There is a sentiment which I see going around whenever it comes out that poor white people largely support Republicans even though Republicans hate the poor. It has been shown that Republican administrations always lead to severe damage to the economy, that poor people have worse outcomes by far under Republicans, and yet this never seems to translate into people aligning towards the Democrats. Very often this issue is taken up in the light of convincing Republicans to come to their senses, to abandon the bigotry and social conformity that Republicans offer to help themselves if for no other reason. There are economic and political and sociological angles that could be taken to inspect this issue. But I don’t want to go at it directly. I want to talk about victory and power.
One of the usual lines when people try to make this observation is that American white people are more motivated by racism than by their finances, and this makes them irrational actors. The thinking is, from what I can see, the concept of redlining is an example of what we could call “classic racism” or, maybe better, “academic racism”. Redlining “makes sense”. The claim of redlining is that Black people and other non-whites in an area will reduce the housing values. Given the assumed racism of potential white buyers (who are the majority of buyers by both number and by money invested), we can see how the existence of non-white people in an area would make it less attractive to those people, so there’s a causal theory at work. The racism does have a social and personal aspect, obviously, but it also has clear economic benefits for the racists. It’s when white people are shown to support policies like ICE kidnappings which demonstrably make their communities worse, which even rip through their own friends and families, that we have an issue. That’s what “doesn’t make sense”. That’s what we are constantly looking for an explanation for. And I believe there is one. To talk about it, we’ll have to bring up our old friend Friedrich Niches.
It has been a few months since I’ve written about Nietzsche, so I want to contextualize my references to him here. I view Nietzsche as expressing the conservative (and specifically anti-socialist) id. What he wrote is what all arch-conservatives would like to say about the world but are generally too cunning to actually put down on paper. I am most familiar with On the Genealogy of Morals but these tendencies run throughout his work; it isn’t as if this book is an aberration. Of these, the Genealogy is also the most concentrated version of these ideas in relation to conservative politics. I did not go very deep into the book this time for two reasons. First, I’m hoping to write something relatively short; and second, the first essay in Genealogy gave me more than enough to work with on the theme.
As a note, the italics used within the quotes are all in the book edition I’m using: On the Genealogy of Morals & Ecce Homo, translated by Kaufmann and Hollingdale, published by Vintage Books in November 1989. This is also the source of the page numbers.
To begin with, we need to expand our conception of what the purpose of economic well-being is. Often, people put forward the idea that economic well-being is the main goal that people are seeking: they want to have money, they want to have resources, they want a kind of tangible success. I have never ascribed to this idea. Rather, I think that economic well-being is just a pillar of a person’s general well-being. Economic well-being is not inherently more important, it is only situationally more important. In theory, someone’s general well-being could be increased in a way that does not involve increasing economic well-being. I’m aware that this is not a unique observation but it’s important that I make it explicit what I’m talking about to start out with.
We can equate general well-being with “the good life” or with broadly living well. That is the goal. Conservatives usually formulate their idea of the good life in terms of liberty: freedom of action. They believe in their own inherent goodness and right to life, they believe that their actions must be respected, and that their rightful position is at the top of their society. As Nietzsche says:
[T]he judgment “good” did not originate with those to whom “goodness” was shown! Rather it was “the good” themselves, that is to say, the noble, powerful, high-stationed and high-minded, who felt and established themselves and their actions as good, that is, of the first rank, in contradistinction to all the low, low-minded, common and plebeian. It was out of this pathos of distance that they first seized the right to create values and to coin names for values (p. 26)
The knightly-aristocratic value judgments presupposed a powerful physicality, a flourishing, abundant, even overflowing health, together with that which serves to preserve it: war, adventure, hunting, dancing, war games, and in general all that involves vigorous, free, joyful activity. (p. 33)
The ‘well-born’ felt themselves to be the ‘happy’; they did not have to establish their happiness artificially by examining their enemies, or to persuade themselves, deceive_themselves, that they were happy (as all men of _ressentiment are in the habit of doing); and they likewise knew, as rounded men replete with energy and therefore necessarily active, that happiness should not be sundered from action (p. 38)
This is the ideal which conservatives strive for, an ideal they gladly and openly express. They want to be free, they want to be strong, they want to exert their strength. Not only that, they do not want to reflect on their situation. It is not simply that the knights & aristocrats exert their power, it is also that they are not expected to act otherwise, as he says here:
To demand of strength that it should not express itself as strength, that it should not be a desire to overcome, a desire to throw down, a desire to become master, a thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs, is just as absurd to demand of weakness that it should express itself as strength. (p. 45)
We see that Nietzsche specifically equates strength, and thus his concept of good-as-against-bad, with “a desire to throw down”. I half-want to start talking about Nietzsche’s idea of strength as power right now, but I think the better way is to put forward most of the quotes I’ve pulled now so that I can reflect on them in context.
