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?
The gish gallop has gone mainstream.
What we needed, twenty to forty years ago at the bare minimum, were journalists who were willing to shut that shit down.
I remember being a child watching the news with my parents and seeing an oil company defender accusing the scientists of chasing profits.
Like what the fuck? How did that not end immediately with “And who is currently profiting?” is and always has been beyond me.
…I’m not sure that’s a great example of the gish gallop. Technically.
My point was that we now report the untrue claims rather than saying, from the start, “This candidate said something completely false and not worth repeating.”
For clicks, views, the algorithm, for profit. Nope. It was all to game the system in order to destroy it.
Sorry, this probably isn’t coherent but I’m tired and tipsy, and I’ve chosen to hit save.
Of course this is death by a thousand cuts. For me a lot of blame goes to the Reagan administration. They really set up the next 40 yrs plus with trickle down economics. It really hammered home that government is for profit of corporations, not a non-profit service for the people. Citizens United vs FEC (1988) also opened the flood gates to money in politics with no recourse by the public. It’s been a downhill from there in my opinion.
I should’ve given the full context - when I was a kid watching the news with my parents it was likely late in the Carter administration, or early in Reagan’s. So yeah, fully agreed.
*2010
Woops, you are right the case was 2010, Citizens United was founded in 1988.
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’
-Isaac Asimov, 1980
Ach, beat me to it.
That’s what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that’s being jammed up their assholes every day, because the owners of this country know the truth: It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it." -George Carlin
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.
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.
The citizenship test is only in English, so anyone able to vote will be able to understand English.
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.
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 grew up in a small Utah town. The only four adults I ever remember hearing admit they were wrong especially when it came to politics or science or religion were my father and three of my high school teachers.
All the rest would literally tell me that the research papers and encyclopedias I tried to cite as evidence were made up by either satan or some government deep state conspiracy. Or they’d say we can “agree to disagree” about shit like animals feeling pain and the flaws in eugenics (I wish I was joking)
Yes, they have always been this stupid. Learning requires accepting when you’re wrong and the vast majority of people I knew growing up saw that as weakness.
I thought it would be different when I got out of that place, and while living in a larger city is better, it’s not better by all that much.
You forgot Satan. They also like to blame anything bad on Satan’s apparently limitless power and also Satan being so unbusy that they’d devoted time and energy into stealing your shoes.
They literally mentioned that.
Blame Satan.
Grew up in southern Idaho. Yeah that’s pretty much what I experienced growing up, too!
Wasn’t just admitting wrongness that was seen as weakness, though - honestly I came to find that most empathetic, society benefitting behaviors are spun and contorted into a weakness.
Ironic to me that, at least thru my eyes, spinning stuff like that into a “weakness” indicates to me that they’re avoiding the work they’d need to put in to be better… Which, is the real weakness here!
I think a significant portion of the problems in the US stems from a lack of willingness to work on themselves, aiming to minimize their impact on those around them (and thus themselves, through societal proxy). On the contrary, people install loud ‘mufflers’ to show they don’t give a fuck. Or leave carts outside the corral. Or scream at fast food workers, display flagrant racism, refuse to wear COVID masks - whatever.
Good ol Golden Rule really would solve it all, I think.
To be completely fair, something like 80% of the state of Utah belongs to a cult. You don’t see as much of this in coastal states.
As a westerner who lived in Asia for the past 2 decades I have unusual take on this.
Americans generally aren’t more stupid than anyone else but they have no face saving culture which acts as a useful bottleneck on social and information exchanges. Because of this Americans can easily subscribe and announce their beliefs even if theyre low effort conspiracies because they are not afraid of losing face for believing in something stupid.
Combined that with information flow that is too fast for most to even comprehend let alone keep up with means that Americans are quick to believe lies and don’t feel punished for doing so.
This is very different in face saving cultures like Asia where if you say or do something stupid you’ll have strong social consequences and even spiritual/religious ones if you’re a Buddhist.
The caveat here is why Europeans are a bit better than this? I’m not sure i hadn’t lived there for a while but I’d imagine that smaller countries are less susceptible to this issue as they can correct quicker and I think Europe does have a bit of face saving culture, well definitely more than the US.
