trump has shown the rot in American culture. It used to take terrible privation and suffering to drive people into horrible totalitarian political systems like fascism, in the modern US it seems merely being unhappy about societal changes that usually don't even directly affect an individual can drive about a third of the country into eliminationist fantasies. Mostly because there's an entire grievance/grift industry telling Americans every day that their world is ending and the Other is coming for their kids/home/guns/retirement/etc.
I think it is largely the result of a polity that no longer thinks of politics as a practical way of managing society and finding compromise, to an ego suffused battleground where any compromise is anathema and worthy of violent opposition. And that polity was formed by the creating of various organizations in the non-profit (Heritage foundation, Federalist society) and media spaces (FOX, Twitter, internet cesspools like 4chan) that are in fact dedicated to the destruction of traditional classical liberal policies and the creation of institutions and systems that guarantee eternal rule by an aggrieved minority.
We use fascism as shorthand because of the similarity of authoritarian and totalitarian tendencies, but it really goes beyond that. Most of the cutting edge thinkers (loosely speaking) on the right want to overturn not just democracy but the Enlightenment itself (https://theweek.com/articles/937611/conservatives-who-want-undo-enlightenment).
I am at a loss as to what can cause that kind of nihilism and how to combat it. And it's not new, it's been the backbone of movement conservatism since the 1950s.
Machine learning algorithm is, I guess, the academic term for con artist. That's what con artists do - they listen attentitively to their marks and learn what they want and what their weaknesses are, then they tell them what they want to hear. They want a strong leader to protect them and to stop their world from changing, and he exudes strength. Is he fascist? Sure, why not? He talks like one. But he's really interested in only two things: Power and image.
He stepped onto a field well-prepared by Gingrich Republicans, who promised far more than they could or would really want to deliver abd raised the expectations of their fascist wing. The Democrats, for our part, kept trying to convice people to agree with them (you win elections by convincing people you agree with them, not by convincing them to agree with you), and weren't listening to voters. So Trump had a fairly easy time stepping in and grabbing up an electoral base - not a majority, but enough people in the right states to win the electoral college and get the power to retaliate against all the people who had, in his view, tarnished his image.
It’s possible (likely, IMO) that there are times when change (including technology) develops too fast for many people to handle. You recently posted a link to Sean Carroll’s discussion with the physicist/complexity theorist Geoffrey West. If you haven’t yet, please watch the Geoffrey West 2024 lecture video that Sean provides on https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/03/25/270-solo-the-coming-transition-in-how-humanity-lives/ It ends with Geoff’s suggestion that the individual brain may evolve, but in some people it does not seem to evolve fast enough and they turn to authoritarianism because change is happening too fast. That may be why we’ve had wars and fascism after large bursts of rapid technological advancement—and may have another soon. (If I read "The Great Transformation" correctly, that relates to one of Polanyi’s points about fascism.)
The 20th century had 2 other good examples of fascist governments - Spain and Japan. Spain was similar to France in an earlier century, but Japan was indutrialized by the time it became fascist with a militaristic government. Both should be used as evidence in theories of why fascism emerges. It was also evident in France, the UK, and USA in the earler part of teh 20th Century, but failed to become controling. Why? What conditions derailed the forces that propeled it to dominance in the countries that did become fascist?
Your inclusion of Jackson is, I think, correct, but when it comes to France I'd take it back a bit earlier to Robespierre and Marat. As Jonathan Israel has argued in excruciating detail, they were not the "left"; they *hated* the liberals (Condorcet and the rest of the Girondins). And once you accept that, then the role of Rousseau in this process becomes very important indeed.
trump has shown the rot in American culture. It used to take terrible privation and suffering to drive people into horrible totalitarian political systems like fascism, in the modern US it seems merely being unhappy about societal changes that usually don't even directly affect an individual can drive about a third of the country into eliminationist fantasies. Mostly because there's an entire grievance/grift industry telling Americans every day that their world is ending and the Other is coming for their kids/home/guns/retirement/etc.
I think it is largely the result of a polity that no longer thinks of politics as a practical way of managing society and finding compromise, to an ego suffused battleground where any compromise is anathema and worthy of violent opposition. And that polity was formed by the creating of various organizations in the non-profit (Heritage foundation, Federalist society) and media spaces (FOX, Twitter, internet cesspools like 4chan) that are in fact dedicated to the destruction of traditional classical liberal policies and the creation of institutions and systems that guarantee eternal rule by an aggrieved minority.
We use fascism as shorthand because of the similarity of authoritarian and totalitarian tendencies, but it really goes beyond that. Most of the cutting edge thinkers (loosely speaking) on the right want to overturn not just democracy but the Enlightenment itself (https://theweek.com/articles/937611/conservatives-who-want-undo-enlightenment).
I am at a loss as to what can cause that kind of nihilism and how to combat it. And it's not new, it's been the backbone of movement conservatism since the 1950s.
Machine learning algorithm is, I guess, the academic term for con artist. That's what con artists do - they listen attentitively to their marks and learn what they want and what their weaknesses are, then they tell them what they want to hear. They want a strong leader to protect them and to stop their world from changing, and he exudes strength. Is he fascist? Sure, why not? He talks like one. But he's really interested in only two things: Power and image.
He stepped onto a field well-prepared by Gingrich Republicans, who promised far more than they could or would really want to deliver abd raised the expectations of their fascist wing. The Democrats, for our part, kept trying to convice people to agree with them (you win elections by convincing people you agree with them, not by convincing them to agree with you), and weren't listening to voters. So Trump had a fairly easy time stepping in and grabbing up an electoral base - not a majority, but enough people in the right states to win the electoral college and get the power to retaliate against all the people who had, in his view, tarnished his image.
It’s possible (likely, IMO) that there are times when change (including technology) develops too fast for many people to handle. You recently posted a link to Sean Carroll’s discussion with the physicist/complexity theorist Geoffrey West. If you haven’t yet, please watch the Geoffrey West 2024 lecture video that Sean provides on https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/03/25/270-solo-the-coming-transition-in-how-humanity-lives/ It ends with Geoff’s suggestion that the individual brain may evolve, but in some people it does not seem to evolve fast enough and they turn to authoritarianism because change is happening too fast. That may be why we’ve had wars and fascism after large bursts of rapid technological advancement—and may have another soon. (If I read "The Great Transformation" correctly, that relates to one of Polanyi’s points about fascism.)
The 20th century had 2 other good examples of fascist governments - Spain and Japan. Spain was similar to France in an earlier century, but Japan was indutrialized by the time it became fascist with a militaristic government. Both should be used as evidence in theories of why fascism emerges. It was also evident in France, the UK, and USA in the earler part of teh 20th Century, but failed to become controling. Why? What conditions derailed the forces that propeled it to dominance in the countries that did become fascist?
Your inclusion of Jackson is, I think, correct, but when it comes to France I'd take it back a bit earlier to Robespierre and Marat. As Jonathan Israel has argued in excruciating detail, they were not the "left"; they *hated* the liberals (Condorcet and the rest of the Girondins). And once you accept that, then the role of Rousseau in this process becomes very important indeed.