Nietzsche envisions a noble man who epitomizes strength of character, strength of will, will to power. As a statement of the fortitude and daring that such a person is supposed to express, Nietzsche says this:
To be incapable of taking one’s enemies, one’s accidents, even one’s misdeeds seriously for very long—that is the sign of strong, full natures in whom there is an excess of the power to form, to mold, to recuperate and to forget …. Such a man shakes off with a single shrug many vermin that eat deep into others; here alone genuine “love of one’s enemies” is possible (p. 39)
To read that line after reading the rest of Nietzsche’s writing made me feel like there was a joke being played on me. Nietzsche, the same person who talks about shrugging off vermin, about how the strong throw down, about how the strong recuperate and forget, also gives us passages like this:
Did Israel not attain the ultimate goal of its sublime vengefulness precisely through the bypath of this “Redeemer,” this ostensible opponent and disintegrator of Israel? Was it not part of the secret black art of truly grand politics of revenge, of a farseeing, subterranean, slowly advancing, and premeditated revenge, that Israel must deny the real instrument of its revenge before all the world as a mortal enemy and nail it to the cross, so that “all the world,” namely all the opponents of Israel, could unhesitatingly swallow just this bait? (p. 35)
For a man who claims to abhor ressentiment, who says that men of strength do not let ressentiment poison them, Nietzsche shows throughout this essay that he is in fact poisoned by ressentiment. Either Nietzsche is portraying a hyperactive and hypocritical conservative antisemite as a joke or he is actually a hyperactive and hypocritical conservative antisemite. This passage is not isolated in any of its points, not even the conspiratorial tone of his words. If the point of Nietzsche’s work is, in part, to demonstrate that he himself is part of some new generation of strength, he’s working against himself. The only real saving grace here is if Nietzsche did not view himself that way and only as their ressentiment-addled observer.
I am not a fan of simply taking someone’s concept which they’ve coded negatively and then saying to them “that’s actually you”, but it’s unavoidable in this case. Ressentiment is a very straightforward description of the antipathy that Nietzsche shows towards Jews, Christians, and even the very concepts of being kind or charitable. It is all about how the Jews have won and how they reformed all the values. If the strong person is not supposed to care about the slights they commit or are committed on them, if they are supposed to be able to love their enemies, how is it that Nietzsche has nothing but venom for Jews and English philosophers and the like? His philosophy does not even live through itself.
The last key quote I want to use is the following, where Nietzsche engages in a kind of theodicy of the noble strong man:
When the noble mode of valuation blunders and sins against reality, it does so in respect to the sphere with which it is not sufficiently familiar, against a real knowledge of which it has indeed inflexibly guarded itself: in some circumstances it misunderstands the sphere it despises, that of the common man, of the lower orders; on the other hand, one should remember that, even supposing that the affect of contempt, of looking down from a superior height, falsifies the image of that which it despises, it will at any rate still be a much less serious falsification than that perpetrated on its opponent—in effigie of course—by the submerged hatred, the vengefulness of the impotent. (p. 37)
This is one of those statements which defeats itself. The pivotal phrase is “against a real knowledge of which it has indeed inflexibly guarded itself”. In this one phrase, I believe Nietzsche has undone the entire book. His entire argument is that those who are the noble, the good-as-against-bad, are that way of themselves, without the need for comparison or opposition. That they are that way innately, that they should not be asked to change because it is simply in their nature. But here Nietzsche admits that in fact those noble strong people do “know better”. They are in fact aware that they are causing harm or otherwise acting in ways that might invite retaliation or justified displeasure, they are aware enough that they are protecting themselves from knowing more.
