Against Bargaining (Laurie Penny). Long, but worthwhile!
[…] white men in the West have always been encouraged to believe that it is their feelings that matter more than anyone else’s, and a unilateral response to those feelings is justified. That’s what Trump voters, Brexiteers, and their ilk have done and continue to do as the everyday violence against women, queer people, black, brown, and Muslim citizens escalates across the Western world.
[…] the new right, the alt-right, all these new permutations of old bigotry consider every emotion weakness if it isn’t ballistic spite. They adhere to a cult of toxic masculinity that deems evidence of feeling a defeat. That is why they are so fixated on “triggering” their opponents, why they are obsessed with the notion of “safe spaces,” why the worst possible thing you can be is a “snowflake,” oversensitive, convinced of your worth as a human in a humane society. They believe that compassion is maladaptive, that liberalism is a disorder. They are wrong. Having feelings does not make a person weak. Allowing those feelings to control your behavior is what makes monsters.
Normalization is psychic armour. But so is resistance. In the coming weeks and months and years we must navigate a course between the exhaustion of perpetual outrage and the numbness of normalization. That means taking care of ourselves and of one another. It means practicing a sort of emotional intelligence that the new power order lacks the capacity to imagine, an emotional intelligence that is all that stands between us and fascism with a cartoon face.