This decay has already started, and Trump has done substantial damage. He has deepened an already substantial polarisation within society, and turned the US from a high-trust to a low-trust society; he has demonised the government and weakened belief that it represents the collective interests of Americans; he has coarsened political rhetoric and given permission for overt expressions of bigotry and misogyny; and he has convinced a majority of Republicans that his predecessor was an illegitimate president who stole the 2020 election.
The breadth of the Republican victory, extending from the presidency to the Senate and probably to the House of Representatives as well, will be interpreted as a strong political mandate confirming these ideas and allowing Trump to act as he pleases. We can only hope that some of the remaining institutional guardrails will remain in place as he takes office. But it may be that things will have to get a lot worse before they get better.
https://www.ft.com/content/f4dbc0df-ab0d-431e-9886-44acd4236922
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As a non-mutt looking at it from the outside, The cardinal mistake a lot of libs make is treating Trump as the sickness, not as the symptom.
Trump didnt turn soyciety into a low-trust one. Losing trust in society is what Trump picked up and turned into a political "movement".
No. All of those were present and increasingly common in US discourse long before Trump. Again, he's the symptom not the sickness. Demonising the government started (the current round of it, anyways) in '03 due to the invasion of iraq. It reached a peak with the patriot act and wikileaks revelation about project echeleon and such. And trust in the government has never recovered from it. And if you want to look for russian psy-ops, look no further, making sure that it never recovers has been their main goal for 15 years.
Of course, leftoids have been at the forefront of delegitimising government activities since the cold war started, so that part is preferably memory-holed when accusing rightoids of doing the same thing now.
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You have to go further back than that. We are still dealing with the cultural aftershocks of the Vietnam war.
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Sure, but i tried to keep it a bit more limited. Vietnam with the peace-movement and the commie 5th column subversion (which is criminally under-explored, but not surprisingly so since the current generation of academics are the ones that bought into the propaganda and/or are straight up 5th columnist commies, but an intellectual reckoning will come eventually) is the birthplace of the modern anti-government sentiment that defaults to blaming the (US) government for anything (especially bad) happening in the world, the Iraq war or Snowden leaks serve as evidence for the belief and to keep it relevant, while the 'nam legacy/commie propaganda makes sure these things are seen as one-dimensional evil done by evil people for evil reasons instead of a more nuanced view.
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The Iraq war is by far the #1 reason for Trump. It totally discredited the Republican that existed back then, the "compassionate conservatives" who were trying to be the heirs to Reagan's legacy. You very soon see the Tea Party emerge and then Trump. The Republican party as it existed then was basically destroyed and replaced by far-right wackos who took over its corpse.
The magats hijacked the 1960s extreme left counter-culture view of the world and now they call it their own: the US government in general is terrible but especially the FBI and CIA, the CDC is out to get us and probably invented AIDS, the US has no legitimate need for internal security or foreign intelligence, the US shouldn't support its allies overseas. (Notice these also happen to all be themes pushed in Soviet propaganda.) Conspiracy theorists are by definition low-information people as they are too lazy to learn how the world really works and blame conspiracies because it's easier. So it's not surprising that they don't even know where their own mythology comes from. I once had a rightoid here, the kind who calls everyone else a communist, who was absolutely insistent that the FBI killed Martin Luther King. I tried to drill down asking him where he got this idea, and of course he couldn't come up with anything other than "it's common knowledge".
The leftoids can't attack them on any of this because it's their mythology too. They act shocked that anyone could distrust the FBI agents investigating Trump. B-word please. For decades you said the FBI was a fascist deep state. They act shocked that anyone could take Putin's side. For decades you lied about the CIA smuggling drugs and assassinating world leaders and you're surprised that America is the bad guy now? They act shocked by January 6. For decades you've glorified every race riot.
So the left can attack certain things that the MAGA crowd does, but it can never attack their core ideology. They would rather lose elections than admit that one lone psycho killed MLK.
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Right wing anti-government extremism also has a long history in the US, im actually curious if it spun off from the left-wing or if it developed "independently" or maybe even before the left wing.
Yeah, thats imo the biggest political issue in US, and probably why the undecided/non-voters are both so many and so ignored by the parties. Both have been taken over by their radical wings, and neither seems interested in making reasonable politics.
