I’m recovering from COVID-19 which I got from my wife which got it from somebody at a leadership seminar because people can’t think for themselves and want to believe that not only is COVID over – it’s been over for at least a year. Crowded restaurants, bad ventilation, coming to such events with a cough. People mean well but they have no clue. Eyes wide shut, into the abyss.
I think people are starting to realize that the situation in the US and elsewhere is going to get a lot worse before it’s going to get better.
The Russian troll army and the social rage media like Facebook and Twitter are just exacerbating the entire thing. They exploit every weakness, every fracture, every divide. It doesn’t actually matter what we’re divided over, as long as there is division to exploit, as long as there is rage to cultivate. Like a poisonous plant, it is encouraged to grow in every crack we leave.
The far right in Switzerland, in German, in Denmark, in Sweden, in Finland, in Poland, in Hungary, in Austria, in Italy, in Spain… they’re all following the same play-book: Ur-Fascism.
If we could fix our shit and close the crack, there’d be a way out. But there is not because so many of us are intended on profiting from the same cracks. Nobody is debating economics and taxes as long as they are distracted by trans-gender people and bathrooms. Instead of declaring all bathrooms unisex and moving on, it has developed into the crack that is being worked by one side and needs the other side must try and mend it. But even if mended, the other side would just move on to the next topic. Cops, guns, racism, whatever. Rational discourse doesn’t help because outrage is what counts.
On this front, the “Left” and the pro-democracy camp more generally can perhaps learn something from their opponents: The Right has no trouble keeping the big picture in mind and has long thought of the political conflict as an all-encompassing struggle against what they perceive as fundamentally “un-American” forces of radical “woke” progressivism and extreme leftism; as a result, they have developed a comprehensive strategy to counter the supposed “leftwing” domination of most major institutions – one that takes into account that they lack majority support in the population and that the battle will have to be waged over decades. – There Are No Decisive Victories for Democracy to Be Had Yet
There Are No Decisive Victories for Democracy to Be Had Yet
@tzimmer_history puts the finger where it hurts. If a side describes itself as the victim and manages to take over all the institutions, then it can’t ever stop. Like the Germans before World War Two: They were always the poor ones, the trampled ones, held back, exploited, delayed, to be squashed – and so, sadly, unfortunately, against all odds, they had to be the fastest to militarize, the first to attack, and the quickest to stomp out the opposition. You can be both a victim and a perpetrator. The play-book exists and is well-known.
It doesn’t end well for those who learn from history, but for a while, it works. You just make sure that your family fortunes don’t burn in the fire and the world after the conflagration will be all the sweeter. Where did all the Nazis go? A few got convicted in Nürnberg, a few lost their jobs, and the rest got to enjoy the postwar years, the economic miracle, they got to be the boomers.
That’s why it seems inevitable to me that things will get a lot worse before they’ll get better. The left hasn’t had a unifying ideology like Communism in a very long time. The right, on the other hand, has been at it for decades. If you follow the slow news on podcasts like What Roman Mars Can Learn About Con Law, you’ll see how they worked at it: The entire judicial system is infected with the Federalist Society brain worm.
What Roman Mars Can Learn About Con Law
Brynn Tannehill writes for The New Republic:
For those advocating gun control, you can be civil if it makes you feel morally superior. You can be uncivil if it makes you feel better. You’ll get the same results either way: namely, nothing. I admire those working to try to change these policies. But it is counterproductive to pretend that there is a “normal” political or legal solution: Things are only going to get worse for at least the next 20 to 30 years, if not more, based on the stacked political system and the courts. The system is broken, and it is not fixable in any meaningful sense. – The Grim Truth: The War on Guns Is Lost
The Grim Truth: The War on Guns Is Lost
No matter what they do, the US will remain a broken country for the next two or three decades at the very least. How to undo the gerrymandering? How to turn the Senate around? How to turn the Supreme Court around?
This battle is lost, and it’ll take some other intervention on an entirely different layer to change the minds and hearts of people and institutions.
I suspect the left finds itself in a similar situation elsewhere. Here in Switzerland, the right did the grass-roots organizing, the farmer’s breakfasts, it claimed national sports and pass-times for politics, from the ringing of cow bells to the local martial arts. And people like me grew up hating politics, “no -ism!” we’d say and feel like there was no future and we didn’t organize and now there is no future and other people organized. We have several decades of political struggle ahead of us – or some sort of violence.
With the climate breaking down, the economy breaking down, and civil discourse breaking down, well, it doesn’t look good.
Here’s what I want to emphasize, though: The struggle is real. For the longest time, I didn’t think it was. Then I thought it could be resolved by civil discourse. Then I thought it could be solved by mass protest. Then I thought it could be solved by science.
But I think not.
#USA #Culture War
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“People mean well but they have no clue. Eyes wide shut, into the abyss.”
Man that hits hard
– starmonkey 2023-05-07 01:16 UTC
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Thanks!
– Alex 2023-05-07 16:42 UTC