#it goes into detail about how disability discourse is linked with neoliberalism which I didn’t get into here

[communistkenobi]

There’s a popular sentiment in political discourse that right wing extremist beliefs - shit like Qanon, but also often just like, antisemitism in general - are indicative of mental illness, or that these beliefs are pathological in origin. There are a lot of arguments against this, but a common one I see in progressive spaces is that this is an ableist argument to make (which is a reasonable response!). However, I don’t think this is persuasive enough on its own to convince people to stop framing it as a mental illness thing (or even why it’s ableist to begin with). I also don’t think people fully understand why it’s a factually incorrect claim, even if they know it’s a problematic framing of the issue. And so I want to attempt to give an explanation for why that framework is wrong, and why believing it will lead you to poor conclusions about political beliefs generally.

This is going to be a long post, so it’ll be going under a cut. If anything doesn’t make sense or people want shit clarified feel free to send me an ask/reply etc. This is primarily aimed at people who might know that it’s wrong to call Nazis or Qanon people mentally ill (even jokingly) but don’t understand why. This is not meant to be an exhaustive explanation, but I want to make a strong case for why it’s shitty to talk about ring wing views in this way.

I’m gonna first talk about disability and mental illness, and then talk a little bit about right wing beliefs - the goal here is to fully explain why it’s ableist, and then move into why it’s an incorrect argument more broadly. The primary sources for this discussion will be two books: one called Absent Citizens, which is a book about disability politics in Canada, and a book called The Authoritarian Personality, which is about a massive research project conducted in America after WWII with the aim of understanding the content and origin of fascistic beliefs. This isn’t going to be an academic essay or whatever, but I do want to draw on academic sources to frame this discussion. I think this is a complex topic that involves a lot of complicated shit and I want to hopefully clarify some of the dimensions of this issue.

why this argument sucks

To begin, I want to break down the argument that people who believe absurd things - like bleach as a cure for covid, for example - are mentally ill. There are a lot of hidden assumptions built into that claim that I don’t think people realize are there. I also think people react to and argue against those hidden assumptions, but they still often go unstated in discourse about the topic.

You often see this claim made against celebrities - Kanye is the most recent example, but Trump is a really common one too. And whatever actual diagnosed mental health issues they have, I’m going to set those aside for the moment, because I don’t think that popular discourse about them being mentally ill is actually about their specific, diagnosed mental illnesses. Kanye would still be antisemitic even if he did not have BPD, but the fact that he does have BPD provides people with a very handy rationalization to explain his horrific views. And if he didn’t have any diagnosed mental illnesses, I doubt that would stop people from claiming he’s mentally ill anyway (which I’ll talk about later).

So, this argument has a couple different assumptions built into it. First, it takes for granted the idea that there is a social and political orthodoxy which is normal, and to fall outside of that orthodoxy means your beliefs are pathological. Views deemed sensible and reasonable (generally centre right to centre left) are equated with mental well-being, and views that are deemed unreasonable are equated with mental illness. What this does is medicalize all political beliefs. Sufficient deviance from the societal norm is therefore a sign of mental instability.

What this also does is medicalize mental illness, which is to say it individualizes it. To make the claim that absurd or dangerous political views are a sign of mental illness is to make the argument that the origins of these views come from an individual, medical deficiency within a person. It ignores the social, economic, cultural, and historical circumstances for why someone may come to believe right wing conspiracy theories (I will explain this in more detail a bit later, so just bracket this for now).

And if you frame the problem of right wing conspiracy in this way, it informs political solutions for how to get rid of these conspiratorial views in society - if antisemitism is a mental illness, then mandated mental health tests that measure political deviancy, or the invention of new mental health diagnoses for right wing extremism, would be a viable solution, right? To take this claim seriously, it would mean inventing a new class of disability, a new type of pathologized person. And once you’ve created this category and placed people into it, what do you do with them? If their beliefs are a matter of neurological deficiency, does that mean they are incapable of being de-radicalized? Should they be put on special medication? Are they even responsible for their own beliefs if there is something wrong with their brain?

And like, this line of argumentation is bad! It’s a defeatist attitude (some people are just bad and there is nothing to be done about it), it makes political beliefs biological (some people are inherently good and others inherently bad), it ignores broader forces that may lead to someone believing these things, and it prescribes policy solutions that are eugenic in nature. If we just get rid of all the bad mentally ill people, society will be fixed. Which means we are now in a very similar political position to right wing beliefs about trans people, jewish people, people of colour, and, of course, disabled people.

