“The United States, just months before its 250th birthday as the world’s leading democracy, has tipped over the edge into authoritarianism and fascism,” Garrett Graff, the American historian and author, wrote in August. “In the end, faster than I imagined possible, it did happen here.”
One awakes to new horrors each day. And it is difficult to grasp – and painful to realize – just how far gone we are, and how quickly it has happened.
“The United States, just months before its 250th birthday as the world’s leading democracy…"
Is this an Onion article???
Strategic
Again an article pretending America’s blatant violence wealth inequality and imperialism was just fine before Trump.
The Republic fell with the SCOTUS Trump v United States decision. It’s just a matter of discovering what things look like once the dust settles.
And yet, none of this is in any way surprising. This is what the US voted for. Nobody who voted for Trump can claim innocence. They all knew exactly what they were doing.
I don’t know, the line between malice and stupidity has become so blurred with these folks - like some really didnt know what they were voting for but that’s only because they didn’t want to either out of weakness or assholishness. I never really grasped Malicious Stupidity before, nor how many of us were in its throes.
I think so many people have been raised/indoctrinated into the notion that they could not possibly vote Democratic. To do so would mean their soul would go to hell (“demoncrats”), or that they’d lose their manliness (cuz “soy boys” and Teh Gheyz, etc) or that they are siding with “radicals” (lol), and so on. Or you have single issue voters that are still hung up on things like their precious gunz or worried about abortion or getting their little book club into schools…
I think some people are so very locked into a certain identity so much that they think the only option besides voting Republican would be to not vote at all.
I feel like this argument would have held ground in 2016. After the first time around - after Jan 6th - everyone knew exactly what they were voting for.
Traditionally, being a consumer of mainstream media wasn’t the disability that it has become currently. Not that it was ever totally accurate or great. It’s just managed to get far worse. But so many people out of cultural and social inertia still are.
20 years ago blanket calling out the msm would have safely gotten you dismissed. Today it’s just par for the course as they’ve all been captured by fascists oligarchs.
One semantic point, “it did happen here” is inaccurate, it continues to happen and what little road blocks were in place ammounted to the suggestion of a speed bump in practice. This is still going on and will continue because it has not been stopped.
In a way, all malice is born of stupidity.
Either way, it’ll be small comfort when they are loading people on to the cattle cars saying, well, they were too stupid to know what they were voting for…
This comment reduces a 50 year campaign to destroy education in the US and polarize everything to people simply voting this in.
I’m with you. The school system is designed to keep voters stupid and uneducated when it comes to civil matters. But at some point, you can’t use it as an excuse. Yes, the system was against them, and miseducated them to this purpose, but they’re still making the decision. You can’t just handwaive away 100% of responsibility for the decisions people make as being a result of being victims of circumstance, because then there’s no such thing as a human being being responsible for their decisions.
True, but don’t forget that the internet essentially destroyed the last guardrail against stupidity: social exclusion.
Pre-internet (not even social media mind you as prior to that, BBSes and forums existed), if you were a dumbfuck, you got excluded. No friends, no hanging out with people, nobody wanted to spend time with you. And most people being social beings, you’d want to avoid that, therefore you either didn’t voice those opinions, or learned to change them.
Then came the internet and suddenly, the morons found brethren. First were the conspiracy theorists who were already excluded, finding safe havens to hide out at. But then slowly - and this is where mass social media, and easy access to it via smartphones and tablets, and affordable computing, comes in - the other morons, let them be racists, antisemites, homophobes, transphobes, etc., slowly discovered that hey, while they might be alone in their surroundings, they’re not alone when you account for 7 (back then, today it’s 8) billion people!
And so the last guardrail was gone, and stupidity, a la Idiocracy, has begun to spread.
Not to mention that the Nazis, coming out of hiding, were quick to utilise these new spaces to recruit people. Now with less overt racism and antisemitism, they preyed on the newer generation.
Remember when around 2012-13-14, all the big meme sites - 9gag, iFunny, etc. - slowly became more and more extremists, racist, and overtly Nazi? That was a somewhat coordinated move, capturing the youngest generation knowing full well their parents aren’t yet tech-savvy enough to do anything about it. Kids under 20-22 lack the reasoning skills older people do, this directly leads to lesser understanding on how bad their actions are, and how they’re being influenced. Which did happen slowly but surely, and resulted in the Trunp win just a few years later.
Mind you I’m not saying these people don’t need to take responsibility for their actions - they most definitely do. I’m purely explaining the reasons why things unfolded as they did, so we can prevent it in the future.
The real mistake was not finishing the job of getting rid of all Nazis back in 1945.