TL;DR: Americans are stupid because they are shameless
Maybe part of it is the whole “greatest country on earth” stuff as well. In other words, a lack of humility
In the European countries I’ve lived in, pride like that wasn’t really encouraged. And if you’re too boastful or what not to the point of arrogance, you tend to get the stink eye
And this applies to patriotism as well. Here in Norway for example, despite us having a stronger claim for stuff like “greatest country”, very few people, if any, really feel like being “proud” of one’s own country is something that one should be doing, or it being honorable at all. The best I see is that people enjoy living here and, if they see another Norwegian out there or Norway mentioned, they just get happy to see a fellow Norwegian, just because we are relatively small
Honestly, most Norwegians I’ve met complain about Norway’s problems more often than not lmao, despite, all things considered, you can hardly find better countries to live in, except some other European ones depending on your own preferences
There really is just, no culture of like, arrogance. Something that I feel like is very different to the US with its super heavy emphasis on individual capitalistic success
Maybe that’s a large part of it as well. A consequence of American culture being so extremely individualistic
Wow you putting it like that:
TL;DR: Americans are stupid because they are shameless
That’s literally it. You are so right.
I cannot count the amount of times that “annoying uncle/dad” is spewing racist/sexist/uneducated bullshit and everyone in the family feels like they just have to let them say it.
We really need to normalize pointing out stupid pov’s with harmful consequences.
This also reminds me of the common experience in the US of some random white dude with a megaphone screaming “Jesus saves blablabla” in public places. Why the fuck do we deal with that shit?
“My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
- Isaac Asimov, sarcastically making a point
The Netherlands is tiny and has a right wing extremist government full of very, very stupid people. In fact, the Dutch version of The Onion sued the minister of foreign affairs because it’s impossible to distinguish between what she says and what they come up with.
The caveat here is why Europeans are a bit better than this?
The European countries had their own wave of fascism and dictatorship in recent centuries. Some seem to have leaned from the experience.
This comment hits hard. There are a lot of ignorant people in my life that spout idiotic stuff and I brush it off, I disengage. I could take the time to listen, converse and correct but I don’t. I disengage, I brush it off as just “Oh boy, there goes crazy Joe rambling again! But generally he’s a good guy so I’ll tolerate it”. I need to start taking the time to push back and correct people I care about so they understand people are judging them when stupid things are said. Thank you!
Something people are discussing but not enough is America and the world’s refusal to diagnose and medicate mental illness.
Crazy Joe may just need meds.
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
- Isaac Asimov, 1980
There were people warning against the glorification of ignorance in the US nearly half a century ago. It’s nothing new; it just reached critical mass (also thanks to social media where ignorant people can self-organise).
Excellent point about the ignorance. I would also add ingratitude. People look to whiners like the Donvict and think that complaining about first world problems is a legit reason to destroy founding principles like integrity, justice, and separation of powers. Americans have it good overall and they spoil themselves with greed. Thanksgiving to them is about football and cryptocurrency commercials and not enough about actually giving thanks, giving back, selflessness, service, kindness, empathy, and goodwill. Add a drop of ignorance and social media brainwashing and you get a nation with too many zombie mooks wearing red hats that turn out to vote. Easily conned, they ignorantly vote against their own interests. Bernie Sanders and AOC have been showing that there’s a better way to solve problems and to work for every American. But it takes gratitude, selflessness, and work, not lazy golfing and whining.
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The republicans have been ruining the education system for decades. Can’t have smart people without paid teachers.
Billionaires are extracting all the wealth from this country and convincing the idiots that Maria from El Salvador with 2 dollars to her name is the problem.
Targeted, systematic attacks on education, and a robust propaganda networks ran by billionaires.
“The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”
-Isaac Asimov
Post-modernism laid the groundwork for an ‘I have my facts and you have yours’ culture. Or call it ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge’. Community has been replaced by an atomised screen time facing our individual echo chambers. Decades of neoliberalism has impoverished swathes of the population, materially and intellectually. There are many chickens coming home to roost.
I don’t think postmodernism had much to do with it. Go ask your average MAGA racist if they even know what that term means and they’ll shrug their shoulders. Similarly, the research does not show that your echo chamber theory holds water, and in fact it suggests the opposite. In the days before the world wide web, people were actually stuck in echo chambers, that being the communities where they lived.
It’s not that the MAGA voter is debating merits of intelectual movements, but a change in mindsets.
the shift from philosophers wondering “why are we here?” to “doesn’t matter why, what do we do now?” removed a sense of duty or obligation to less individualistic moralities drom the way people thought.
Which contemporary philosophers demonstrate this supposed shift in thinking?
Hmm, we’ve lost our philosophical heart. Interesting. I feel like I knew this in my gut but couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I like the way you phrased this, I’ll have to remember it.
