Is Jason Kessler white supremacist or white national?
Is there anything preventing him from being both?
Sometimes the best choice when you come to a fork in the road is to retreat, or even merge the two forks by taking one then going off road to the other! And yet binary thinking will force us to choose between the right or left fork, even if both forks suck standing alone. Only by understanding the perils of binary thinking can you protect against its destabilizing bipolar effects in conflict resolution.
--
Ryan Long
Presenting the question binarily as you have, thus implying that he need be one or the other is as fallacious as depicting light as a particle or a wave. Binariness is the way of the fascist. Even Hitler understood that.
The people in their overwhelming majority are so feminine by nature and attitude that sober reasoning determines their thoughts and actions far less than emotion and feeling.And this sentiment is not complicated, but very simple and all of a piece. It does not have multiple shadings; it has a positive and a negative; love or hate, right or wrong, truth or lie, never half this way and half that way, never partially, or that kind of thing.
-- The Mass Psychology of Fascism
You of all people of this forum, with your "precision syntax" and nit picky use of the language -- YOU ought to know that the choices of a simple adjective changes meaning. So -- it's important that you don't EQUATE or conflate terms...
??? -- I didn't equate/conflate the two terms. Quite the opposite. I asked, "Is there anything preventing him from being both?" That question tacitly acknowledges that the two mentalities are not synonymous, not equivalent.
Insofar as they are not synonymous terms, the question is are they mutually exclusive, that is, whether the two frames of mind necessarily are in binary opposition to one another. To the extent that they are not mutually exclusive, one individual can be a white supremacist
and a white nationalist.
The OP-er's title question asks whether Kessler is one
or the other. My question in response to that question asserts, by way of my rhetorical inquiry, that the two mindsets are not mutually exclusive; thus Kessler can be both.
Note:
- Of course, one may answer the question I posed, thereby not construing it as rhetorical. If one answers it "no," my point is thereby tacitly accorded. If one answers it "yes," the responder's natural next step is to show that the two mindsets are necessarily equivalent.