The psychology of bigotry is much more varied and complex than its portrayal in liberal rhetoric, which usually just presents it as an expression of primordial hate. Still, since I opened a new account on Twitter a week or so ago, I’ve been struck not just by how prolific bigotry has become on that site, but by how obvious its explanation often is. And it’s an explanation that deserves a lot more attention on the liberal-left.
Bigotry is the cope of losers. It helps people who feel worthless feel better about themselves. If you have low self-esteem it’s extremely tempting to start believing that you were born special — that you belong to some special category of people who will always be intrinsically superior to everyone else. Being a bigot means that you get to avoid confronting and wrestling with those feelings of inferiority, which often come from an extremely dark place.
Spend any amount of time looking at the spread of popular bigotry online and it’s impossible to miss a few recurring trends. They:
Are failures, at least according to conventional right-wing criteria. They are not successful entrepreneurs. They are not married or in a relationship. They do not have children. They are not homeowners. They do not have advanced degrees. They aren’t conventionally attractive or athletic or sexy.
Are obsessed with culture that is conventionally regarded as either lowbrow, geeky, or degenerate. An absurd number of online bigots, for example, are fanatically devoted to anime in a way that just a decade ago was still widely regarded as infantile and embarrassing. Views on that have shifted over the years, but if you are still deeply invested in what your conservative parents or grandparents think of you, this is probably an aspect of your life that you are not particularly proud of.
Have personalities that don’t fit the conventions of extroversion and charisma that our culture fetishizes. A completely implausible number of online bigots self-identify as autistic, not because they actually behave like autists, but because they are introverted or socially awkward. Another genre of online bigot positions themselves as self-conscious misanthropes, spinning their natural combative and antisocial tendencies as a kind of proudly defiant contempt.
This is not, to be clear, what all bigots are like. There is a kind of bigot who feels naturally superior to other people but who is blessed with real self-esteem. One finds them especially among the old rich; they are something like Nietzsche’s ubermensch, and rarely feel the need to make a show of their superiority. But this is not the sort of bigot who have made their presence so conspicuous in popular culture today. The loser supremacist loudly advertises his superiority in direct proportion to his internal feelings of inferiority. He tries to cultivate a culture that prefers his whiteness, or his maleness, or his heterosexuality, etcetera, precisely because he wants that preference to compensate for his self-loathing.
There is, of course, an economic explanation for the proliferation of loser supremacy in our era. We are living in the wake of the Great Compression, and as living standards and class mobility decline in the United States, younger generations in particular are failing to meet the standards that ascendant neoliberalism set for them. This is not just a matter of people being angry that their personal ambitions have been thwarted by the economy and channeling that anger towards the first scapegoat they can find; they are embarrassed that they have failed, and they are turning to bigotry because it gives them a new reason to value themselves.
Socialism can help scale back this problem by creating a functional economy that, put simply, makes fewer people feel like losers. It also has a wide range of salutory second order effects, like undermining capitalism’s cultures of meritocracy and consumer fetishism that cultivate standards most people will never meet. It even has third order effects that treat the problem: socialism expands access to mental health services, which can improve personal self-esteem, which in turn takes away the psychological appeal of loser supremacy.
In the meantime, however, it would probably clarify a lot in our culture if the left recast popular bigotry not as an expression of false superiority driven by hatred and rage, but as an expression of weakness driven by insecurity and self-loathing. When Elon Musk amplifies rhetoric about white supremacy, perhaps it’s because he has some deep-seated loathing of other races; but maybe it’s also because he’s a socially awkward geek with a weird face and a schlubby body who is frantically reaching for pathetic race-science reasons to believe that he’s genetically superior after all. When Anna Khachiyan sneers at trans women who are comfortable with their bodies, maybe it’s just because no amount of cosmetic surgery has made her comfortable with hers. None of this excuses their behavior, but it does cast it in a very different light. The modern right isn’t a movement of successful, well-adjusted and conventionally attractive supermen who are cruelly lording their superiority over the rest of us; they’re imperfect like the rest of us, but they are profoundly, pathologically embarrassed about it.
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