Tucker Carlson...how in the heck did this guy happen?

The front page of the Web site. Done.

But if you wanted a specific story, I thought comparing the US “caste system” to Nazi Germany’s extermination of millions was notable.

America’s Enduring Caste System

It’s a somewhat interesting (if very very long) piece about the Indian caste system and some relationship to American racism. But the inclusion of Nazi Germany as a reference is a different leap entirely.

 

There are plenty of fascists and crypto-fascists on Fox.

Are there any Maoists or Marxists on MSNBC?

 

pretty disingenuous reading of a long, complex piece. or at least very opaque

also not sure victims of the Tulsa massacre or Wilmington or Wounded Knee or Sand Creek would agree with you

 

Are there? What makes them fascist? What makes them Marxist? What makes them crypto?

 

So, too, with groups trained to believe in their inherent sovereignty. “The essence of this overestimation of one’s own position and the hate for all who differ from it is narcissism,” wrote Erich Fromm, a leading psychoanalyst and social theorist of the 20th century. “He is nothing,” Fromm wrote, “but if he can identify with his nation, or can transfer his personal narcissism to the nation, then he is everything.”

Fromm well knew the perils of group narcissism from both his training in psychoanalysis and his personal experience. He was born into a Jewish family in Germany and came of age during World War I, witnessing the hatred and fervor that took hold in that conflict, only to see it resurface again with the ascension of the Third Reich. He managed to flee Germany after the Nazis took power in 1933, forced to abandon the psychoanalytic institute he had built, and immigrated to the United States.

He saw firsthand, and through a psychoanalyst’s lens, the seductive power of nationalistic appeals to the anxieties of ordinary people. When a person is deeply invested in his group’s dominance, he “has a euphoric ‘on-top-of-the-world’ feeling, while in reality he is in a state of self-inflation,” Fromm wrote. “This leads to a severe distortion of his capacity to think and to judge. … He and his are overevaluated. Everything outside is underevaluated.” And underneath may lie the fear that he cannot live up to the constructed ideal of his own perfection.

History has shown that nations and groups will conquer, colonize, enslave and kill to maintain the illusion of their primacy. Their investment in this illusion gives them as much of a stake in the inferiority of those deemed beneath them as in their own presumed superiority. “The survival of a group,” Fromm wrote, “depends to some extent on the fact that its members consider its importance as great as or greater than that of their own lives.”

Thus, when under threat, they are willing to sacrifice themselves and their ideals for the survival of the group from which they draw their self-esteem. The political theorist Takamichi Sakurai, in his 2018 examination of Western and Eastern perspectives on the topic, and channeling Fromm, wrote bluntly: “Group narcissism leads people to fascism.” He went on, “An extreme form of group narcissism means malignant narcissism, which gives to rise to a fanatical fascist politics, an extreme racialism and so on.”

Fromm identified this kind of group narcissism in two nations in particular: “the racial narcissism which existed in Hitler’s Germany, and which is found in the American South,” he wrote in 1964, at the height of the civil rights era. In both instances, Fromm found the working class to be among the most susceptible, harboring an “inflated image of itself as the most admirable group in the world, and of being superior to another racial group that is singled out as inferior,” he wrote. A person in this group “feels: ‘Even though I am poor and uncultured, I am somebody important because I belong to the most admirable group in the world — I am white’; or ‘I am an Aryan.’”

A group whipped into narcissistic fervor “is eager to have a leader with whom it can identify,” Fromm wrote. “The leader is then admired by the group which projects its narcissism onto him.” The right kind of leader can inspire a symbiotic connection that supplants logic. The susceptible group, Fromm teaches us, sees itself in the narcissistic leader, becomes one with the leader, sees his fortunes and his fate as their own.

 

As I said upthread, we've done this before, many times.

Not doing it again today. I don't have the time or the energy.

 

I didn’t include the reference to Nazi Germany. The (excellent) writer did.

 

That’s your #1 starter?

This is today.

Patriots rookie Justin Rohrwasser has 'Three Percenters' tattoo removed: report

New England Patriots draft pick Justin Rohrwasser reportedly had a tattoo associated with a so-called anti-government group removed.

Patriots' Justin Rohrwasser has Three Percenters tattoo removed - ProFootballTalk

Patriots kicker Justin Rohrwasser got some notoriety after the draft when it was revealed that he had a tattoo of the logo of the Three Percenters, a far-right militia group. Rohrwasser has had that tattoo removed.

 

The writer cites the work of Erich Fromm - a German psychoanalyst working in Germany between the wars.

Maybe you can articulate why you think that's out of bounds when talking about the dire consequences of 'caste.'

 

So the problem isn’t the reference - or that there were only 3 caste systems listed. The problem is the criticism of the reference.

 

what is the criticism of the reference?

you haven't specified one yet