Well, I think that church pastors replacing the Press as authoritative sources is not at all unexpected, though I don’t think that’s part of the cause of loss of trust in the Press, I think it’s in part a consequence and in part something that already happenned.
My home country - Portugal - was Fascist until 1974 and the Fascist Regime used the Church (which around here was 100% Catholic) through the perceive authority of priests, to tell people what to believe in matters that were social, economic and even political rather than religious, especially in the northern part of the country. This was especially easy because most people were either illiterate or close to it.
It’s funny that you mention the Tea Party: For some years now I’ve been convinced that we live in the time of the fall of Ideologies, in that the fully defined Ideologies from the early XX century that included visions for how the country should be, keen awareness of how Power works, their own specific folklore of visual elements and even specific language (say: the overuse of “proletariat”), and other such things, such as Fascism and Communist, were pretty much dead and buried in the West by the mid/late XX century and were replaced by the “laisser faire” of neoliberalism which doesn’t really has a vision for the future, is all about The Economy never about Power or People (even though it’s definitelly about Money being the one and only Power, though that’s not how it sells itself) and is sold to us very much as a hands off “que será, será” way of managing a nation.
What we’ve seen in the late XX century and onwards was the rise of Politics being done using Marketing - saying what people want to hear, moment by moment, using techniques from Marketing to determine what to say and measure impact (such as focus groups), changing what’s said if people change in what they want to hear (hence said politicians often being accused of flip-flopping), all of which to obtain powder and use it I ways that have nothing to do with what voters wanted. This is still how to this day the Democrat Party works and ditto the modern Labour Party in the UK (aka New Labour).
I think the Tea Party was a reboot of traditional ideology in the US and I actually think the Republicans are at the moment the only party with an actual ideology (not a good one, but one none the less).
Mind you this doesn’t mean it’s not still theatre for the politicians involved (maybe circus would be a better word), it’s just that their beast is as much theirs as it is the crowd’s and they’re forced to give the crowd what it wants, which started as something they’ve convinced the crowd they wanted but then the crowd took it, made it its own and changed it (look at the whole anti-vax movement for COVID which is pretty senseless and how things like anti-mask which is even more senseless came out of it).
I think Republican politicians are just as fake as Democrats, but they’re ridding a bull, not controlling a donkey with the promise of carrot and at times the use of a stick like the Democrats, so you get a lot more loud circus from the former and at times they are dragged into things far beyond what they wanted.
Last but not least there is a true market of ideas within the present day Republican party and the politicians competing for attention in that market are each doing it by trying to be more loud and outrageous that the rest. Meanwhile the Democrat party has used procedural tricks internally to make sure a handful of people control who gets the top positions, so there is no markt of ideas in there hence the party keeps being led by bland politcians who use techniques from Marketimg to control public oerception and voters.
And yeah, I think that, like in Britain, things will go too far and the US will end up doing something it cannot undo. Then again I think the US has been in a post-imperial decay path since the 80s, same as inevitably happenned to all nations that were once great powers.
I very much love your whole message there of “those who are not aware of their history are doomed to repeat it”. 100% that is true, and as I now believe, it is not ignorance that is being fought against, but obstinacy - e.g. those January 6th rioters who stormed the White House, they were not merely ignorant when they showed up ready to “defend the Constitution”, since they had made the full-on actual choice to not read that document first-hand, nor bother to discern what it meant.
In case you haven’t watched yet, John Oliver has a fascinating Last Week Tonight special on “Authoritarianism” that has been steadily rising all across the globe. You already know that, but it is an interesting watch nonetheless:-).
What worries me about these movements having an “identity” is that one, the identity seems to be defined almost solely in opposition to “the other side”, as in so long as the other side loses, then “we win”… except that is not true, b/c the reality is that we all lose, when America grinds to an absolute halt. A perfect example of that is the “anti-abortion” movement, ironically called “pro-life”, except it is killing and endangering women in many states. Even if we took for granted that abortion straight up equals murder, with no room for wiggle room in that discussion, that still does not explain things like why doctors are not allowed to remove already-necrotic tissue from a miscarriage, or those weird events like a fetus in Texas that had a giant fluid-filled sack where a brain would normally appear, or even just run-of-the-mill cancer, if it happens to be in the uterus. Not all actions of “removing tissue from a uterus” are equivalent to “abortions” - and does not explain how failing to provide medical care to a woman is not also a form of “murder”? i.e., having a stance against something is not the same thing as “having a stance”… not really, not “fully” - I mean, yes, you’ve prevented one form of “murder”, but at the expense of introducing another form of it, WTF!? The sheer incompetence of someone who flunked out of school as a child thinking that they know more than literal medical doctors that spent decades of their life learning that profession!?!
