Many people will remember the “You didn’t build that” right wing panic du jour.
In a nutshell, Obama made the perfectly true and even pedestrian remark that the reason “self-made” conservatives were able to succeed was because they, like all the rest of us, were the beneficiaries of a massive infrastructure–roads, the internet, a global medical community, a global economy, and countless other gifts of a state and social system ordered to the common good–that we could never have created on a purely individualistic basis. So in pointing to things like our massive highway system (an unheralded achievement of the Eisenhower Administration that I think ranks as one of the Seven Wonders of the World) Obama remarked, “You didn’t build that” for the very good reason that no individual entrepeneur built it. The state did that.
Well, the monkeys in the Right Wing Lie Machine went insane ginning up the larval MAGA cult with rage at Obama for insulting the Plucky Hard-Working White American Right Wing Individualist who does not owe the government jack shit for one thing he built with his own two calloused hands, dammit! To hell with Obama and his damned socialism, etc. blah blah blah. It was an absolute orgasm of Rugged Individualism and celebration of white male conservatives not owing anybody a damned thing.
It was a textbook example of a classic Right Wing Panic du Jour depending on a the deliberate twisting of words. It was utterly dishonest.
Fast forward to any time a brown person is perceived by the MAGA Master Race to be uppity. Suddenly MAGA white supremacists scream at brown people that America “allowed” them to get where they are and they should be grateful for what they have been “given”.
The eternal subtext of all such discourse is that MAGA white supremacists live here by divine right, owing nobody thanks for anything, and bound by no social ties obliging them to feel compassion for anybody but themselves and that tiny minority who happen to be extension of their egos. People like Obama, who remind them of their huge indebtedness to others and, above all, to what Romans 13 reminds us is God’s gift of the state, are enemies to be destroyed by any lie that comes to hand. And above all, brown people are here by the permission of MAGA bigots–a permission that can (and should) be revoked if they get uppity.
The arrogance and hypocrisy is stunning.
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Reminds me of the phrase in the Mass, “Do not consider what we truly deserve…” when it comes to people patting themselves on the back because they were lucky to be born healthy or smart or connected, and thinking that they are somehow superior specimens as a result, forgetting the “last shall be first, first shall be last” as well if they are thinking they are so wonderful and not wanting to share with others who aren’t so wonderful…and they – not God – get to decide who is worthy of sharing with…
It’s often pointed out that the right wing’s hypocrisy is a feature, not a bug: Under fascism, there are those whom the law protects and those whom it binds with as little overlap between the two as possible.
So too, I infer, are there those who should be grateful and those to whom the rest should be grateful. (Which may just be a restatement of Rand’s Makers and Takers, I suppose.)
The supreme irony in the right wing libertarian mythology is that the red states many of them hail from are the biggest “taker” states in the country. A lot of what keeps those states afloat is federal welfare, in essence.
If it’s any consolation, Obama got payback for that four months later in 2012 when Democrats distorted Romney’s innocuous “binders full of women” statement as a misogynist-sounding punchline. It was the biggest beat-up until “Ross Douthat thinks incels deserve subsidised sex robots” came along in 2018.
That said, ever since 2016 and Trump the GOP have pulled way ahead of the Democrats in playing dirty.
Libertarianism and “The Gummint is the problem” is a common fallacy across the entire American political spectrum, not limited to right-wingers. You see it on the left when people claim that getting someone doxxed and sacked (rendered unemployable and losing their healthcare) because they expressed views that embarrassed their employer, is all fine, nothing to see here because The Government and The First Amendment were not involved. (This is often defended by the pea-and-thimble trick of claiming that anything short of state prosecution all comes under the heading of “holding accountable” or “using our own free speech rights to express disagreement”).
This is why political scientists have observed that American right-wingers tend to be Enlightenment minimal-state liberals rather than European-style throne-and-altar or even “national greatness” conservatives (cf how they purged Teddy Roosevelt and detest the French Gaullists), and why American left-wingers tend to be anarchists or identity-politics rather than communists, socialists, or social democrats (join a union? But that’s not how _I_express _my_self!).
The opposite strain, of European-style collectivism, also has its own pitfalls… see above re throne-and-altar conservatism.
Cory Doctorow:
‘…As Kevin Kelly documents in his incredible, unmissable 2010 book What Technology Wants, most of the major inventions of our species were recurring phenomena: TV, radio, and other “breakthroughs” occurred more or less simultaneously and independently, all around the world.
Kelly explains this through his idea of “the adjacent possible,” which says that ideas suggest themselves more-or-less continuously, but are not realized until the conditions for bringing them to fruition are in place.
For example, thinkers as far back as Da Vinci observed the flight of maple keys, considered the action of a screw, and sketched something that looked like a helicopter. But the helicopter couldn’t be made until there were breakthroughs in metallurgy, aerodynamics, engine design, etc. The closer those other fields grew to a helicopter-ready state, the more obvious helicopters were, so the pace of helicopter attempts only increases as the adjacent possible draws nearer. Once the conditions for helicopters are in place, it’s helicopter time, and so you get helicopters, everywhere, all at once.
But from the perspective of a helicopter inventor, they have been struck by a bolt of inspiration and made something where nothing existed before. They are a Lockean Titan, who has blended their labor and imagination with the raw substance of the world to make a thing that has never been seen before and would never have been seen, without their genius.
They’re almost right, except for two things.
First, all the raw materials they combined to make a helicopter aren’t raw materials at all: they’re finished goods, that other people invented through their own bursts of inspiration, about which they felt every bit as proprietary as the Helicopter Titan.
Second, even if they’d never been born, we’d still have helicopters. When it’s helicopter time, you get helicopters. There isn’t just one Helicopter Titan, there is an emergent cohort of them.
It’s natural to feel like a Lockean Titan when you have a bolt of inspiration and see it through to fruition. It’s generally a lot of hard work and sacrifice, and it requires a legitimately imaginative leap to realize.
The honest truth is Lockean Titans are a dime a dozen. In the alternate universe in which I never wrote a novel, other people, influenced by similar phenomena in the wider world, and by similar trends in our literature, wrote novels that filled niches comparable to mine. Ask any editor: books and stories come in clusters, and not just because people are copying what works, but because the thing that works is zeitgeisty and captures the spirit of the moment, and if something is the spirit of the moment, then it is broadly diffused and powering many peoples’ imaginations.
Being a successful Lockean Titan is like being the successful staph bacterium that manages to find its way into a break in its host’s skin and spawn an infection: yes, you had all the characteristics necessary to go viral (ahem), but you also got lucky by being in the right place at the right time, and if you hadn’t been there, someone else would have been.
Living in a moment in which markets alone determine something’s worth – and thus whether its creator will have a dignified life – has elevated the Lockean delusion and erasure to a catechism….’
https://locusmag.com/2019/03/cory-doctorow-terra-nullius/