People keep saying this and I personally don’t really believe it, I think there could be a couple riots, but not like a full on civil war. What does everyone think?
People keep saying this and I personally don’t really believe it, I think there could be a couple riots, but not like a full on civil war. What does everyone think?
I think that the US is primed to have a civil war. Ever since Reagan fucked the fairness doctrine in 1987, we’ve been getting more and more divided. Gonna sound like an old fogey here, but it used to be that everybody tuned into the same news, and watched the same anchors deliver the same updates about the same world events. We had differing opinions on world events, but we all agreed on what was and what was not reality.
We don’t have that now. It’s like two completely separate universes occupy the same physical space. In one universe, climate change is fueled by anthropogenic forces and is causing more and more catastrophic damage, viruses are real and vaccines are effective tools to combat them, and thousands of traitors tried to overthrow the government because their cult leader lost an election. In the other? Climate change isn’t real, and also the Democrats have secret hurricane machines that they are using to punish Florida for being a red state, COVID isn’t real, and also it’s a super virus concocted in a lab in Wuhan at the request of Hillary Clinton, vaccines don’t work, and also vaccines are secretly a government tool to kill people, and Jan 6th was a peaceful protest of patriots, and also it was a violent insurrection by Antifa.
We don’t share the same reality with each other. In one reality, Democrats are basically similar to milquetoast conservatives from any other first world nation, and they care much more about maintaining the status quo than they do about making progress. In the other reality? Democrats are evil incarnate, and they’re waging an active campaign to round up all of the patriots and send them to concentration camps, and they’re also pedophiles and Marxists. In that reality, it’s far more preferable to vote for a dead pimp than it is to vote for a standard, run-of-the-mill Democrat.
And it’s not just the whole two-realities thing. Ever since Obama became president, the brains of a huge chunk of people in this country just broke. Some of the nicest-seeming people you’d ever met instantly turned into vile, hate-spewing racists, and started mass subscribing to every single conspiracy theory feed out there. That was 16 years ago. Their rhetoric has been getting more violent every year since. That’s to say nothing of the huge increase in terrorist incidents since then - according to the CSIS:
So yeah. I think that this country is primed for organized, mass violence. At this point, all that it’s lacking is the organization. Thankfully, Donald Trump is an incredibly stupid man. I don’t think he’d be capable of organizing people to that level. He can stoke their hatred, for sure. He can inspire the craziest among them to firebomb a mosque or shoot up a Democrat’s office… but he ain’t built to lead people. If someone who had even 1/10th of his prowess as a cult leader, but who was actually intelligent and had a tactical mind came along… hoo boy.
Having two different realities is not good. I’m not sure what is to be done about it though. Some people will always choose to believe the easy lie over the difficult truth.
Ignoring Fox and the crazies for a moment, how often have mainstream networks given equal time to climate change deniers and actual scientists, pretending there was a debate where there wasn’t one.
I want to push back a little on “we all agreed on what was and what was not reality.” When there were three TV stations, did any of them highlight police brutality? Overincarceration? The military industrial complex? Anything that would hurt their sponsor’s bottom lines?
The news networks we have today are all owned by large media conglomerates. They range from pro-corporate to pro-fascist. I’m glad that there are enough independent voices that we can hear from people who don’t profit off of the status quo. It’s unfortunate that right wing media is so prevalent and well funded, but if there is an answer to that, it’s not going back to the days when Walter Cronkite, CBS, and Gulf+Western would tell us “That’s the way it is”.
This is a very fair point. True, having very limited news options didn’t allow for a lot of deviation in agreement on observable reality, but to your point, it could also easily paper over a lot of very ugly parts of the actual reality. Chomsky writes quite a lot about this in his book “Manufacturing Consent”, which basically is a dive into how media organizations can be used as the propaganda arm of the government. Everything from choosing what you show to choosing how you talk about things goes towards bolstering an underlying narrative that you want to project.
I’m not sure what a solution would look like, if one is even possible. But solution or no, the narrative divergence in this country has primed us to detest each other, which is the first crucial step towards mass violence.
That is what I try to communicate to folks who are freaking out about Trump. You have to worry about the next guy, and the next guy, and the next guy. You can’t just keep voting Democrat, you actually have to get organized if you want to stop fascism, because Trump isn’t the font that fascism springs from, he is an inept conman who is riding the wave.
True, but have you looked at the “intelligentsia” of the Republican party? They’ve got nobody. Just grifters and sycophants. It’s one more small mercy. Obviously, this situation can’t be counted on to continue indefinitely, but once Trump is gone, the only thing ready to take his place is Trump-based nostalgia, and people looking to profit off same.
The “intelligentsia” of the Republican Party are dyed-in-the-wool fascist complete monsters like Roger Stone and Steven Miller. They are cunning, dangerous and should not be underestimated.
I’m more worried about democrats having triangulated into fascism in the medium term tbh. Like competent diet fascism vs incompetent blood and soil fascism
I’m less worried about that, not because there aren’t evil people among the Democrats, but because the Democrats are positioning themselves as the anti-fascist party at the moment. Starting up a fascist movement of their own at the moment would be bad business.
Long term, though? 100% agree. Can’t trust none of these fucks. Hopefully, the Interstate Popular Vote Compact kicks off before that happens, and we can do away with the EC. Won’t completely solve the problem, but it will help.
Their rhetoric sure is, but if you look at their actual policies they’re continuing and escalating some of the worst things Trump did. Migrant concentration camps, massive police funding increases, worsening security and surveillance laws, the whole nine yards.
Also, fascism is the reassertion of the dominance of financial capital over the system and the democrats take money from the banks just as much as the Republicans.