Master vs Slave Morality
For the past several decades modern culture has more and more embraced ‘slave morality’, where the weak are valorized over the strong.
Master vs Slave morality
An eye-opening deeper read on the MAGA backlash against 'wokeness’ is this masterpiece from
.For the past several decades modern culture has more and more embraced ‘slave morality’, where the weak are valorized over the strong. Whoever can somehow prove that they are more oppressed, wins. There is even a Wikipedia page about this, called the Oppression Olympics.
At some point in the last 100 years, slave morality became so dominant as to be virtually the only recognizable paradigm. Society used to more openly valorize expansion and achievement. We’d celebrate putting a man on the moon, we’d throw ticker tape parades for aviators and heroes. We’d build giant buildings and bridges and projects and boast about how they were the biggest, newest, and how fast we could create them. The idea of Progress was venerated. There was a World’s Fair every few years to show off the newest inventions. Then something flipped.
The current backlash against wokeness is partly a reaction to this exaggerated slave morality. Trump and Musk represent a return to Master Morality. I don’t agree with everything in this article. But I do believe it is highly likely that something like this is what propels Musk and the MAGA right toward authoritarianism.
In the Trumpist worldview strength in and of itself is worthy of praise. He is good because he is strong. Trump, more than he believes in possibly anything in the world, believes in dominance. International trade is not a positive sum interaction where both parties can benefit - it’s a zero sum game where you beat the other guy. Politics is about belittling and dominating your opponents, then making them crawl back to you and kiss the ring. Trump wants to enforce his will on his political rivals. He measures the worth of his followers not by their ideology but by their loyalty to him. He wants to dominate others. This is the essence of master morality.
Seems like a great characterization of the man, explaining also why he seems so desperate to be liked by Putin.
Strong leaders are no fun at all
If the end-station of leftwing wokeness is stagnation and forced DEI statements, the end-station of rightwing slave morality is fascism. And while people are super tired of hearing that word after years of overuse by the left, it is actually an accurate term for what the MAGA movement appears to be doing (just read the wikipedia page linked above). Despite all the rhetoric about freedom of speech, nothing they are doing is about freedom, it’s just about censoring a different set of views. Musk took over Twitter after heavily accusing it of left-wing bias, and after taking control, has quickly and obviously made it more biased than ever.
Grok briefly censored unflattering mentions of Trump and Elon Musk.
Elon made platform-level changes to Twitter/X.com to boost his own and other Trumpist’s posts.
Back in the 50s and 60s, the times MAGA claims were so great, heroes like the men we put on the moon, had grace: “a small step for [a] man, a giant leap for mankind” is a powerfully inclusive message. We are all one mankind. MAGA messaging sorely lacks that inclusivity.
Instead, there is only a depressing and sad combination of bullying and whiny, loser’ish victimhood. The MAGA people somehow seem to have adopted all of the most unattractive parts of the easily offended ‘snowflake’ left they constantly deride. They are the soy right (seriously, read this one too):
As Scarlet writes at Dialectics of Desire:
They have special diets are afraid of seed oils……They talk non stop about masculinity, drive pickups, and wear plaid, but can’t change a tire to save their lives. While the right spent years mocking liberals for wanting “safe spaces” and echo chambers, for crying about identity politics, for being frail, fragile, overly-sensitive weaklings, they were slowly transforming into the perfect mirror of all of it — without the nagging concern for equality or any of that lib shit. […]
The Soy Right is being oppressed and they want you to know it. They’re scared to take the subway, they’re offended that you called them white or cis, they’re upset that you didn’t think they were cool in high school, they want to call the manager because there’s less boobies in video games. They are crybabies of the highest order. While the right is winning cultural and political victories nonstop lately, that’s not enough. They also need you to like them. Why don’t you like them?!
I hope the Soy Right’s insufferable loserdom is one of the things that turns people off in the next few years.