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?
Yes, they’ve always been here. There has always been more stupid ignorant people than educated and intelligent people.
Previously, the stupid had no platform.
The fire hose of stupid shit we are inundated with nowadays used to only trickle through in person.
Someone would say something insanely stupid to you at the bar, at the grocery store, at the barber shop etc… and all we had to do was ignore them or tell them to shut up
Thanks to social media, now they’ve teamed up and have millions of followers.
The question ought to be, How are the the educated and intelligent going to rise above it?
Democracy might be the problem. You could put a threshold to vote in place, something to test that you know all the views from all the parties and the relevant topics. It’s a slippery slope though, because once you enable restrictions on voting, it’s hard to disable it again. If you accidentally get a Trump in power, he might just as easily restrict voting back to cis, white males only.
Democracy isn’t the problem; it’s the money in politics, which is an intended effect of capitalism.
Capitalism is the problem. Capitalism by its very natire is a system of economic distribution where you have an owner class who control a working class via wages, where the working class will never be paid what they are worth due to the profit motive that the owner class has when it comes to the profit of their business. Shareholder capitalism makes this even worse, as the profit year-over-year must ALWAYS go up, as that is how stock price increases. It is to the point where shareholders sue companies not for losing money, but for making less money than they did the year prior, and they win.
Imagine an alternative where you could have democracy in your workplace (worker-owned coops). You would be able to hire and fire your boss with a vote. You will be able to determine the direction of the business, also with a vote. This could be the reality if we just forced all corporations to be worker-owned coops.
This, combined with a hard wealth cap and a UBI, will prevent any one person (or small group of people) from gaining enough power to buy a government, and the addition of democracy in business will also make business interests harder to corrupt as well.
I was wondering if a top age restriction could be good though. People use to not live so damn long that they could fuck over the future generation.
Like shouldn’t people who will actually be alive to see the changes they are making make the decisions? Why are we letting people vote who are on their death bed, probably base their decisions on stuff from 50 years ago, and don’t really care about what the people who will actually live that reality will experience?
Not sure what the cutoff should be. But if 17 year olds aren’t old enough to vote, maybe 60+ year olds aren’t young enough to vote?
Maybe, just maybe, it shouldn’t be an age but a knowledge requirement. Some 10 year olds know that there are (were?) e.g. 3 branches of government, while I kid you not there are some 20+ year olds that are not aware of that plain and simple fact fact. On average, older people tend to be a little bit more knowledgeable than young, if only due to having had more time to figure stuff out, although otoh also society does change out from under them - e.g. which is more trustworthy, something seen on the TV “news”, or something shared on TikTok?
It seems more like an attitude of responsibility to me than an age or anything else. Perhaps make college degree a requirement - while keeping the GI bill offering college funding to people who successfully serve (without being dishonorably discharged) in the military. Or just a test of how government “works”.
Or rather, used to work. We aren’t coming back from this, methinks.
Yeah all good points honestly.
I was thinking changing something age related would be more hard to argue with, but any “test” we give people could feel unfair. Like think about how many languages it would have to be translated to, and what if you accidentally entered the wrong answer?
I kind of love the idea but it’s just hard to imagine the problems at scale.
Maybe we should go after the electoral college instead since ultimately they make the decisions??
Omg, you might not have been paying attention lately, but I 100% guarantee that it will be solely in English. Assuming we are allowed to vote again, which tbf we probably will, it’s just that the options will be preselected for us. As it has pretty much always been, but moar so now.
Damn I didn’t see that news 😭 I’ve been traveling the last week and honestly trying to ignore the news a bit. Not sure how to productively consume it without just feeling upset!
I hear that. Fwiw, a lot has been broken for a very long time - not merely weeks or months or even years but rather decades, so this is more of a reckoning that is catching up to us than it is a total surprise.
Similar to Brexit I would imagine, and many other similar trends around the globe, with similar causes and effects. People got complacent, the wealthy ignored the plight of the poor, who reacted out of desperation, and now… we’ll see.
The citizenship test is only in English, so anyone able to vote will be able to understand English.