Sorry if the premise is inflammatory, but I’ve been stymied by this for a while. How did we go from something like 1940s era collectivism or 1960s era leftism to the current bizarro political machine that seems to have hypnotized a large portion (if not majority) of the country? I get it - not everything is bad now, and not everything was good then. FDR’s internment camps, etc.
That said - our country seems to be at a low point in intellectualism and accountability. The DHHS head is an antivaxxer, the deputy chief of the DOJ is a far-right podcast nutball, etc. Their supporters seem to have no nuance to their opinion beyond “well, Trump said he’d fix the economy and I don’t like woke.”
Have people always been this unserious and unquestioning, or are we watching the public’s sanity unravel in real time? Or am I just imagining some idealistic version of the past that never existed, where politicians acted in good faith and people cared about the social order?
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The short version is this - once politicians realized that human engagement was maximized by anger, a segment of politicians focused on making white christian Americans believe they were a minority group under attack and being disenfranchised by their country. The seeds of this have been getting sowed for decades.
It’s always about the money.
Can’t you see It all makes sense Expressed in dollars and cents Pounds shillings and pence Can’t you see It all makes perfect sense
-Roger Waters
No child left behind + Unregulated social media + 60 years of social and economic regression in rural areas = USA #1. !!!??
There’s a fantastic documentary by Adam Curtis, called “I can’t get you out of my head”. It explores specifically the transition from the ‘then’ system of thinking to, well, now. It’s long but give it a watch.
Here’s an honest response.
Grew up in South Florida. Shit was pretty liberal back then. Moved to a much more “conservative” state and found the same brain drain happening. At first it was fairly liberal, but has become less so.
Maybe we deserve it. Maybe we don’t.
The one thing I know is not to rely on your fellow human to do what is right.
Read the book “bowling alone” if you’re interested in someone’s attempt at researching why we went from collectivism to individualism as a country. There are a large amount of factors but if I were to take a crack at it, I’d list a few: TV, the Internet, smart phones, air conditioning, capitalism, and (last but certainly not least) racism. Racism is foundational to the country and its history.
As far as the stupidity, some of the same factors apply, but there are also additional ones like environmental factors (US citizens eat more microplastics than any other major country since like 2020 and we lead poisoned ourselves for a century), a deep-seeded anti-intellectualism, and we’re a large part cultist/religious idiots that see everything through the lense of “some guy” being the best thing ever and the source of all truth.
Every country suffers from this, America is just the most rich and therefore visible due to geographic benefits and the Bretton Woods system.
Germany was actively shutting down its nuclear power before Russia attacked, China has a giant property bubble that’s collapsing, the Eurozone is rushing in a CBDC to prop up its failing currency, Canada is doing mass immigration to hide it’s failing business climate. Its the same all over, people love faux economic growth and they love to borrow from the future.
Every country suffers from what? Mass stupidity?
Maybe that’s true but it certainly seems like we are more individualistic and stupid than most…and I don’t think those two things are entirely unrelated.
Are you familiar with the elders of zion, which was believed by a huge number of people all over the globe, even though it was totally ridiculous. The average person is not smart, though I may be a tad pessimistic I suppose.
Driving in a car/metal box instead of sharing the space or walking/cycling and connecting to others is another one.
Othering of others is super easy in a car. There are studies about how much more violent and vitriolic people are when driving.
Yeah lack of third spaces and class mixing is big. Everyone is segregated into their own existing (shrinking) in groups, that then get concentrated by the webiverse.
The 70s oil crisis was an inflection point for Europe and a lot of cities/countries started moving back away from cars as the sole transportation option but the US didn’t have the same reaction.
Not to mention the rise of vehicle violence, running over protesters and such.
Lead was used in Europe too, and is still used by some member states. If there’s anything we know about micro plastics, it’s that they are ubiquitous. What we don’t know is what effects, if any, they have on health/cognition.
America is more car-oriented than most other western countries and leaded gas is how we did the majority of our poisoning.