The second issue is that it equates “normal” political views with mental fitness, which is often a (hidden) shorthand for moral fitness. This creates a view of society as something that is naturally good, a moral yardstick to measure everyone else by. People with absurd beliefs that shock the public are just not following the rules that will make them a good person. It leaves no room for a critique of those societal norms. Is the current political orthodoxy good? Is it a good yardstick to measure other people by? Is the current state of the world a morally and socially healthy society? What if you think it isn’t? Does that make you mentally ill too?

disability & mental health

I remember right after the 2016 American election there was a very intense focus in the media on Trump being mentally ill. He was charged with infecting the body politic with his mental instability. What this did was place him outside of history, positioning him as an alien invader on an otherwise healthy society. It did not account for the social and economic forces that led to him becoming a key political figure in American politics. It was an abdication of responsibility from mostly liberal people who did not want to confront the problems in society that existed far before Trump got into power, and indeed, allowed him to get there. If you could prove Trump was mentally ill, then that would mean the problem was just that - illness. So, to go back to an earlier point, when people point to Kanye’s bipolar disorder as a reason for his antisemitism, they are not making a medical diagnosis; they are removing his political beliefs from public discourse and placing them in the realm of mental pathology. It is a refusal to meet his beliefs as they exist, and instead insist that they exist outside of society. It also robs him of agency. Something outside of his control is making him do this; you can’t really blame him. It frames bigotry as something a person does without their knowledge or even consent. This external problem is to blame.

And finally, to synthesize these points, the idea that right wing bigotry is a symptom of of mental illness is making the argument that mental illness, and disability more broadly, are medical in nature. This is also a problem! Disability has for decades been seen by activists and academics alike as something that is not biological, or at least not completely. Since around the 70s or 80s, disability activism began pushing the social model of disability, which was in direct opposition to the biological (or medical) model of disability. The social model argues that disability is the product of an unfair and discriminatory society. Disabled people are not biologically broken; society purposefully excludes them.

I think a really instructive example to use to illustrate this is the built environment. Staircases are not naturally occurring phenomena; human societies build them, and there are certain assumptions that go into building stairs as opposed to ramps, or tiered walkways, or other configurations. The inability to climb a set of stairs does not indicate a biological deficit in a human being, the social model argues; it indicates that society is building a world that excludes disabled people from fully participating in it. Framing it this way, the solution to the problem isn’t to force everyone to use the stairs, it is to alter the environment so that it is accessible to everyone. Disability can either be exacerbated or minimized through social change. In the same way, there are a lot of social norms that exclude certain groups of people. Autistic people for example can find a lot of social norms to be confusing and difficult to navigate. It’s worth considering whether these social norms are useful to everyone, and whether it would be better to alter them the same way we might want to alter a staircase to include more people in public life. It’s not that these people are broken or incorrect, it’s that historical institutions, from social values to urban architecture, prescribe certain modes of travel, certain social relationships, that can be more or less harmful to certain groups of people. The same critiques can be made through a feminist lens, or an anti-racist one. What the social model of disability does is introduce the idea of disability as a social category, one that is not a biological destiny but a historically contingent position in society that can be improved through social change.

And more broadly, mental illness has a similar disadvantage. It’s framed as a medical issue, a problem that arises within individual people. Society isn’t the cause of social dysfunction, or depression, or personality disorders; your brain is just broken, and you need to learn how to fit into society better.

And so going back to the original claim, what you’re doing when you make that argument is A) medicalizing political beliefs, and B) accepting that an individualized medical view of mental illness is inherently correct and useful for understanding political conflict.

So that’s one reason why this framework is harmful. It also leads into the other major reason why this view is harmful - it prevents a structural analysis of right wing beliefs. If Kanye West’s antisemitism is a manifestation of his mental illness, this means that antisemitism is itself a medical condition. It comes from nowhere, or to be more charitable, it’s someone pathologically indulging in bigotry. In this framework, the source of the bigotry isn’t the problem; the person being too extreme about it is.

fascism

I’m going to talk about fascism now in a more theoretical way. I think even if you’re on board with everything I’ve said up to this point, it’s still hard to watch someone say something completely absurd and not think there is something mentally wrong with them. Like, who the fuck actually believes that giving your kids bleach or horse heart de-wormer will cure covid? How can bigots keep making claims about jewish people or trans people that are easily proven false every single time? You have to be mentally ill in some way to ignore reality that hard, right? But I want to caution people against framing this as mental illness, even if it’s difficult to find another explanation.

Fascism is a product of history. What I mean by this is that fascism is a response to large social forces, and when fascist movements are successful, they reinforce a lot of those existing social forces. Fascism often takes the form of political ambitions, such as the desire to take over a democratic government, but it goes deeper than that. In The Authoritarian Personality, Adorno (one of the authors) makes the argument that fascism is a particular response people have to the contradictions of capitalism - those contradictions being that you are supposedly this free agent able to make your own choices, yet are constantly crushed under the weight of the ruling class. Human beings are told they are free and yet are constantly alienated from other people as a result of class conflict. The book explores this claim at multiple scales, down to the level of individual families all the way up to society as a whole. We know, for example, that children in abusive households sometimes become abusive people themselves. Not always, or even often, but they sometimes do. Abuse also causes a lot of other, non-abusive social and emotional problems for children who grow up in these environments, often following them into adulthood. This is a particularly horrific environment that people respond in different ways to, and it produces a wide range of issues that people have to grapple with for the rest of their lives. In the same way, harmful societal forces illicit different responses in people, and sometimes, that response is a turn towards fascism.

