Language completely appropriate for venue but I honestly don’t get the intensity of the emotions.
My take is that anyone who says that the world will become more fascist and anyone who says it will become more liberal will be right, depending on when you want to start and stop the clock. You know the clock. It’s the big grandfather one … has that pendulum on it.
Long arc of history I think we’ve had in aggregate more directionality to liberalism. Not a straight line and several periods of multiple bad decades. Much of the world right now is in a fascist swing direction and that is definitely scary. Soon to be a sweep of South America, likely a Le Pen future in France, AfD notching up in Germany, the Left unlikely to hang on in Spain … Trump is not a fascist in isolation.
But if D-T was right then these American midterms will be a GOP sweep as votes will be literally tossed out. That’s the level he’s been predicting.
Check back in a decade. I’m predicting that we are then globally in a process of tossing the fascists out and rebuilding liberalism. And then after some time a swing the other way of some magnitude.
I enjoy his posts on some subjects, scroll past his doom porn, and consider his less extreme takes. I am happy he took his break and is back.
That return swing depends on lots of people doing hard work to prevent the fascists from consolidating power in ways that hold the pendulum on their side. I agree that if a free democracy remains in place in the US that the pendulum will swing. The fascists know this, too.
Yep. I’m skeptical of the decade answer too. At least if the Fascists operate as @echoreply suggests just above. Which view I endorse.
My favorite go to example is Iran. Setting aside trump’s ill-gotten war, the Iranian people were just about done with the Ayatollahs. A mere not-quite 50 years after they seized power. And good bet that absent outside meddling it’d have taken another decade-plus for them to force the Ayatollahs out and somebody else in. These turnarounds are measured in lifetimes, not decades.
Russia demonstrates that you can have a pseudo-stable totalitarian situation for centuries.
And that’s before we add modern police state technology to the mix. Or widespread economic dislocation due to war, famine, population explosion, population collapse, AGW, AI, etc. Most nation-scale crises produce a turn towards personal selfishness and either armed anarchy or heavily armed government. Sometimes both.
There may indeed be a turnaround soon. But it’s getting real late in the game for the countries still on the downhill slide into overt Fascism / authoritarianism / kleptocracy.
Because the attitudes expressed are why America collapsed. People spouting cliches like “stopped clock” as if it’s deep wisdom and clinging to conventional wisdom like it’s the gospel are as much the problem as the fascists they golf with. Old white people sat around muttering that it can’t happen here while it did happen here and they still are spouting off as we drown in shit. I’m sick of their pompous pronouncements of complacency. I will take the nutty over the aggressively mediocre any day of the week.
The real danger isn’t just that empires follow this pattern, but that they refuse to see it happening. Every declining empire convinces itself it is different, that the rules don’t apply, and that this time will be the exception. Americans have taken this denial further by turning exceptionalism from a social idea into something that nearly looks like religion.
American exceptionalism once referred to a historical fact: unlike European workers, American workers largely rejected socialism, which made America unique. But somewhere along the way, as Princeton historian Sean Wilentz notes, exceptionalism was hijacked. Today, it means something entirely different: that America, alone among nations, is beloved by God. When politicians invoke American exceptionalism, they make a theological claim that places America beyond criticism or comparison.
I’m not some great lover of DT, I just don’t like seeing the pile on. I don’t always read DT’s posts. So I’m not aware of his misogyny, but if anything, that should make him fit right in here.
Most, though not all, of the so-called “detractors” in this thread, including myself, aren’t doing much of that. Rather, we’ve mostly been saying there’s a lack of nuance - DT is neither a nutjob nor some misunderstood Cassandra.
But I guess expecting any sort of nuance online is itself a stupid expectation.
The thing is that any current election is not a counter to the idea that the pendulum is likely to swing back in a decade. It’s acknowledged already that the world is swinging into fascism now.
No that author is not crazy. Yes the phrase “American Exceptionalism” was coined in that context, but the belief of an America beloved by God? That concept? That strand was more the majority view through much of American history, it girded the whole Manifest Destiny bit, remember it? The meaning of the phrase has changed yes: to mean a concept that was long present and basically like water to a fish. It was the cultural default before; now it is a partisan identifier.
The Religious Right didn’t fight today’s culture wars a hundred years ago because their beliefs mostly were the beliefs. There were Bible reading and prayer in public schools, blue laws, Comstock-era obscenity restrictions, and Prohibition. Sundown laws throughout the South. But even so a century ago the clawing against liberal modernity progressing raged: it was the Scope’s trial and women had just managed to get to vote.
Empires don’t last forever? No duh. Complete agreement that American hegemony is past its best used by date. And America as an empire is like a jug of milk that Trump is leaving out over night.
Complete agreement with that article’s take on empire, and about not ignoring the patterns of history. Which includes that the larger arc has been progress to liberalism, reactionary movements, more progress, more reactionary movements, and overall in fits and starts - progress.
That does not guarantee that fascism won’t prevail. Past performance does not guarantee future … yup. It is an ongoing war and battles are being lost. It requires recruiting others to reject fascism, that is where the trench warfare is. And there is every reason for not failing.
In my opinion those who preach the war is lost, it is only a question of what Hell we are going to, woe woe woe, are not helping. And that is D-T.
“Just about done” seems like an overstatement. With or without Ayatollah-rule, Iran has a long tradition of powerful religious figures wanting to control things, along with other totalitarian-minded forces on the extreme Left/Communist side of things. It wouldn’t be surprising if there were still elements wanting to bring back a Shah. It’s as doubtful that a freely-elected democratic government will be installed there as in China, where a popular uprising was also brutally crushed not long ago.
The U.S. does not have an extended history of totalitarian-wannabe rule, so there’s vastly more reason to expect a return to democratic norms in the near future. Those who seem content to sit back and prophecy doom without offering any constructive suggestions are not helping.
And to me, people who are dismissive, pompous and absurdly verbose are not helping. In fact their dithering is in service to fascism. Guess what poster I’m thinking of?
I worry that the very capacity to think and act collectively has been greatly diminished and we have less knowledge and fewer institutions with which to push back. Everything from larger school class sizes to the crushing of unions to the ability to communicate with someone across the world but not with your neighbours plays into this. Pushing back effectively takes work and training and tools and practice, and this seems to have eroded. By the time it is rebuilt, will it be too late?
As for the arc of history bending in a progressive direction, MLK was an advocate of that view. Look what happened to him.
He holds a lot of extreme self-contradictory opinions which can be frustrating.
All Republicans want to rape and enslave women, BUT
All women are irrationally afraid of men and hate them. (As evidenced by them avoiding strange men at night.) He feels so strongly about this that he once crashed a thread dedicated for women to share their experiences of rape and abuse. He yelled at them for being cautious around men in the aftermath of their rape. I was very mad at him about that for a long time.
I pointed out that if (as he believes) fully 40% of the US population wants to rape and enslave women, then perhaps it’s not so irrational for women to be cautious around men.
Never got an answer to that one.
Incidentally he’s currently arguing against rape culture in frats. Is a woman being cautious of men’s intentions at a frat party irrational? One can only guess.
I’ve always enjoyed his contributions in other ways, I usually just take what he’s saying and dial it down by about 60% intensity and respond as if he’d said that.