Christian Patterson
People’s Sickle
December 29, 2017
Here is the tweet:
I have thought about this a lot. Matthew Yglesias is on to something. The far-right has a really good ability at grooming kiddos on the internet. I have even heard Generation Z is much more right-wing than millennial based on polls.
However, I think his anxiety about the future youtube Nazis is not necessarily wrong, but short sighted, and overstated. He is also a liberal, so he’s not coming at this from a leftist perspective, but I will be.
For one, many people don’t become leftists until they either go to college or join the workforce. Communism is an ideology that rings true when you sell your labor for piss-wages. If you aren’t a laborer in a conventional sense, you either have to A) have read and understood Marx or B) have the empathy that most rich non-laborers lack.
Give these kids some credit, many of them will grow out of it.
I remember when I was in 6th grade, I drew a swastika. A teacher immediately saw that and told me to get rid of that shit. It is extremely regretful, but I was a barely pubescent bozo, and I had no concept of Nazis in terms of politics. I basically drew it for the same reason kids drew those S shapes.
Not only that, but being intrigued by Nazis was, at a time, like being into Dungeons and Dragons in the 80s, or Marilyn Manson in the 90s. It was edgy as imagery, but an ideologically hollow gesture. In 2017, being into Nazis does carry more political weight, but for the kids Yglesias is referring to, many of them are edgelords who will grow out of it when they understand the impact of the political beliefs.
Also, in terms of pure demographics, the potential base of Nazis in America is dwindling. Most Americans have no material incentive to be Nazis. The ideal Nazi is white, middle class men, and the first two demographics are shrinking. I guess that’s what far-righties mean by “White genocide”—they’re simply becoming outnumbered from an identarian perspective.
Finally, looking into Nazism, even politically, when you are young doesn’t correlate much to Nazism as an adult. If anything, from my experience, the type of people allured by Nazism are apolitical, until they realize our system is failing later in life, like late teens to late 20s. Since they lack political vocabulary before feeling the flaws of our system, their political response is reactionary, in both the mundane sense of “reacting”, and the political sense. This is exactly why adult reactionaries, Nazis, and alt-righties are adult diaper babies.
The impact of this is I have good faith that kids flirting with Nazism indicates discontent with the current system. It is the most rudimentary, surface-level, and incoherent answer to a capitalist system (and is really just a hyper-exaggerated version of capitalism). But a kid flirting with Nazism, I hope, won’t be a Nazi when they learn how the world works outside of shitty YouTube videos. Nazism and fascism are infantile disorders, and if someone is interested in political alternatives as a kid, they will be more likely to be politically motivated into actual change: communism.
I hope I’m not too optimistic.