People were dumb and voted for fascism before the Internet, you know
In limited numbers, sure.
I was merely commenting on the verifiable result of the last US presidential election. I’m certainly aware of the events that lead up to that. On the other hand, I’m really really sick and tired of the constant excuses I’m hearing that are being made for the morons and assholes. If you voted for Trump you’re a moron and/or and asshole (usually both). No excuses. Nobody can tell me those people didn’t know what they were doing.
Yes and no. A lot of people are misinformed. It’s easy to say not being misinformed is the responsibility of the individual, just like recycling plastic is the responsibility of the individual consumer. Reality is a bit more nuanced. Misinformed people often simply don’t have access to good information or critical thinking skills to not be duped. Many others are straight up vulnerable to manipulation, through fears etc.
Democracy only works if people are informed. I think the American system has failed catastrophically to inform ordinary people.
That might apply to people in North Korea. In the US a different viewpoint is literally just a press of a button away. Their ignorance is very much willful. They believe all this shit because they want to.
Have you watched their propaganda networks? They believe the same things about the left. They think they saved the republic from monsters. They think ICE is deporting murderers. They think antifa is a literal terrorist organization. They think 47 stopped 8 wars. They think these things because they’re in an information silo. No wait, they’re in a CULT. Some people do know that what they’re doing is evil. Most likely those at the top. But the rank-and-file MAGA are brainwashed cult members.
It would be very easy for these people to get information from different viewpoints. Their ignorance is wilful.
Oh for heaven’s sake they would say the same thing about you! Cult members do not think rationally. I know this from personal experience. If the message comes outside approved channels, it is disinformation at best and at worst, the work of Satan. Would you go to OANN for a different viewpoint? I’m beating this horse because I think it’s important to keep straight who the real enemy is: the elite class who is manipulating media and money to keep you and your MAGA neighbors under their heel. Your neighbor may lick the boot while you spit on it, but it’s crushing you both. The only way to turn the tables is to understand why your neighbor licks the boot and find common ground so you can work together to untie the laces and trip the enemy.
The decline and direction was started way before Trump.
Makes it sound like a natural disaster, Trump’s name only appears three times in the body text of the article.
Trump may be the catalyst, but he couldn’t do anything alone. He has hundreds of MAGA federal officials and tens of millions of Americans propping him up, as well as benefiting from a spineless (with one notable recent exception) Democratic Party that willingly became the face of a broken status quo.
Can’t put direct blame on Dear Leader, after all.
At this point the rest of the world has to assume that everything is A-OK with America, and this is the America we need to plan to deal with going forward.
The American people (as a whole) have given us no sign that they are anything more than mildly concerned about the situation.
Please spare me the “but protests” and “I have a family” BS. The last No Kings should have been, far and away, the biggest protest in US history. It was not even close. Almost triple the amount of people came out, for (can you believe it) Earth Day in 1970.
The US is so, so far from where they need to be to stop this, and I’m 100% positive that when people start throwing their lives at this problem, it will be far too late.
Yeah… Things are not great for America, but it’s unfortunately a bigger problem than that. Democracy in general is being put against the ropes around the world, and isn’t putting up much of a fight.
Pretty much every democratic nation with a large economy has been flirting with fascist the last 10 years, America is just being the trail blazer. Democracy has become too entangled with capital. Instead of creating boundaries and limitations upon the predation of capitalism, we’ve largely just traded social security and stability for economic exploitation.
How easy it is for you to provide insight from outside the prison.
I’ll second this. Some of us do “have a family” and we are just trying to get out like it’s 1940 France…
Right, because you can’t possibly understand, recognize and prepare yourself for fascism unless it’s actively in your country.
Woe is you.
Oh is that what you were doing? It looked an awful lot like you just complaining as the voice of not only Canada but also the world about a situation you’re a third party observer to.
I certainly hope you never have to deal with what the US is facing, but I seriously doubt you guys will fair any better.
Am I a third party observer? Really?
Come on now. If you want to have a debate, do better than that.
I don’t want or need to debate you and if you aren’t living in America you’re a third party?
It might not be my government, but your president has openly threatened my sovereignty and is currently engaged in economic and psychological warfare against my country.
I am not a third party to American fascism any more than Ukraine is a third party to Russian authoritarianism.
Not everyone at Earth Day was protesting, though. The last No Kings protest was the largest number of protesters in US history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_protests_and_demonstrations_in_the_United_States_by_size
The George Flloyd protests were bigger and not just a single day. I’d put that as more active than No Kings on the single day. Regardless, this shouldn’t even be a debate. It should be unequivocal that protests should be larger and more frequent than anything in American history. Anything short of that is a failure.
