They may hate you, but they love each other.
You see hate mongering, they see a bright future.
Sometimes people don’t see something, and don’t even know they’re not seeing it. There seems to be some confusion on the left about how the right-wing organizes and rallies people to action, to vote, to write letters to your Democratic Senators, to run for school board, and to show up at public meetings and demonstrations.
It's actually NOT through fear & anger and keeping their supporters stewing in doom, fear, and dark feelings.
YOU see the hate mongering, fear & anger. That's for YOUR benefit. To trigger the libs — to intimidate the left. It’s like a “don’t let your dog shit on my lawn” sign that’s facing the street — the homeowner is not staring at it from within, it’s for the people walking past.
Right-wing political supporters see, within their movement, love in a comfy community and hope for a promised world that prioritizes them.
You see big rallies and conventions on the news. But communities, (often with astroturfed money), are organized in small groups where people experience camaraderie — and also sometimes ways to network and make money. They offer solutions that sound good to people oriented as conservative. And though it is hard for educated lefties to imagine this when we read stuff like the "Project 2025" document, many exhausted and confused people have been fooled into thinking that hellscape scenario will benefit them. Yes, it’s upside down and cruel to many, but they don’t see it that way, because they don’t see the cruelty as happening to them, but hope it stymies the people they think are cruel and keeping them from the good life.
They see the right-wing hellscape as a promising bright future.
The right-wing is rallying people based on hope and solutions and what they are seeing as a positive vision — with them in power and having all the good things. The leaders and powerbrokers on the right offer people simple easy answers and digestible and entertaining narratives to make things make sense in a world that’s confusing and made difficult — albeit by those very people. The conservative consumers of all this information, malinformation, and disinformation, find comfort and engagement in what we might perceive as racist bullshit and “crazy conspiracy theories”. These people have been lured in, and are snowed with this promise of a better future, no matter how inconceivable it seems to us.
Because they do NOT see the entire picture. But neither do we.
Right-wing groups are staging messaging and trolling campaigns behind the scenes in telegram channels, right-wing forums, group chats, and discord servers. They don't go on open twitter and reddit in mixed company and use that for strategizing or expressing their inner most deepest feelings, nor do they often even expose themselves to their opposition’s narratives. They’re not interested in “the discourse” — they see the open internet as a battlefield - and that’s exactly what it is - cognitive warfare. So they go on twitter or facebook to drop the message bombs and all the garbage they want YOU to see, all the nasty bullying they want YOU to experience, and then go back to their safe spaces for rallying, reinforcement, hope, and support.
Their safe spaces are perceived by them as supportive, positive, upbeat, and friendly. Of course they’re not offering support or friendliness to YOU. But they offer community and belonging to their own. To us it looks like Qanon fictitious nonsense and horrendous bigoted hate from Moms For Liberty. But they are not hateful toward each other. They are welcoming, show caring concern, and have a great deal of empathy for those they perceive as their in-group. They don’t find that racist stuff offensive because it doesn’t offend them — they don’t see it as pertaining to them. It pertains for the people who are, they believe, hurting them. Within their own in-groups, they feel warm fuzzies, hope, and promise.
This is the same model ISIS has used. The targeted market for recruits was seeing something the rest of us were not. You saw (or hopefully just heard about) beheadings. They saw the promise of a caring community and a functional society where they would live well and in harmony with others who accept them and share their values. A safe haven, an intentional community of the like-minded.
Amanda Rogers (aka MsEntropy) explained this about ISIS in a twitter thread a few years ago.
Amanda Rogers was on an episode of the podcast I Don’t Speak German from Sep 29, 2022, a podcast that watches the right-wing (so you don’t have to), and Rogers mentions there too, the dangers of dehumanizing people as being purely motivated by rabid hate and anger. Rogers warns that you won’t see the enemy coming if you are blinded this way. My concern is that lefties get the wrong idea about how people get organized and build power if they have the wrong idea about how the right-wing is doing it, and able to aggressively push forward incredibly unpopular policies with a minority fringe.
This inside vs. outside difference is one that exists with many extremist high control authoritarian movements. (Sometimes they’re called cults.) From the outside, these groups look scary, or at best, inexplicably weird and off-putting. That’s not at all how it looks from the inside.
But using psychological messaging is not confined to any particular beliefs, cultures, or politics. Advertising is universal, and obviously it’s not always dishonest. Hope and small groups pushing for a better future have also been the foundation of successful left agendas that made progress, such as the first Earth Day — a very inspirational and hopeful theme. And a good cause in my opinion.
Feeling hope is attractive, after all. Though angry people do indeed click. And that can be habit forming. And some out there are only interested in your clicks.
