One of the disadvantages to democracy that Thomas Paine actually highlighted in "Common Sense" is that when things are off the rails in a monarchy, the cause (and remedy) are obvious. In a democracy, far less so.
When Americans elect bad leadership, they ultimately have nobody to blame but themselves, and that damages the public attitude; I suspect one of the reasons "stolen election" conspiracy theories are so popular right now is that the alternative is one must simply be skeptical of the good judgment of one's neighbors, and people don't want to live like that.
This, too, is a pattern we've seen before. The several Presidents elected prior to Lincoln were known as the "Bumbling Generation." When America gets scared of its own shadow, it tends to elect ineffectual leaders because neither side actually wants an empowered Presidency, lest it reward their opponents.
(One major difference between the antebellum period and now is it's a little harder to see precisely what the cleave-line is that has America's hands around its own throat. In hindsight, slavery was obvious. But the battle lines here are not so brightly drawn... Class? Faith-based conservatism vs. modern cosmopolitanism? Tech savviness vs. technophobia? Possibly enough of all three to make a crisis).
>> the alternative is one must simply be skeptical of the good judgment of one's neighbors, and people don't want to live like that.
People love being skeptical of their neighbors' judgement, what they're afraid of is being skeptical of their own. They can't handle backing the wrong horse, so instead they declare that the system is wrong
Was just going to say this. We have gotten away from any kind of accountability as a standard, and some of that is driven by the fact that our leadership(no one specific, talking about the state of global leadership currently) shows no accountability either.
The system is wrong. It already has been corrupted to a very large degree, because, surprise, people who gained power, like to retain it and an average power broker is as willing to let go of it as an average mollusc attached to a rock.
The problem is that workable solution within the confines of the system requires somewhat educated populace. Or maybe not educated given the state of education in US.
I do see signs of hope in the form of push to 'return to office' mandates ( I just threw a middle finger to HR for denying my remote myself simply refusing to come back ). People seem to rediscover that the rules are really 'by the consent of the governed' and there is strength in numbers.
This reminds me of negative interest rates because they are inherently about giving up power, or rather, artificially raising interest rates from the negative range is about maintaining power.
Let's say there are sources of excess power like political corruption. You can gain a lot of power over a short period of time but you want that power to last long. You wouldn't want to be corrupt and become rich for 5 years, be voted out then be poor again, you want to be rich your entire life long after your political career has ended.
That excess power needs to be stored somehow. We use land and money to store this excess power. In my opinion, corruption wouldn't be as widespread if its impact didn't outlive the original act of corruption.
Isn’t some of this power dynamic just human nature to a degree? Those in power often have a hard time believing that someone else would do a better job. Power is truly a corrupting force over a long enough time span, even for those that start out with the best intentions.
>I suspect one of the reasons "stolen election" conspiracy theories are so popular right now is that the alternative is one must simply be skeptical of the good judgment of one's neighbors, and people don't want to live like that
I suspect it's because the major politicians of one of the two major parties overwhelmingly tell them it was. Trump says so, the Republicans who follow him say so, and the alternative is to acknowledge the guys you support are trying to overthrow the government, so it must be "true".
The fact that the leadership of a major party has chosen to not show restraint is certainly part of it. But there is a reason that their message is resonating instead of the voters just turning away in disgust and the party replacing those pressing that narrative with someone else in the party as leadership. Instead, the party is bending towards that messaging because it is resonating with voters.
The cleave-line IMO is very clear: the have and have-nots. People who live of capital (i.e. rent-seeking) VS those who live of their labour (or rather increasingly don't).
>(One major difference between the antebellum period and now is it's a little harder to see precisely what the cleave-line is that has America's hands around its own throat. In hindsight, slavery was obvious. But the battle lines here are not so brightly drawn... Class? Faith-based conservatism vs. modern cosmopolitanism? Tech savviness vs. technophobia? Possibly enough of all three to make a crisis).
It's two fundamentally irreconcilable worldviews, which are alluded to in TFA.
FTA:
>>One grievance that drove support for Donald Trump in 2016 was that American coastal elites felt more connected to elites in other countries than to their fellow Americans in the heartland. And there was some truth to that! There’s also truth to the European version of it—that some elites in France and Germany and Britain feel closer to one another than to the working stiffs in their own countries.
