view. The purpose of society is to guide the right people to the right roles rather than prescribe who should be in which roles.
Extremists who adhere to this philosophy are predictably anarchists, who believe that society is secondary, and that people can simply get along without it. Clearly this doesn’t work, because the less social structure there is, the harder it becomes to get collective projects to work. In the United States, we learned this early on with our experiment in the Articles of Confederation, the first form of centralized government that nearly lost us the revolutionary war.
Middling People
Most Americans sit somewhere along the spectrum, and those who have bought in hook, line, and sinker, view the alternative as terrifying. We label things that fall well short of fascism as fascism, and ideas that aren’t remotely socialist as socialist, and in our heads, fight the imaginary fight to prevent either. Ironically, in America, we’ve always been more on the fascism side so that even those who claim to be socialists aren’t real socialists. I can write an entire blog post on this alone. And sadly, it’s this mislabeling that allows us to slip into fascism, as the waters are muddied so much that people don’t really understand what the labels mean anymore. If I had a dollar for every time I had to re-explain “fascism”…
But this is the fight: should we be more fascist than we are, or less? And this fight is entered into in predictable ways by capitalists (read: people who own companies, not you most likely). Capitalists tend to buy into the “more fascist” philosophy, because they don’t want competition, and frankly, due to our baked-in fascist-leaning status-quo, these people tend to be white males, who sit comfortably at the top of most social hierarchies that fascists flock toward.
The workers, on the other hand, where their wills haven’t been broken by laws that cripple collective action, tend to side more on the socialists or anarchist side. However, recall that we’re de-facto fascist to an extent in this country, so that’s not as extreme as it reads, and it’s not that difficult to peel people away from their collectivist mentality when we’re living in a perpetual proto-fascist system.
Understanding Creates Opportunities
If you understand some of the why behind the mentalities we see, then you have a better chance of convincing someone of the rightness and wrongness of a particular view. For example, there’s a sliver of daylight between “more efficient society” and “white supremacy” that you can potentially exploit. There’s also a very strong personal liberty argument that can be made on the anarchist side that can’t even be imagined to a strict fascist. As a society, we do need some structure, and this is why the law-and-order crowd, police forces especially, tend to lean fascist. So it’s important to understand that some of the conflicts we see between protestors and police have less to do with any lawbreaking, and often more to do with the ideological divide separating fascist-leaning from anarchist-leaning people. Keep the above in mind when having conversations, look for clues as to which ideological conflicts are being presented, and you can actually have a meaningful conversation beyond screaming through a megaphone.
But also…if you have a megaphone, don’t be afraid to use it.
Just saying.
