4 ms·
I think the real summary of Scott Alexander's community was written 80 years ago. https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/ https://harpers.org/archiv
by bloaf 6y ago
I think the real summary of Scott Alexander's community was written 80 years ago.
https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/ https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/
> Mr. G is a very intellectual young man who was an infant prodigy. He has been concerned with general ideas since the age of ten and has one of those minds that can scintillatingly rationalize everything. I have known him for ten years and in that time have heard him enthusiastically explain Marx, social credit, technocracy, Keynesian economics, Chestertonian distributism, and everything else one can imagine. Mr. G will never be a Nazi, because he will never be anything. His brain operates quite apart from the rest of his apparatus. He will certainly be able, however, fully to explain and apologize for Nazism if it ever comes along. But Mr. G is always a “deviationist.” When he played with communism he was a Trotskyist; when he talked of Keynes it was to suggest improvement; Chesterton’s economic ideas were all right but he was too bound to Catholic philosophy. So we may be sure that Mr. G would be a Nazi with purse-lipped qualifications. He would certainly be purged.
Now this is not to compare modern liberal sensibilities to naziism, beyond the broadest of generalities such as "they are both political movements." I do think we can see that the modern liberal political body is inclined to purge SA's group of "deviationists" who they see as insufficiently ideologically pure.
- jessaustin 6y agoAh, nerds are bad. Good to know!
- bloaf 6y agoThat is the level of understanding that the NYT piece seems to be promoting, but it is not at all my point. The point of the quote I posted is that these "deviationists" do not jump on bandwagons of any kind, be they good or bad. Therefore, political movements that expect uncritical acceptance of their ideas see them as opponents even if they mostly agree.
- jessaustin 6y agoI confess I like the summary in your reply a great deal more than the excerpt in your original post. It is a fact about humans that many of them think and perhaps even overthink various topics of import, leading to indecision, ambivalence, sometimes even confusion. Those humans are not worse humans than their brethren who seek only to support what they currently perceive to be their tribe. [EDIT:] In fact I think you have completely misunderstood Dorothy Thompson, since the Nazis were overwhelmingly the latter rather than the former sort of human. A complete reading of her essay is a complete reading of a set of wooden stereotypes, interesting only for the fact that it records the propaganda of an era in which a previously apparently peaceful nation was girding itself for world war. Ms Thompson includes such scintillating analysis as "Believe me, nice people don’t go Nazi." Good grief.
- bloaf 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Thompson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Thompson