I've been thinking a lot about this, about how the whole left/right conservative/liberal whatever-you-want-to-call-it divide is built on this People the culture just says intrinsically belong here, deserve to be here, are the kind of people who live here And people who aren't
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The big tough manly dude and his pretty innocent housewife and their adorable kids The good Christian family, "all-American", blonde hair and white skin and Anglo names, red white and blue Everyone unconsciously defers to them, gives them extra credit
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It's always like this People who swear up and down they don't have a racist bone in their body still unconsciously think it's "normal" for people like that to be in charge and pushing back is always walking uphill
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Terry Pratchett captured this really well in Discworld The deep dwarves, the hardcore reactionary religious fundamentalists, are a tiny minority among dwarves and yet they get a ton of deference People know they're "crazy nutters" but let them go about their business
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Cheri, who is the dwarven equivalent of a trans woman, is HATED by their movement (a "ha'ak", a heretic) and they've outright threatened her safety And yet she privately admits in her heart of hearts she can't imagine the world without them
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Nobody else believes shit like that letting sunlight touch your skin contaminates you or that all trolls should be genocided and their bodies ground to powder and whatnot But it would *feel wrong* if they just ceased to exist
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Like the "liberal" dwarves feel slightly reassured someone else believes all that so they have someone to compete themselves against and be more liberal than They're the measuring stick authenticity is counted by, they're what you know as a deviant you're deviating from
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And if they were just GONE, well then You wouldn't know anything at all anymore Everything would permanently change And as much as people might claim otherwise people are really scared of permanent change
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They like to think this system is stable - "Well, they can be old-fashioned, and I can be more liberal and tolerant than them, and they can condemn me and I can be smug about being freer than them we can just keep on going that way and everyone's happy" But, well, it isn't
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End of conversation
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It's an objective reality that the Right is gaining power while the Center is losing it. The labor focused Left are gaining power but it is still smaller than both the Right and Center. You're focusing on the wrong things if you're only highlighting "symbols of strength".
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