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this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2024
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A friend who worked in D.C. for a while clued me in to the Rosetta Stone of understanding the right-wing mentality: It all flows from a deep, abiding self-hatred. They need constant reassurance that they are good people, because they don't really believe it.
Furthermore, they literally need an untermenschen (the poor, the homeless, the sick) to be better than, so their own success proves that they are good.
It's obvious when you look at it this way: America must axiomatically be all good, because they are Americans; with your criticism, are you saying they're not good?
I spent a lot of formative years in an extremely rural area. People would take a lot of their time running down the local area, mocking the state of the school we went to, how there was nothing to do, and so on.
But, I noticed two things - first of all, if anyone talked about moving somewhere else in the country, or to a big city, these same people would express shock and outrage and say overtly racist things like "but that's where all the nKLANGers are!". Also, few of them had actually went anywhere else - some of them had never left the county, few left the state, and very rare was it that someone had left the country.
Secondly, if the topic of the greatness of this country came up, it was the bestest evar, at everything, than any other! I sometimes would ask these people how they would even know, since, in some cases, they've seen almost none of this country and they have never been to any other, and they thought the area they lived in was kind of a shithole?
Yep, interesting how they're proud of America, they just hate all of the people and things in it.