But as you say, that grew out of the earlier events where people had already stopped listening to the “authoritative” sources. At which point they became vulnerable to listening to… “alternative” sources of authoritarian-sounding sources. I LOVE your analogy of controlling the donkey with a carrot and Repubs a bull - I’ve used that myself so I wholeheartedly agree (the caveat being that often the carrot never actually arrives - just like the analogy seems to suggest too!).
What worries me most is that this is not something “new”, since the 80s, but rather something very, VERY old, as in somewhat mathematical, predating humanity itself, and even Earth itself in the sense of representing a fundamental law of how the universe works. And if that is true, then I think this nation might be well & truly fucked? B/c if the most powerful people within it are no longer invested in its success, then they will take what they can get from it ofc, but they will no longer give back, seeing no reason to - and the loss of that incentivization seems to me to spell out a doom spiral to the ending? I am talking about e.g. Rules for Rulers by CGP Grey, where “corruption” isn’t a flaw in a system, but instead a feature, and we ignore that at our peril.
You see Neoliberalism is also a form of Authoritarianism, or more precisely it’s a way of transforming Democracy into Oligarchy.
And it’s actually quite simple if subtle:
In Capitalist Democractic countries there are two main forms of power: the State, whose leaders are elected by a vote were all citizens are the same and count the same (ideally, in practice not really) and Money which buys all kinds of things, including better treatment by the Justice System and which is an incredibly uneven power.
Neoliberalism is all about the State removing itself from the Markets, i.e. the place were Money operates and which impacts even the basic needs of people. This goes as far as the State removing itself from the provision or even regulation of the provision of life essentials: water, food, housing. Neoliberalism sells itself as Meritocratic yet strongly defends anti-meritocratic mechanisms such as private elite schools (were it’s money that buys entry, not merit) and which you can see from the experience in the UK (which has been doing it thus for almost a century) just serve to entrench power in the same segments of society across generations and collapse Social Mobility to pretty much zero.
In other words, Neoliberalism wants to reduce to meaniglessness the Power within Democracy which is controlled by people elected via a system were all citizens have roughly the same power, leaving only a single Power in action, that of Money whose control is so uneven that some people have billions of times more power than others, an inballance only beaten by that of Kings vs Peasants in the deepest darkest of Middle Age’s Feudalism.
The effect is achieved via the capture, subversion and/or nullification of the mechanisms of the State within Democracy rather bloody revolution, and people are kept in their place using techniques from Modern Psychology and Marketing to prey on human cognitive weaknesses (tribalism, information overload, emotion-driven action, familiarity, halo effect and so many others) rather than force (though at times, that too: look at how Obama suppressed Occupy Wall Street) but ultimatelly it anchores itself on the same principles.
And if you look around with a different perspective you see a lot of the things from John Oliver’s segment:
The institution which is the Press was not taken over by the State using force, it was simply bought with money.
The Judiciary in the US has long been subverted by the Political power nominating the Supreme Court Judges, breaking the independence between these supposedly independent pillars of Democracy
The demonised enemy has changed over time, in order: communists, middle easterns, terrorists, the other half of the US (yeah, the Identity Wars really perfectly allow both “sides” to give their bases a perfect enemy on the bases of the other side).
The Projection of Strength is the US’ hyper-nationalism and militarism (cultivated by both “sides”), with near constant military interventions abroad, both under Republican and Democrat presidents.
From this pespective the fight in the US is not between leftwing and rightwing, not even close, it’s between Oligarchy and Fascism. It is thus unsurprising how so many Americans feel powerless: they are powerless as the fight is really between two different models of Power were wealthy elites control everything and hence it’s mainly a fight between two side of the elites were the rest are but pawns.