Despite Nietzsche’s declarations that the strong do not need to compare, that they value themselves first and primarily, his explanations of their goodness are nothing but comparisons. In fact, he makes it clear that the self-image of the noble strong ones is dependent on their ability to overthrow others, to master them. It is not the case that the noble strong ones are simply good on their own and without comparison. Even in his own explanation, their goodness only exists in relation to the badness of others.
Nietzsche gives no clear evidence of the order of operations, that the noble strong morality places value on itself first and “the bad” second, and that the “Jewish” morality places evil first and the good second. There’s no logical reason that it should be seen thus. The fact is that both arise out of oppositions which place evil-bad on the other side from themselves (theoretically; there are people who claim themselves to be evil, and I won’t bother parsing that out here). He is effectively describing the same thing, but when describing the noble strong ones he uses a pleasant voice and when describing the “weak” he uses a Crypt Keeper type voice. Further, the idea that Jewish people or Christians would describe themselves as not vital, not active, etc., that is ridiculous. It would have been obviously untrue even at the time that he wrote this. It’s simply a smear that seems like it should follow from the Christian talk of love, charity, healing, etc., but it is fairly embarrassing that he expected to be taken seriously on this point.
The reason I laid all this out, and pointed out the deficiencies in Nietzsche’s arguments, is that this search for the expression of strength is at the core of the conservative satisfaction with “mere cultural victories”. Being able to be racist, to be part of an oppressive movement, is a search for triumphs; a racist in an oppressive government has victories every day. These victories do bring people closer to a feeling of being strong, being potent, being fully liberated and free to act. But it is not only that the victories help them to feel strong, it is also that they feel entitled to this false-strength and reject any form of restriction on it. They believe themselves to be naturally powerful, naturally good, and they believe that their perceptions of others as bad are entirely justified, entirely reasonable.
This also leads conservatives to make the same turn that Nietzsche does about the weak: they are the true evil ones, the ones most befitting of their own charges. Rather than simply accept that they have caused harm and might be responsible for that, the conservatives argue that those asking for justice are actually doing so in bad faith, that they have ressentiment, that they are simply jealous of those with the ability to harm and not care about it. They guard themselves, as Nietzsche says. It isn’t that they are truly naïve; they are pretending to be naïve in order to escape responsibility. Nietzsche says first that the noble strong ones do not falsify in the way that the evil weak ones do, and then he says that even if the noble strong ones do get it wrong, on account of how much obviously superior they are, that would be less wrong than the perceptions of the evil people. Again: there is no naïveté in this position, this is simply denial.
But conservative ignorance has always worked like this. It is always a performative denial of something known, a denial which is made specifically to absolve the denier of the responsibility to know better. One does not blame children for all their misdeeds, after all, so if one is as innocent as a child, one simply cannot be blamed. Anyone who has had to listen to conservatives backpedal after a scandal erupts from one of their policies will know this move. Suddenly, a politician with decades of experience has not seen anything, has not spoken to their colleagues in months, and would not even know what to say about an issue. This is a lie which the powerful tell so that they can pretend to be the aggrieved party in a dispute.
The truth lies in the words Nietzsche says but not in the way he presents them. The noble strong ones do not view themselves as noble and strong in a vacuum. They are noble and strong in relation to others whom they have thrown down, overcome, and claimed mastery over. So there is a before-nobility which exists, a state which the noble strong ones disrupt. Having done this, they then create their concepts of good and bad, ascribing themselves the first and the ones they have thrown down the second. This isn’t in order: they don’t first create good and then create bad. These ideas are created simultaneously as an opposition to explain the situation which the noble strong ones have created. The noble strong ones then create a third category: evil. In this category they place the objections that the thrown-down have to the noble strong ones. This gives us the good-bad-evil triad which Nietzsche actually presents as his morality, whether or not it is also shared by the noble strong ones.
