I mean they opened Pandora’s box and saw that it worked.
There’s an irony to comparing it to a Lovecraftian tale, considering how racist the guy was, and how his stories allegorically supported racism.
There’s other forces fucking with our politicians, both inside and out of the country. Our
governmentpoliticians basically have a combination of ransomware and no soul.(Aleksandr Dugin waves cheerfully from behind the shrubbery)
I mean, yeah America’s rightward spiral is depressing, especially if you live there. But it’s not exactly an American-exclusive phenomenon. Italy elected a far-right party, France might in their next Presidential election, and even Germany’s far-right party is surging in the polls. Honestly, I’m struggling to think of a country that hasn’t seen a massive rightward surge over the last few years.
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In Australia we recently had a considerable shift towards progressive politics after a long ass run of conservative government. The centre right (moderate conservatives) were absolutely demolished in our last election in favour of progressive minor party candidates. Our centre ‘left’ party has certainly moved further to the right (this has been happening for a while now though) but they are having their asses handed to them by our progressive left party who is growing in popularity, especially with younger voters.
We are historically a very conservative country and I have no doubt we’ll eventually trend back towards this tradition. But for now I’m enjoying being the exception to the rest of the world.
If you’re from another country just being exposed to American media and not familiar with why that media is the way it is, it may seem like this hate and racism thing wasn’t around as much before and is around more now. Unfortunately, if you are familiar with American history or have spent any time in a predominately conservative area, none of what you mentioned is anything new or even at higher levels than it has ever been. Almost all these hateful bigots have been that way for their entire lives. Politicians are just directly pandering to them now since Trump proved it wouldn’t destroy your political career when you are totally open about demagoguery rather than dogwhistling like right wingers used to think they had to do.
I know that America has been built on the blood of the natives. I know that the country’s been racist for a very long time.
But I also see the good. I balance this pessimistic vision with all the creatives, nice folks from America.
It’s not just the consumerism, the racism & the guns. It’s the diversity, the craziness, and the exploration of a big country full of nature.
My country is a lot of things, for good and bad.
I just watched a video where a woman from Tennessee explained that every resident was required to get a new license plate that year, and that they had the choice between 2 standard options, the only difference being that one said “In God We Trust” and one didn’t. Oh, and the ones that had “In God We Trust” had the numbers come first. So for example, every “Christian” license plate reads 123 ABC, and every “atheist” plate reads ABC 123.
What the fuck?
What is wrong with people, why is this even necessary
A better way to concieve of it is that Americans have dredged it to the surface, making it possible to confront directly. This is a thing that happens cyclically in the US as we’vetried to resolve the issues from our racist past, it’s not comfortable and is liable to produce a lot of pain but it’s better to bring out in the open than to continue to let it fester.
This was about 35 years ago. It’s an illusion that any of this went away
What happened was, for the GOP, all their propaganda was made for the plebs. They knew it was all bullshit.
However after a generation you get a bunch of true believers whom were raised on Fox News and AM radio, and this is what happens.
Trump for example was never “in on” the propaganda, he was just a boring asshole that only watched Fox News and underage beauty pageants. So of course he’s a true believer. It’s also the reason why he resonates with his “base” because he literally talks like them on Facebook. Word for word sounded like some of my distant “kinfolk” and one of the reasons why I ditched Facebook. It’s literally “he’s like me frfr” except everything that matters ie rich, coastal elite.
The only way to get his cult to back off would be if he said he was a Democrat now.
Trump doesn’t believe in anything except himself. He threw out the ‘Mexico will pay for the Wall’ in a speech and when the crowd reacted, he repeated it.
Or trump has perfectly mastered the art of « dumbing down »
Trump is a poopee cacca. The GOP is a cacca poopee.
This is unironically the level of discourse modern Conservatives deserve.
At least then they’d understand what we’re saying.
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There’s a theory that societies experience 40 years of progress followed by 40 years of regression in an endless cycle. I hope the theory is wrong. I can’t take decades of these idiots running things.
starring into the abyss of contempt, chaos, and bigotry… it also makes me sad.
I started experiencing it in 2014 when Cambridge Analytica was building up their pro-Trump stuff. Reddit and Facebook really changed that year, and it’s never gone back.
I really hope that people have a sense of urgency that it took a lot of time to get humanity more towards positive after world war 2, and we could do better, and it really isn’t worth hating each other on this planet.
A world-wide funeral for those we lost in the pandemic would be nice, but it just doesn’t seem to form. Plenty of people with social power who could spread the idea.
For me it is weirdly entertaining and frightening at the same time.
Seeing the humor in things is an amazing coping mechanism. Otherwise, I think I’d just go insane myself.
Jimmy Buffett has a good song about that.
If you like pina coladas…
Changes in Latitudes is the song name.
“If we couldn’t laugh we would all go insane”
“If we weren’t all crazy, we would go insane”
That’s Rupert Holmes, not Jimmy.
That must be why I get so turned on.
That was my take on Brexit (American here)
And it’s happening in a lot of other countries - here in the UK the political culture is more right-wing than any time since at least the Second World War (and that’s saying something).
It’s Late Stage Capitalism: in order to continue business as usual in the face of all reason and evidence of its devastating effects, capitalists look to authoritarianism and fascism to ensure capitalism’s continuation.
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