You see Neoliberalism is also a form of Authoritarianism, or more precisely it’s a way of transforming Democracy into Oligarchy.
Which is why people rolled the dice on Trump - b/c the only other alternative was Hillary Clinton, so people chose to play Russian Roulette rather than that known quantity.
I need to update the words I use - e.g. I have been calling that “plutocracy”, but yeah neoliberalism seems to mean essentially the same thing? In the end at least. I really don’t like that word though, b/c it is basically the polar opposite of “liberal” - which I think is perhaps by design, as in describing people who present themselves as “liberal” but by virtue of being “neoliberal” they are the opposite.
That aside though, I also do not like it b/c that leads to a word creep, b/c what will come after that - post-neoliberalism? Nouveau-neoliberalism? :-) We are seeing the same effect with neoconservatism as well - as in, what the hell does it even mean!? And especially, how is neoconservatism any different from neoliberalism, especially when both devolve to mean the same thing as plutocracy!?
Wording aside though, absolutely yes: press bought with money, check, judiciary too, check (though it arguably took longer, and I think not strictly speaking in the precise manner in which you said but… yes, there’s no use quibbling intricacies when it amounts to the same end of agreement).
What did you think of the CGP Grey’s Rules for Rulers video? If you have any suggestions for a video to watch after that one, I am interested. That one messed me up, emotionally, and I still am not past it, b/c it highlights, as you said, that there IS no fixing this - this is simply how it is going to be, from now on. The Golden Era in the USA that, regardless of whether it truly even existed (expecially for e.g. black people), is definitely over. As soon as corporations started to amass more power than people could ever hope to - e.g. people die, and have to breathe, eat, sleep, etc., but corporations have special exemptions that give them super-human status, essentially making them Giants in the land of us mere pawn-style Humans. Even the CEOs of those institutions are helpless before their might, if the Board of Directors were to want to get rid of them.
We are fast becoming slaves to corporations, and while government was the only thing rivaling their strength, the power of misinformation seems to be reducing those hallowed institutions to weak ghosts of their former selves, or rather more like a cancer patient, barely able to move their arms a bit and even that ability fast waning until there will soon be nothing left. The wasps have laid eggs in the brain of this caterpillar, and when they finish hatching and eating us from the inside there will be nothing left. Nor will revolution likely work, when they have all of nukes and drones on their side and the rest of the people have… what, possibly slightly better AI? Even which weapons will end up being used in that fight seem to have not yet been defined.
At this point, maybe we should put all our hope into the EU to save democracy? :-P But if so, it won’t be for everyone, and I think the USA is probably too far gone… :-(
Yeah, that’s exactly what I think happenned in the US to elect Trump.
Agree that the words do not mean what they seem, but then again what else is new: NAZI stands for National Socialist German Workers’ Party and at least 2 of those things are the opposite of what they really stood for. The misnaming of political parties and ideologies is probably a hill not worth dying on, IMHO.
I like and agree with the Rules for Rulers video, though I think it oversimplifies things, especially in Democracies: if it was that simple, why is there such a massive difference in median quality of life and wealth between the US and, say, Sweden or why has oil-rich Norway not turned in to a Dictatorship, or why the difference between present day US and 1960s US - same country, same rules, yet hugelly different wealth distribution, quality of life and social mobility levels.
Clearly there are a lot more factors at least in Democracy.
Not that I think that video is wrong - I can actually see a lot of that in my own country both before and after Fascism was overthrown - I just think it’s not enough to explain everything.
Can’t really recomend any other videos: I’ve built my views on politics from reading a lot in quite a number of subjects (Finance, Behavioural Economics, Psychology, Mathematics and so on) as well as crossed with my life experience including membership in political parties. I don’t think this is easilly replicable and it would most definitelly not fit a couple of videos, which given the very pressures of seeking Youtube views and aimed for audience means the videos by need be very simplified views of reality.