Post-modernism laid the groundwork for an ‘I have my facts and you have yours’ culture.
I feel like this is a common regressive take. The Right/anti intellectualist movement understood postmodernism as giving them the right to claim that facts don’t matter.
Post modernism itself is a way of interrogating frameworks we take for granted. It’s not saying “facts don’t matter,” it’s saying “how do we know those are facts”? There are valid questions to ask about science as a way of knowing - which epistemological frameworks we take at face value, and if we really can. Lolita is a postmodernist work, because it’s asking you to interrogate what a novel means (in the context of an unreliable narrator - HH is lying to you, but he isn’t real. what does that mean about what is being described in a novel? Is a novel a window into a different universe which has a reality to be described?)
The Right’s unreality is more of a Romantic one - none of those fuckers are reading Derrida or Deleuze. It’s more related to sexual insecurities and the death drive. I’m not a Freudian but I look at anti intellectuals and see deep sexual confusion and fear. If “male” and “female” are permeable categories, how does someone who defines their existence solely by their white masculinity going to police the boundaries of their own identity?
Advantageous geography has allowed the US to fall upward in success throughout its existence. It’s as simple as that, no joke. By sitting on a mountain of natural resources and having no formidable enemies in the western hemisphere, the US was the default player to take center stage post WW2. Europe was decimated and America funded the war. Bam, the US gets success in spite of its thoroughly racist and regressive culture. Their position (and hubris) became too entrenched for there to ever be a legitimate contender. We might get to witness a changing of the guard now though, we’ll see how much damage 47 does.
FDR era is an incredible circumstance though. The past North’s failure to reconstruct the South led to all kinds of strategic chess moves that ultimately saw the D and R parties swap. The liberals had to put aside the racism problems for a bit so they could unfuck the economy. It was probably the best that the progressives could have hoped to achieve given their challenges.
All said as an American. So we’re not all morons. But it’s a sticky, uphill battle. I’m not sure if it’s fixable without a big change to the world order. Thanks for the question!
First and foremost, beyond all other things, the problem is that people in the United States see no other country but the United States. You have libertarians arguing that taxation is theft as if the United States is the only country in the world with an income tax. You have people talking about 15 minute cities as if it’s some theoretical, untested idea instead of the absolute norm in every other country. America is continually pretending that it can’t see its problems solved everywhere else. That it can’t imagine a better world even though one already exists.
The American dream is an all time amazing piece of propaganda that has left every American imagining that one day, through hard work, they will become the oppressor, and that has created a population so submissive and pliable in the face of its own destruction that Russia, China, and even North Korea could never even dream about having.
America won big both morally and militarily in WWII. For the average poorly informed citizen, that meant our government had permanently earned its position as the Good Guy. Lots of people thought (and still think) that any evidence to the contrary is merely a mistake or anomaly.
Then there’s capitalism. Wartime manufacturing brought us out of the Great Depression, and even the average citizen benefited. Unfortunately, capitalism became much more powerful than we realized, and now we’re beginning to see what a monster we’ve created. We know that the top 1% are literally killing our biosphere to protect their investments, but somehow our Good Guy government is allowing it to continue. The average citizen can’t reconcile those facts, so they decided that the facts must be wrong.
Government and capitalism have always been intertwined, but never to the extent we’re seeing under Trump. A Nazi billionaire is shaping government policy. That was supposed to be impossible. Again, the average citizen can’t reconcile those truths, so many of them decided that the libtards must be exaggerating.
I wouldn’t say that we Americans are stupid. I’d use the word “foolish” instead. “Deceived”, too. A few people saw what was coming and tried to warn the rest of us, but we let it happen anyway, because organizations that we thought we could trust lied to us.
Those of us with at least some awareness of what’s going on are traumatized (whether we think so or not). We’re trying to accept that our own government suddenly hates a lot of us, and that the corporations that have tried so hard to make themselves indispensable are, at best, constantly trying to deceive and monetize everything about us.
Anti-intellectualism has a certain tradition in the USA, it’s kind of well-known.
A German perspective: I think Germans have always been this stupid, they’re mostly just more willing to say the quiet part out loud than they were between 1970 and 2014 (rough estimate). The difference is that the far right extremists have a popular platform now, and the mainstream parties refuse to ban either the far right party or all the media (X, Facebook, local tabloid press etc.) that’s pushing them. If this party had been around in 1960, it would definitely have been banned.
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