Saturday, January 14, 2017

Oikophobia on the rise after Trump win

Oikophobia on the rise after Trump win: Glenn Reynolds:
"Irrational fear of fellow countrymen is spreading among America's ruling class.
(How crazy has the reaction to Trump’s impending presidency gotten?
So crazy that Democratic operatives are scared of plumbers, and I don’t mean the Watergate kind.
No, really. Ned Resnikoff, a “senior editor” at the liberal website ThinkProgress, wrote on Facebook that he’d called a plumber to fix a clogged drain.
The plumber showed up, did the job and left, but Resnikoff was left shaken, though with a functioning drain.
Wrote Resnikoff, “He was a perfectly nice guy and a consummate professional.
But he was also a middle-aged white man with a Southern accent who seemed unperturbed by this week’s news.”
This created fear: “While I had him in the apartment, I couldn’t stop thinking about whether he had voted for Trump, whether he knew my last name is Jewish, and how that knowledge might change the interaction we were having inside my own home.”
When it was all over, Resnikoff reported that he was “rattled” at the thought that a Trump supporter might have been in his home. “I couldn’t shake the sense of potential danger.”
Well.
When people have irrational, exaggerated fears we call them phobias. 
We heard a lot during this year’s immigration debate about “xenophobia,” an exaggerated or irrational fear of foreigners.
But this plumber wasn’t a foreigner.
He was an American with an American regional accent who thought the American election had turned out okay.
What do you call the irrational fear of an American, by an American?
Roger Scruton coined the term oikophobia” (from the Greed oikos for “home”) to describe the fear of one’s fellow countrymen. 
And there seems to be rather a lot of it among the gentry liberals who make up America’s ruling class.
In fact, another piece on reacting to the election, by Tim Kreider in The Week, is titled "I love America. It's Americans I hate." Writes Kreider,
“The public is a swarm of hostile morons, I told her. You don't need to make them understand you; you just need to defeat them, or wait for them die. . . . A few of us are talking, after a couple drinks, about buying guns; if it comes to a fascist state or civil war, we figure, we don't want the red states to be the only ones armed.”
“A vote for Trump,” Kreider continues, “is kind of like a murder...”

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