As for Corporations, never forget that they do not have a will of their own - it’s all people doing the choices behind the veil of the corporation and those choices are made for the personal upside maximization of those people, even if only indirectly (which is why you see massive CEO payouts when it’s seldom in the best interest of the corporation). IMHO, the personification of corporation is a trick in Modern Capitalism meant to help deflect the blame away from the decision-makers within the corporation to the corporate entity itself, which is how for example a CEO of an airplane maker can decide to cut corners in the building of their planes, leading to hundreds of avoidable deaths, and yet instead of the CEO ending up in jail for Manslaughter it’s the company that ends up paying a fine - the system all the way through levels of the State such as the Legislative and Judiciary are set-up to stop certain elite from getting punished in the same way as non-elites would and the Press often cooperates by going on and on about the Corporation itself and never mention the CEO(s) who made the decision.
(I suspect that the solution for the current problems with corporations is simply going after the individuals themselves making the decisions in the name of the corporations. I’m probably not the only one who thinks so, which is why you often see people on the Internet advocating for prision sentences for CEOs of corporations for the crimes who for public consumption are attributed to the corporations)
I would be more worried about dynastic hold on Power and Money than explicitly about corporation, as corporations are simply agents and façades for those holding power.
Well, I think that church pastors replacing the Press as authoritative sources is not at all unexpected, though I don’t think that’s part of the cause of loss of trust in the Press, I think it’s in part a consequence and in part something that already happenned.
My home country - Portugal - was Fascist until 1974 and the Fascist Regime used the Church (which around here was 100% Catholic) through the perceive authority of priests, to tell people what to believe in matters that were social, economic and even political rather than religious, especially in the northern part of the country. This was especially easy because most people were either illiterate or close to it.
It’s funny that you mention the Tea Party: For some years now I’ve been convinced that we live in the time of the fall of Ideologies, in that the fully defined Ideologies from the early XX century that included visions for how the country should be, keen awareness of how Power works, their own specific folklore of visual elements and even specific language (say: the overuse of “proletariat”), and other such things, such as Fascism and Communist, were pretty much dead and buried in the West by the mid/late XX century and were replaced by the “laisser faire” of neoliberalism which doesn’t really has a vision for the future, is all about The Economy never about Power or People (even though it’s definitelly about Money being the one and only Power, though that’s not how it sells itself) and is sold to us very much as a hands off “que será, será” way of managing a nation.
What we’ve seen in the late XX century and onwards was the rise of Politics being done using Marketing - saying what people want to hear, moment by moment, using techniques from Marketing to determine what to say and measure impact (such as focus groups), changing what’s said if people change in what they want to hear (hence said politicians often being accused of flip-flopping), all of which to obtain powder and use it I ways that have nothing to do with what voters wanted. This is still how to this day the Democrat Party works and ditto the modern Labour Party in the UK (aka New Labour).
I think the Tea Party was a reboot of traditional ideology in the US and I actually think the Republicans are at the moment the only party with an actual ideology (not a good one, but one none the less).
Mind you this doesn’t mean it’s not still theatre for the politicians involved (maybe circus would be a better word), it’s just that their beast is as much theirs as it is the crowd’s and they’re forced to give the crowd what it wants, which started as something they’ve convinced the crowd they wanted but then the crowd took it, made it its own and changed it (look at the whole anti-vax movement for COVID which is pretty senseless and how things like anti-mask which is even more senseless came out of it).
I think Republican politicians are just as fake as Democrats, but they’re ridding a bull, not controlling a donkey with the promise of carrot and at times the use of a stick like the Democrats, so you get a lot more loud circus from the former and at times they are dragged into things far beyond what they wanted.
Last but not least there is a true market of ideas within the present day Republican party and the politicians competing for attention in that market are each doing it by trying to be more loud and outrageous that the rest. Meanwhile the Democrat party has used procedural tricks internally to make sure a handful of people control who gets the top positions, so there is no markt of ideas in there hence the party keeps being led by bland politcians who use techniques from Marketimg to control public oerception and voters.
And yeah, I think that, like in Britain, things will go too far and the US will end up doing something it cannot undo. Then again I think the US has been in a post-imperial decay path since the 80s, same as inevitably happenned to all nations that were once great powers.
I very much love your whole message there of “those who are not aware of their history are doomed to repeat it”. 100% that is true, and as I now believe, it is not ignorance that is being fought against, but obstinacy - e.g. those January 6th rioters who stormed the White House, they were not merely ignorant when they showed up ready to “defend the Constitution”, since they had made the full-on actual choice to not read that document first-hand, nor bother to discern what it meant.