>>Interestingly, there have been attempts to counter this international network of elites with an international network of Trumpist nationalists (however ironic that may sound). I can actually imagine this kind of international populist tribe becoming a stable part of a global community—but this isn’t the place to elaborate on that long-term scenario (which I’ve done elsewhere). My main point is that one big development of recent decades—the formation of international tribes whose cohesion sometimes comes at the expense of national cohesion—was bound to happen, given the direction of technological evolution; and it was bound to be turbulent.
>>And, leaving aside the inherent tensions of moving toward a global level of social organization, there are lots of other digital-technology-abetted (and sometimes specifically social-media-abetted) problems to worry about. Like QAnoners and other conspiracy theory tribes. And violent political extremist tribes. And intense animosity among even less extreme ideological tribes. And so on.
Wright (the OP) is sort of taking this for granted, and the phrase "global level of social organization" sounds pretty benign - lots of people from different cultures all over the world, getting together and organizing humanity ... sounds great, like the plot to a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. Anyway, the two irreconcilable worldviews are wanting this to happen and thinking it's good and inevitable, and not wanting it and thinking it's terrible and represents an erasure of national and cultural identity.
To your point, about past presidents, it would be very very helpful if people on the left and right would just be honest about all of this. Instead it gets cloaked in a lot of technobabble or scorn or just taken for granted because, again, how could anyone possibly disagree with a global organization of humanity unless they're racists, right? That's the future we've all seen in the more utopic science fiction over and over again. Whether this leads to a hot conflict within nations, or just remains a cold-but-simmering civil war is a separate question.
This makes a great deal of sense. Coupling it with the classic American entitlement thought in a peer thread, I think I can even see why it's only manifesting as a problem recently in the United States (I would say mostly within the past decade or so, whereas the technology to enable cheap long-distance cross-national cultural and economic flow is decades older)... Americans hadn't had this problem previously because the global metacultural phenomenon had been heavily America-biased. People were concerned about McDonald's crapping up in Russia, but concerns about other people's ideas blending with the American way of doing things were dismissed mostly, I think, because a lot of Americans just assumed their way was the best way so it would dominate.
But that was never going to happen, and the cross-national mixing has been passing the inflection point where things that seem anti-American to those disconnected from the rest of the world seem perfectly natural to those deeply plugged in.
The "global" vs "local" dynamic also maps pretty well to those other issues you referred to - class dynamics, cosmopolitanism, tech savviness ... all of these make a strong inference where, if you fall into the category where you are upper class and cosmopolitan and are optimistic about technology, you are very likely to be in favor of a more global approach to managing civilization. Hell, it even maps (though less cleanly) to things that at first glance you'd assume are completely unrelated, like thinking the pandemic originated in a lab in Wuhan.
It is worth noting, however, that there is strong push back in the broader west against the more aggressive American cosmopolitan ideas that half of the country here finds alien. Macron in particular seems to recognize this trend[1]. He seems like a genuine outlier, though, and his skepticism may be an artifact of the general weakness of the French left. This is to say, that while these ideas look and feel alien to ~50% or more of each country in question, they still did, in fact, emerge and gain prominence in America first and were then exported.
When Americans elect bad leadership, they ultimately have nobody to blame but themselves, and that damages the public attitude; I suspect one of the reasons "stolen election" conspiracy theories are so popular right now is that the alternative is one must simply be skeptical of the good judgment of one's neighbors, and people don't want to live like that.
This, too, is a pattern we've seen before. The several Presidents elected prior to Lincoln were known as the "Bumbling Generation." When America gets scared of its own shadow, it tends to elect ineffectual leaders because neither side actually wants an empowered Presidency, lest it reward their opponents.
(One major difference between the antebellum period and now is it's a little harder to see precisely what the cleave-line is that has America's hands around its own throat. In hindsight, slavery was obvious. But the battle lines here are not so brightly drawn... Class? Faith-based conservatism vs. modern cosmopolitanism? Tech savviness vs. technophobia? Possibly enough of all three to make a crisis).