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They've got their own anti-government/conspiracy theory traditions going way way back:
The John Birch Society, wasn't anti-government in principle but when you're saying that Eisenhower is a secret communist, that's pretty anti-government. They were pushing all kinds of conspiracy theories and had a pretty large audience. Before that McCarthy, who I don't think had any real ideology but he was an opportunist who spread the cancer of conspiracy theorist thinking.
Southerners who hadn't gotten over the Civil War. Rightoids don't like to talk about this, but if you read any detailed history or watch media from the early-mid 1900s southerners still hated the US Army, blaming it for their precious plantations getting burned down. As late as WW2 there's jokes about them trying to dodge the draft because they hate the Army. (This is why you see so many southerners in the Navy in this era. That was considered okay.) They even protected that black girl going to school in Little Rock! And of course they hated the FBI since it infiltrated and destroyed their organizations like the KKK.
Rural westerners and southerners who didn't want the government interfering with them. There were lots of hillbillies who just wanted to do subsistence farming and didn't want or need no government poking around in their lives. They just wanted to farm and go to their weirdo hick church. Watch the first half of Sergeant York if you want to understand. Many of these people ended up being forced to give up the lifestyle and move to urban areas, but they kept some of that same spirit with them. These would be the crazier side of people who supported Barry Goldwater in 1964.
Wacko religious fanatics who talk more about politics than religion. Long before televangelists they had Father Coughlin on the radio.
People obsessed with gold. FDR confiscated everyone's gold in one of his most blatant violations of the constitution. This was a legit reason to be pissed at the bankers and the government that worked for them. If you go back far enough, there's William Jennings Bryan and the Free Silver movement of the late 1800s that pitted farmers against the banks and all the forces of capitalism. That may seem like a long time, but I know people who knew people who were adults back then. This stuff does percolate through the generations.
Legitimate grievances sane people had with real conspiracy theories. You want to get a job in the theater in the 1930s? Well you'd better be a card-carrying commie because otherwise you're screwed. You want to get a job in a city on the East Coast? Better be Catholic. Or if it's on the docks, depending on the city you'll need a good word from the mafia or the commies. On the Great Plains? There's gonna be a church that pulls all the strings in the county, maybe the Swedish Baptists or God knows who. In Portland? Everyone knows that the [sheriff-turned-mayor]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Theatre_Project) is part of the Mafia-affiliated gang that runs the city. People were way more aware of the actual conspiracies screwing them over in daily life so naturally they're going to start hating the religious/ethnic group that screwed them and pass that on to future generations.
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Yup, the open borders libertarians, wall street, and the shitheads that lied us into the iraq war, after having destroyed the GOP with their sociopathic bullshit, switched to the Democrat party.
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Yes. As you can see from their pathetic attempts to chase after this crowd. It turns out there's actually very few of these people. I won't deny that Trump and the movement behind him has done a lot of good things for this country. The neocons did far more damage to this country than Trump did and I'm glad they've been pretty much annihilated.
Except CNN keeps bringing John Fricking Bolton on as an expert on foreign policy. This draft-dodging chickenhawk has been wrong about everything. How in the frick does that make him an expert? Unironically you could go back and compare what I said about invading Iraq in high school versus what he said and it turned out I was completely right and he was completely wrong. Why in the frick don't they just have me on as an expert? The establishment left's fascination with Republicans who defect to their side because they have a personal beef with Trump is bewildering to me.
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The one thing I like about him is that he's a big fan of Taiwan. I don't want Taiwan to become a Chinese province.
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[EDIT: I read that as you DO want Taiwan to become a Chinese province. Which I found confusing. But the story below is still really good.]
I want Taiwan to annex China.
I got this from a story about a Lebanese guy who was pissed off at Antoun Saadeh, the leader of the SSNP. Their ideology was all about uniting a "Greater Syria" which included half the Middle East. So all these countries would have to merge into one.
Saadeh: Why do you hate me so much.
Lebanese: Because you want Syria to annex Lebanon!
Saadeh: No, I want Lebanon to annex Syria.
Lebanese:
Now I'm no SSNP fan but this is most brilliant answer to a difficult question. OMG that's so Antoun. He was such a character. In 1949 he attempted a coup and failed. He fled to Syria which immediately sent him back to Lebanon for immediate execution.
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That dream caused Taiwan to miss its chance for declaring itself an independent nation without risk of geopolitical fallout.
Would be nice, but it's completely absurd nowadays.
that's an interesting rabbithole, thanks :)
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Oh yeah. The SSNP is all kinds of really fricking weird.
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