Adorno describes fascism as an ideology of irrationality. A fascist is someone who embraces the contradictions of capitalism and makes contradiction a core component of their belief system. Or rather, fascism is a belief system that fully accommodates contradiction because of its irrational character. Fascism is often difficult to describe precisely because of this irrationality - in order to make sense of it you need to place it in a rational context, which runs the risk of over-intellectualizing or rationalizing it. This even came up in the methodology section of the book. The researchers couldn’t go around asking people if they were racist or antisemitic, for example, because a bunch of people would say no, even if they were explicitly racist and antisemitic people. In several of the interviews the researchers did, fascistic people would assert that they were not racist and then, in the literal next sentence, would say something horribly racist. And they found that fascistic people would repeat this pattern for many areas of their lives - deny a behaviour, even a trivial one, and then do that exact behaviour a few minutes later. This contradiction is so deeply embedded that it makes investigating what fascists actually believe difficult.

However, to try to give a broad overview, fascism is a singular fixation with power. The way power is distributed in society is along in-group/out-group lines. If you are part of the in-group (white, Christian, able-bodied, cishet, etc) you are deserving of power; if you’re not, then you must be dominated or destroyed. In order to realize this goal of white supremacist power, any belief or behaviour that will further this goal is advantageous, regardless of how truthful it is. This is part of the reason why a lot of right wing conspiracies sound so ridiculous - truth is not a quality that is valuable to them because it could interfere with the pursuit of power. In this framework, Qanon people asserting that ivermectin will cure covid are not making a factual medical claim; what they are doing is saying that the medical establishment cannot be trusted, that a deadly disease killing millions of people can be stopped with an over the counter remedy. Because if covid isn’t real, or is as mild as a seasonal flu, then the current government in power is making illegitimate demands on people to socially distance and wear masks, and therefore the only moral response is to overthrow them and install someone who will stop making those demands. You have to view all right wing conspiratorial claims not as factual but as strategic; you need to evaluate their claims based on what the proposed solution to the problem they’re presenting you with will be. If they’re claiming trans people are grooming children or assaulting people in bathrooms, then the obvious policy response is to bar trans people from any space that contains children or public bathrooms (ie, all public spaces). If Jewish people have undue influence in government, the obvious response is to remove all Jewish people from positions of power. And these are short term solutions - if these minorities are so disgusting that you need to shut them out of public life, the only real solution is to get rid of them entirely. It doesn’t matter that these accusations are demonstrably false; they are “true” to a fascist because they further their political and ideological goals. They have to be true for their power to be realized, and so by virtue of that they are effectively true to a fascist. (This is also why disproving their claims with facts don’t work; they aren’t interested in the truth of any of their claims, because truth is not something they value in their vision of society).

And they don’t even need to be dyed in the wool explicit fascists to be saying this shit! A good portion of this discussion has been about hidden assumptions in discourse. I do things without realizing the full consequences of my behaviour sometimes. Sometimes I don’t even know I’m “doing” something at all because it’s so embedded and normalized in society that it feels natural. I try to catch myself as much as I can to make sure I’m not doing something harmful, but everyone does it. Fascists are just as capable of this. And like, racism and bigotry are part of normal everyday society. The dedicated well-read fascists who know what they’re doing and the shallow incurious racists who just want to be assholes both peddle the same shit and it does the same harm; doing it unintentionally doesn’t make you mentally ill, and being mentally ill doesn’t mean you’re being racist through some kind of medical accident. These people are enacting their political beliefs through their words and behaviour, whether they know the full scope of those beliefs or not, and you should not diminish that agency by arguing that they’re misguided mentally ill people.

It’s also part of the reason why they will deny charges of bigotry. They aren’t necessarily lying to themselves, but they are attempting to exclude types of discourse that would harm their political goals. I’m not racist because racism is bad and what I want isn’t bad. I’m not racist because racism is undue bigotry against racial minorities and mine is fully justified. You can’t trust what they say, but you can trust their intentions, and their intentions are bad.

This post is extremely long already so I’ll wrap it up here. When you see people making outlandish, false, ridiculous claims about a minority group, remember that these people are not expressing mental illness. They are expressing dangerous political views and need to be shut down for political reasons. The status of their mental health is not relevant to solving the problem of bigotry. Laying the blame at the feet of mental illness is an error of both scope and origin; bigotry does not come from illness, it comes from a desire for power, and that is the thing that needs to be stopped.