Yes, of course microplastics are everywhere, but I’ve read studies saying that internationally they’re eating about the same amount of plastic as we did years ago, but they kind of plateaued whereas here in the good ol USA people still don’t know that it’s not a good idea to eat three meals a day of microwaved food cooked in plastic containers.
Unless you can show any research done that indicates micro plastics influence intelligence I wouldn’t be using that as an answer to this.
Yeah, I’m a hunching it up a bit, but I can’t imagine it’s a good thing (for reasoning) to have your brain full of microplastics.
It’s a bit of an aside, but there’s a large amount of absurdity in expecting scientific rigor in lemmy comments when purportedly scientific bodies are being led by vaccine-denying simpletons.
That ubiquitous expectation of powerless individuals to reason and behave perfectly while ultra-powerful people can behave like spoiled five year olds is foundational in making life fucking miserable for me personally.
Targeted, systematic attacks on education, and a robust propaganda networks ran by billionaires.
Long term, Americans have been bad at making idiots feel shame for their idiocy. There is less of a societal push to make people conform to societal pressure. On one end, this leads to great creative freedom for artists. On the other end, it creates the born again movement.
Medium term, LBJ oversaw the collapse of economic leftism as he was trying to include civil rights legislation and the Vietnam War. This lead to the stagnation of American salaries, but it took a while for people to notice that quality of life wasn’t improving for everyone. Also, conservatives realized they could create parallel media in a way to control public sentiment.
Short term, the Great Recession and COVID made it clear that quality of life wasn’t as bulletproof as people thought. As a response, some people want to bring back “the good old days”, not realizing/remembering that the good old days had a lot of bad to it that was covered up.
Are we more stupid than we used to be? Yeah. But I’d use the word ignorant instead. It’s a bit more accurate. Ignorance is chosen, and that’s what our current epidemic of stupidity is. Chosen.
There have always been a lot of ignorant people, but now, with social media, those people have platforms to infect others with their ignorance. Also, in my own lifetime, I’ve witnessed a shift from ignorant people still being able to set aside partisan politics to condemn obviously bad actors or decisions to 100% doubling down on partisan politics no matter how bad the person or action is.
I’ve definitely FELT this increase in willful ignorance over the course of my life living in this country. People in my own life choosing to believe things they absolutely would not have believed a couple decades ago. People not understanding super basic concepts.
I think there are other factors than just bad actors spreading ignorance on social media. I think a lot of it has to do with simple distractions. The modern world has so many. A lot of the people I know don’t even read books. Like, they simply don’t read. If I ask them what book they read last they have to concentrate because it was multiple years ago. That’s fucking crazy. Instead of picking up a book they’re watching Real Wives of Whatever. Getting involved in some wealthy person’s 1st world problems, instead of, you know, learning something.
We’re entering an age of concentrated ignorance and, unfortunately, that’s very unlikely to end anytime soon. And the stakes are higher than ever for something like that to happen because we possess greater power to decimate this planet than we used to. Through pollution or braindead child-like politicians who can wage war or launch nukes.
It takes a lot less effort to allow things to keep going the way they are than it does to turn things around and responsibly educate the masses. So we’re probably going to continue spiraling.
Things are going to get dark. Our quality of life will decline.
How did we go from something like 1940s era collectivism or 1960s era leftism to the current bizarro political machine that seems to have hypnotized a large portion (if not majority) of the country?
The prevailing economic wisdom after WWII was Keynesianism, which says that the government should increase government spending when unemployment is high and decrease it when inflation is high. What happened in the 70’s and 80’s was that the economy started experiencing both high unemployment and high inflation at the same time, “shrinkflation,” which wasn’t supposed to happen according to Keynesianism, and which it had no real response to. The reason it was happening (at least from a Marxist perspective) was that the US had already developed in the ways that saw the highest returns, and there simply wasn’t as much new ground to cover - this is what’s meant by “the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.” Regardless, the government was faced with a decision of which problem to focus on between unemployment and inflation - and it chose inflation.