What I’ve given there is not a genealogy of morality in general but a genealogy of conservative morality. This is what Nietzsche is getting at when he says “As is well known, the priests are the most evil enemies—but why? Because they are the most impotent.” {p. 33} Evil for Nietzsche lies not in misdeeds, it lies in weakness, and weakness lies in being thrown down, in being overcome. So it is something of a mystery that he quotes Thomas Aquinas with seeming disapproval, what looks like a scornful reference to his “meekness”, when he says:
We might even guess, but it is better to have it expressly described for us by an authority not to be underestimated in such matters, Thomas Aquinas, the great teacher and saint. “Beati in regno coelesti,” he says, meek as a lamb, “videbunt poenas damnatorum, ut beatitudo illis magis complaceat.” [The blessed in the kingdom of heaven will see the punishments of the damned, in order that their bliss be more delightful for them.] (p. 49)
Shouldn’t those who have been victorious exult over those who have been defeated? This treatment, where the victorious gain pleasure from the punishments of the damned, is a direct reflection of Nietzsche’s idea that strength must be displayed in mastery, in defeating opponents, and that those who are strong should not be restricted from being strong. If those who are in heaven were victorious, why should they be ashamed in glorying in their victory? Have they not proven themselves strong? But no, the weak can never express themselves as strong according to Nietzsche, so even in victory, those who are weak have not justified themselves. Again: this feels like someone expressing sour grapes at being defeated, the kind of thing that Nietzsche says the noble strong ones do not do.
What becomes clear here is that it is not the fact of victory, of superior results, that makes one good, which is contradictory to Nietzsche’s more glowing bloviations. No, goodness is a quality that is represented in a certain kind of person. And despite what Nietzsche says about physicality, this cannot mean a physical superiority because that does not describe Nietzsche in any way. No, instead, we must imagine a kind of generalized, innate superiority, a superiority which constructs itself through imagining itself defeating its enemies even if it doesn’t, one which can never be defeated in its true form but either stunted early or deceived late. It is a superiority that one knows when they see it but which nevertheless can never be proved or disproved, and therefore which can always be claimed.
What conservatives desire above everything else is the feeling of power. That, to them, is goodness. That is what should be striven for. Economic well-being can deliver that up to a point but, beyond the fact that it is not easy to achieve in itself, it is even more difficult to consistently achieve victories over others. Patriarchy will do this some of the way, for men towards women and adults towards children. But an overarching conservative project requires a sacrificial victim, an other which is not an enemy, despite Nietzsche’s descriptions, but is a lesser. Because while Nietzsche talks about the fact that noble strong ones delight in enemies who provide real opposition, the only enemies he actually talks about are slaves and Jews, who to him are born slaves who have escaped their position by deceit. What else is the reason for Nietzsche’s hatred of the Jews, or for any racist’s hatred of their chosen targets, other than a feeling that they do not belong?
But we have to understand what power and victory represent to understand why they are enticing. For the conservative, power and victory mean the same as what economic security and legal justice mean to the socialist. These are the guarantors of a good life. To say that racism and other aspects of conservative politics are not part of an economic calculus, or that the anxiety that such people may experience is “un-economic”, would be like saying that a trip to an amusement park doesn’t count as an economic decision because you had fun rather than trying to make a profit. In the case of policy, it may be that a certain policy will, for instance, increase death of all people, but it increases the death of a minority by 10% and the majority by only 5%. In this situation, a conservative may support such a policy because it will give them a victory over their enemies, a victory which they rely on in order to continue constructing themselves as the noble strong ones. A victory which represents power, liberty, and good living.
Where a socialist or an otherwise progressive person would ask “Why would you accept a racist policy when it will impact your health?”, the conservative person would ask “Why would you accept a modest increase to your health when you will have your enemies thriving among you?” Because we have to remember that Nietzsche’s good-versus-bad and his evil-versus-good are both his own constructions. They are not accurate reflections of the world outside. The reason that Nietzsche’s work aligns so well with the conservative worldview is that Nietzsche was, politically, a garden-variety conservative. His alignment doesn’t come out of study but out of his honest feeling. Understanding this, we can see his expression of the conservative worldview as broadly accurate without taking on board his expression of the progressive, socialist, or “Jewish” position, which he has absolutely no insight on. This, too, mirrors how conservatives continue to misconstrue the origins and goals of socialist politics. But not out of naïveté. This is their inflexible guard.