Right! There has been an odd journal called “The Lobster” that is dedicated to conspiracy theories since the early 1980s. Weird, wild stuff!
Man, I hope that doesn’t give anyone ideas about dumping weed killer all over Trump’s golf courses. That surely would be terrible.
Well put. And he has had the aggressive support of the Repubs - who actually set the stage for him in their outright opposition to EVERYTHING Obama tried.
Really amazing of how much we thought was “law” was little more than civility and tradition. Once those are jetisoned, things break down quickly.
It really will be - interesting - to see what can be done to strengthen/reimagine our institutions. It is hard to imagine any broad consensus being reached on anything significant. Unless steps are taken in the near future, I anticipate a rapidly accelerating multifaceted decline.
The Democrats will never win by ceding the right to define the terms of the debate. That’s a sucker’s game.
I think people are missing the point.
Democrats have given up on a lot of rural American - meaning that they don’t even visit some of these places anymore because they’re almost certainly going to go for Trump. They visit battleground states, understandably. But I’m saying visit some states that aren’t quite battlegrounds yet, and stop just rolling over and giving up states to republicans. At least talk to these people - even if they laugh us out of the room.
Taking the attitude that “there’s no talking to these people” only feeds into the polarization that’s beginning to overtake our politics.
asahi,
I was taught that the first rule of public speaking is ‘evaluate the audience’. How do you approach a group that rejects truth and logic?
I believe Socrates told us ‘if one man has truth and another bullshit, the man with bullshit will win’. Do we stoop to better bullshit?
They say that wrestling with a pig is useless, as you just get dirty and the pig likes it.
But I guess that doesn’t take into account the audience of people that really want to see a pig wrestling match.
So, is the answer that we learn to wrestle pigs, not because it’s useful in any way, but because that’s the only way that 71 million people in this country are able to evaluate a candidate?
Wrestling pigs, wrestling pro wrestlers, same difference.
Then we need a Huey Long or William Jennings Bryan to ‘paint the barn’.
Figuring out how to approach the “reachable” rightists is a fine idea. But its a mug’s game in the presence of aggressively fact free polemic propaganda designed specifically to ensure that same audience is as unreachable as possible.
We can’t pump out the ship of state until after we seal the hole below the waterline. The false propaganda must be comprehensively stopped. Then after a few years, people currently in its thrall will have subsided from fact-free rage-a-holic to merely politically dissatisfied with the actual status quo.
From there we can return to the more typical politics of give and take, of everyone having a seat at the table and gaining something from being there.
That’s my prescription for the disease. Unfortunately I have no idea how to turn that into action against very powerful organized forces who are happy to have an bought an army of malcontents on the cheap who are unwittingly pursuing the goals of their masters, not of themselves.
You’ve nailed it. There has to be a concerted effort to get people to read/hear, understand and agree on a core set of facts. As long as there are “alternative facts” being accepted as anything but lies, we’re going to continue to be a nation divided. I think it’s equally important to understand that this is a global issue, not just an American anomaly. Right wing ideology and authoritarianism is on the rise in many western style democracies. I think the way to combat this may end up being a multi-national effort. Which will be tough with nations that have already succumbed to ideologically right-wing leadership.
I fear it will all get much worse before it gets better.
You can’t beat a comforting lie with harsh truth. What do the Democrats have to say other than “your way of life is over, we’re going to try to help you as best as we can but you need to accept that things won’t be as they were”. On the other side there’s a Republican wearing a miner’s hat screaming about how he’s going to bring all the jobs back and when things are bad it’s not your fault, it’s those “others” taking what rightfully belongs to you.
I recently posted a link to a pretty good road map … once one comes to grips to the true nature and the actual severity of the problem:
I think this has to be undertaken – at least in large part – by the Democrats in terms of countering the political narrative.
Some decades ago, I thought this burgeoning “internet” would cause just that to happen, and that people would finally pull themselves up out of the dark ages because they could discuss things with people of different cultures and with different viewpoints, and we would end up with a GLOBAL melting pot, and the humanity would finally work together for the greater good (the greater good).
Yes, I was in my late teens/early twenties, and naive as HELL.
Instead, people have done literally the opposite, it seems. They have taken this gift and used it to build more impenetrable wall around their beliefs, blocking out ALL voices that don’t coincide with their viewpoints, and only allowing in those that share them. All of the things that make life as a human nearly intolerable are being distilled in that environment. My only hope is that it is a temporary thing, but really, as much as I would like to pretend that it’s just the “old folks who are set in their ways”, the worst offenders seem to be in MY age cohort right now.
I saw this article recently which I think speaks to what you just said:
Wow…I thought exactly the same thing. In fact, I said something like it to my dad (a diehard republican but more in the Reagan/Eisenhower model than today).
My dad died 15 years ago (old age…he had a good run). This is one point I am sure he’d remind me of and laugh at me for.
Somewhere in my files is a 4000 word essay I wrote on my typewriter in 1994 titled “In the future, technology will make it easier to lie to each other”.
Common vandalism of this sort isn’t “Terrorism,” unless you’re a blade of grass.
Sure. And when the Klan burns a cross, it’s only the cross that is affected, right?
I think your point is well taken, but … since this is basically a legal term with an established definition (source)
Domestic terrorism is the unlawful use, or threatened use, of violence by a group or individual based and operating entirely within the United States (or its territories) without foreign direction committed against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.
I’d be hard pressed to ascribe the requisite motive to the guy who damaged the grass, but much less hard presssed to ascribe the requisite motive to the Klan in the cross-burning scenario.