The phenomenon of shrinkflation started under Nixon, who attempted to fight it with price controls and taking us off the gold standard, which was perhaps the most anyone ever did. Ford had no idea what he was doing and just asked people to spend less.
And then we got Carter, and Carter does not get nearly enough hate for his role in this. Carter chose to confront inflation rather than unemployment, the real beginning of “supply side economics” that Reagan would take further. Carter’s whole deal was “restoring the dignity of the office” after Watergate and his focus was on individual morality. His message was essentially, you’re going to have less purchasing power, but it’s ok because we can seek fulfillment in other ways, outside of the economic sphere. He marked the transformation of the Democratic party away from representing the interests of labor and towards the beast that it’s become today, with it’s obsession over norms and procedure and technocracy.
The result of Carter’s messaging and policy was one of the greatest blowout losses in history against Ronald Reagan. Reagan would do all the same things as Carter, but he at least had the decency to lie about it. He focused on how much more you’d be able to afford with cheaper goods, conveniently ignoring the fact that with lower wages, purchasing power would actually decrease. However, thanks to the Democratic party completely abandoning labor and the common people, there was no real pushback against this, there was no alternative explanation or solution or criticism of the broad direction of policy. In fact, economic policy was moved out of the sphere of democratic accountability altogether by leaving it to the Federal Reserve to set interest rates. Instead, the culture war kicked off and that’s what elections would be about from then on.
Why did the Democratic party abandon unions? Because the unions like the AFL/CIO stripped themselves of power and radicalism by purging communists during the Red Scare. The Carter administration didn’t view labor vs capital in terms of the fundamental struggle of society but as just another set of competing interest groups and lobbyists, which is honestly pretty much how the unions saw themselves and wanted to be seen anyway.
So what happens when more and more important questions are taken out of the hands of the voters, who then watch conditions gradually decline? Well, the voters get mad about declining conditions - and at the same time, get dumber from not being engaged in any important questions. There’s a sense that we can just fuck around and do whatever because our actions don’t have consequences, because most of the time what we say and believe seems to have no real effect on policy anyway. Nobody gets to vote on whether or not to keep arming Israel and bombing Yemen or on whether to raise or lower interest rates or anything like that - the only thing we get to vote on is stuff like whether trans women can play sports.
Trump’s popularity is very easy to understand in that context - he is a rebellion against that declining status quo and a desperate attempt to reassert the power of elected officials over technocratic institutions. Of course, since the left has been purged and is devoid of power, this rebellion can only come from the right. A similar thing happened in Iran (which Carter also fucked up btw but that’s not important right now), where after being installed by the CIA, the shah hunted down and exterminated everyone on the left, and then conditions declined and people wanted change, only that change had to come from the right because the left was powerless. And if the American left can’t materialize and offer an alternative vision, both to Trump and, more importantly, to the failed bipartisan status quo that existed before him, then we’re headed towards the same future.
the only reason their kkk ass didnt join the nazi german campaign is that the president realised a big ass war against the germans and rebuilding europe is a super great deal.
us school lack of worldwide geography and history lessons, keeping the kids stupid as fuck.
the 2 party system makes sure no other new ideology comes beetween their bew god: the lobby money from the top 1%.
answering your question: yes
Dont forget the failure of the Business Plot. Which side of the war would those fuckers be on?
(Fun fact: Prescott Bush, Dubya’s grandfather might have been involved too - it’s debatable but the argument against it is that he was too busy with Nazis abroad to be helping them here….)
Here in Europe we always used to think Americans were stupid.
And it’s not like it’s prejudice from people never leaving their hometown. Nope, actually TV shows and movies make Americans look way smarter than they are.
Nope, the conclusion comes from people that met real Americans, either in Europe or in the US.
Last time I saw an American in Paris he was asking for ketchup on top of his duck breast. The most barbaric thing I’ve seen in a while 😂
Unregulated, chemical-dipped, gene-modified, mutated food eating up their intellect