In case you haven’t watched yet, John Oliver has a fascinating Last Week Tonight special on “Authoritarianism” that has been steadily rising all across the globe. You already know that, but it is an interesting watch nonetheless:-).
What worries me about these movements having an “identity” is that one, the identity seems to be defined almost solely in opposition to “the other side”, as in so long as the other side loses, then “we win”… except that is not true, b/c the reality is that we all lose, when America grinds to an absolute halt. A perfect example of that is the “anti-abortion” movement, ironically called “pro-life”, except it is killing and endangering women in many states. Even if we took for granted that abortion straight up equals murder, with no room for wiggle room in that discussion, that still does not explain things like why doctors are not allowed to remove already-necrotic tissue from a miscarriage, or those weird events like a fetus in Texas that had a giant fluid-filled sack where a brain would normally appear, or even just run-of-the-mill cancer, if it happens to be in the uterus. Not all actions of “removing tissue from a uterus” are equivalent to “abortions” - and does not explain how failing to provide medical care to a woman is not also a form of “murder”? i.e., having a stance against something is not the same thing as “having a stance”… not really, not “fully” - I mean, yes, you’ve prevented one form of “murder”, but at the expense of introducing another form of it, WTF!? The sheer incompetence of someone who flunked out of school as a child thinking that they know more than literal medical doctors that spent decades of their life learning that profession!?!
But as you say, that grew out of the earlier events where people had already stopped listening to the “authoritative” sources. At which point they became vulnerable to listening to… “alternative” sources of authoritarian-sounding sources. I LOVE your analogy of controlling the donkey with a carrot and Repubs a bull - I’ve used that myself so I wholeheartedly agree (the caveat being that often the carrot never actually arrives - just like the analogy seems to suggest too!).
What worries me most is that this is not something “new”, since the 80s, but rather something very, VERY old, as in somewhat mathematical, predating humanity itself, and even Earth itself in the sense of representing a fundamental law of how the universe works. And if that is true, then I think this nation might be well & truly fucked? B/c if the most powerful people within it are no longer invested in its success, then they will take what they can get from it ofc, but they will no longer give back, seeing no reason to - and the loss of that incentivization seems to me to spell out a doom spiral to the ending? I am talking about e.g. Rules for Rulers by CGP Grey, where “corruption” isn’t a flaw in a system, but instead a feature, and we ignore that at our peril.
You see Neoliberalism is also a form of Authoritarianism, or more precisely it’s a way of transforming Democracy into Oligarchy.
And it’s actually quite simple if subtle:
The effect is achieved via the capture, subversion and/or nullification of the mechanisms of the State within Democracy rather bloody revolution, and people are kept in their place using techniques from Modern Psychology and Marketing to prey on human cognitive weaknesses (tribalism, information overload, emotion-driven action, familiarity, halo effect and so many others) rather than force (though at times, that too: look at how Obama suppressed Occupy Wall Street) but ultimatelly it anchores itself on the same principles.
And if you look around with a different perspective you see a lot of the things from John Oliver’s segment:
From this pespective the fight in the US is not between leftwing and rightwing, not even close, it’s between Oligarchy and Fascism. It is thus unsurprising how so many Americans feel powerless: they are powerless as the fight is really between two different models of Power were wealthy elites control everything and hence it’s mainly a fight between two side of the elites were the rest are but pawns.
Which is why people rolled the dice on Trump - b/c the only other alternative was Hillary Clinton, so people chose to play Russian Roulette rather than that known quantity.
I need to update the words I use - e.g. I have been calling that “plutocracy”, but yeah neoliberalism seems to mean essentially the same thing? In the end at least. I really don’t like that word though, b/c it is basically the polar opposite of “liberal” - which I think is perhaps by design, as in describing people who present themselves as “liberal” but by virtue of being “neoliberal” they are the opposite.
That aside though, I also do not like it b/c that leads to a word creep, b/c what will come after that - post-neoliberalism? Nouveau-neoliberalism? :-) We are seeing the same effect with neoconservatism as well - as in, what the hell does it even mean!? And especially, how is neoconservatism any different from neoliberalism, especially when both devolve to mean the same thing as plutocracy!?
Wording aside though, absolutely yes: press bought with money, check, judiciary too, check (though it arguably took longer, and I think not strictly speaking in the precise manner in which you said but… yes, there’s no use quibbling intricacies when it amounts to the same end of agreement).
What did you think of the CGP Grey’s Rules for Rulers video? If you have any suggestions for a video to watch after that one, I am interested. That one messed me up, emotionally, and I still am not past it, b/c it highlights, as you said, that there IS no fixing this - this is simply how it is going to be, from now on. The Golden Era in the USA that, regardless of whether it truly even existed (expecially for e.g. black people), is definitely over. As soon as corporations started to amass more power than people could ever hope to - e.g. people die, and have to breathe, eat, sleep, etc., but corporations have special exemptions that give them super-human status, essentially making them Giants in the land of us mere pawn-style Humans. Even the CEOs of those institutions are helpless before their might, if the Board of Directors were to want to get rid of them.
We are fast becoming slaves to corporations, and while government was the only thing rivaling their strength, the power of misinformation seems to be reducing those hallowed institutions to weak ghosts of their former selves, or rather more like a cancer patient, barely able to move their arms a bit and even that ability fast waning until there will soon be nothing left. The wasps have laid eggs in the brain of this caterpillar, and when they finish hatching and eating us from the inside there will be nothing left. Nor will revolution likely work, when they have all of nukes and drones on their side and the rest of the people have… what, possibly slightly better AI? Even which weapons will end up being used in that fight seem to have not yet been defined.
At this point, maybe we should put all our hope into the EU to save democracy? :-P But if so, it won’t be for everyone, and I think the USA is probably too far gone… :-(
Yeah, that’s exactly what I think happenned in the US to elect Trump.
Agree that the words do not mean what they seem, but then again what else is new: NAZI stands for National Socialist German Workers’ Party and at least 2 of those things are the opposite of what they really stood for. The misnaming of political parties and ideologies is probably a hill not worth dying on, IMHO.
I like and agree with the Rules for Rulers video, though I think it oversimplifies things, especially in Democracies: if it was that simple, why is there such a massive difference in median quality of life and wealth between the US and, say, Sweden or why has oil-rich Norway not turned in to a Dictatorship, or why the difference between present day US and 1960s US - same country, same rules, yet hugelly different wealth distribution, quality of life and social mobility levels.
Clearly there are a lot more factors at least in Democracy.
Not that I think that video is wrong - I can actually see a lot of that in my own country both before and after Fascism was overthrown - I just think it’s not enough to explain everything.
Can’t really recomend any other videos: I’ve built my views on politics from reading a lot in quite a number of subjects (Finance, Behavioural Economics, Psychology, Mathematics and so on) as well as crossed with my life experience including membership in political parties. I don’t think this is easilly replicable and it would most definitelly not fit a couple of videos, which given the very pressures of seeking Youtube views and aimed for audience means the videos by need be very simplified views of reality.
As for Corporations, never forget that they do not have a will of their own - it’s all people doing the choices behind the veil of the corporation and those choices are made for the personal upside maximization of those people, even if only indirectly (which is why you see massive CEO payouts when it’s seldom in the best interest of the corporation). IMHO, the personification of corporation is a trick in Modern Capitalism meant to help deflect the blame away from the decision-makers within the corporation to the corporate entity itself, which is how for example a CEO of an airplane maker can decide to cut corners in the building of their planes, leading to hundreds of avoidable deaths, and yet instead of the CEO ending up in jail for Manslaughter it’s the company that ends up paying a fine - the system all the way through levels of the State such as the Legislative and Judiciary are set-up to stop certain elite from getting punished in the same way as non-elites would and the Press often cooperates by going on and on about the Corporation itself and never mention the CEO(s) who made the decision.
(I suspect that the solution for the current problems with corporations is simply going after the individuals themselves making the decisions in the name of the corporations. I’m probably not the only one who thinks so, which is why you often see people on the Internet advocating for prision sentences for CEOs of corporations for the crimes who for public consumption are attributed to the corporations)
I would be more worried about dynastic hold on Power and Money than explicitly about corporation, as corporations are simply agents and façades for those holding power.