Minnesota guy. "This particular activist will not stop." Sen. Chris Murphy
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I don’t think fascism forms “magically,” I think it’s a social phenomenon that forms from people convincing other people to be fascists, rather than arising from some kind of underlying economic condition. I think the experience of the last few years has shown this to be a pretty good theory
do you not think the two things I said were compatible
What turns people into fascists is being given a permission structure to indulge their most paranoid and resentful fantasies about social decline and racial caste, which, as it turns out, also happens quite a lot online One such permission structure: “the libs yelled at me too much for my views”
It genuinely is shocking to me how unseriously everyone still on Twitter seems to take the idea that the platform (under current ownership and with current userbase composition) might be feeding them a warped version of the discourse and that distortion is in turn impacting their views.
sorry am I not supposed to criticize nate
Left, right, center - a lot of dudes don’t care which one, they’re just looking for a space where they don’t have to pretend to care about racial minorities, sexual minorities, or women
Every six months they find a new way to say the problem is that any politics not entirely keyed to the cultural and social prerogatives of white men
lol they actually did it
If Trump had ever produced popular demonstrations even one quarter the scale of the No Kings protests, you’d genuinely have Dem leaders considering whether they should leave the country. But when it’s at their back they still don’t feel safe going on the offense.
It’s insane and it’s a clear signal that many Dems’ “political instincts” are a flimsy front for neurosis and conflict aversion. They hesitate to lean on the largest protest movements in US history (again this year!) but quake in terror at the slightest hint of right-wing grassroots sentiment.
the internet did deliver on its promise to connect people and spread ideas around the world and unfortunately the ideas that it is best at spreading are conspiratorial and fascist
In related news, I’ve discovered a provision of law that allows the Secretary of Transportation to summarily abolish cars and order construction of high-speed railways wherever he feels like it
This is the provision Ensign cited as the basis for the government's authority to summarily remove unaccompanied migrant children. I’d love to hear from immigration lawyers, but having briefly looked at it… it’s so frivolous it’d be laughable if it weren’t so cruel. (Am I wrong??)
You’re still just imagining a guy, is the thing. You need millions of these guys before it starts to even be a significant factor
Of course I do it but part of understanding the world better is recognizing the things distorting your thinking and trying to identify and correct them bsky.app/profile/adis...
I really think the hard part about thinking about society and politics isn’t coming up with explanations for stuff - that’s easy - it’s recognizing when those explanations are too pleasing. Most narratives about the spread because we find them satisfying not because they hold up to scrutiny
You are probably smart enough to rationalize whatever narrative about the world you want to believe, but that doesn’t mean it’s correct or you ought to do it
Like the reason animal spirits are so unpredictable is not that individual motives are unknowable but because there are so many individuals all interacting with each other. If you can’t actually find real humans talking about something it’s probably not happening, though
Yes but what you’re describing is the opposite of that. You’re describing a world in which The Big Liberal Fixation of the 2000s explains the Big Liberal Fixation of the 2020s. That’s not animal spirits, that’s the most convenient possible narrative for liberals
Everyone educated of a certain always wants to make Iraq and the financial crisis the roots of present-day trends because it was formative to us, but most normal people just don’t even remember that stuff very well.
I think this is all kinda silly. Brazil and Germany and India are all going fascist too. This stuff strikes me as an exceedingly amerocentric exercise of trying to link Stuff We Feel Was Important to Stuff That’s Happening Now
Like the idea that 60 million Americans, many of whom are under 30, have been grappling with a way to process our loss of imperial glory in Fallujah 20 years ago, it just doesn’t parse. It’s a narrative that only works if you anthropomorphize the whole nation as a single individual
It’s not that it’s irrational, it’s that you can talk to people and discover where they get their ideas and people aren’t stewing over Iraq
This is what happens when you obliterate the presumption of regularity. Endless homework assignments because the court can't trust the government to follow orders in good faith.
wouldn't be sporting!
I'd argue that the most alarming revelation of the past few years is that their effectiveness seems tied to the degree they validate people's fears and resentments far more than the degree they reflect any real event or trend in the world
media decentralization didn't happen immediately upon invention of the internet, took years for TV and print to decline and digital and online media consumption to become the norm. fifteen years ago Americans were still consuming much more TV than social media, now it's the opposite
the political fallout is a consequence of the increased fragmentation of the information space which has been getting worse for decades (and not just online - broadcast media too).
you can find prominent corners of the internet not dominated by big for-profit tech firms (e.g., 4chan) and if anything, they're FURTHER along the path of fascist radicalization. the basic dynamics here arise from lower cost of content production and broadcasting, which are a function of the tech
no, I strongly believe it's just the nature of the internet. lowered cost of publishing + huge potential audiences that depend on viral spread
Okay, but I do think that's the appeal of the very powerful current of left-wing thought that attempts to make MAGA a direct outgrowth of Bush. It's very narratively appealing if you were a certain kind of left-wing thinker through the 2000s
well a lot of people think a lot things caused election results that are almost certainly wrong
And if you look at the humiliations and outrages that MAGA relies on, they are indeed invented outright, more often than not! I don't think they really needed ambiguous conflicts twenty years prior to make their case or radicalize their voters, when they could talk about restroom litterboxes et al
I think there's no shortage of fears and resentments that right-wing media can play on - fears of national humiliation, racial degradation, cultural impurity or decline, the collapse of the social order surrounding gender or class. If humiliations and threats don't exist, they can be invented
Neoliberalism has its many faults, but neoliberalism didn't cause a worldwide fascist uprising. You can't even blame Fox and Murdoch outside the anglosphere. It is quite clearly an internet and social media phenomenon, and we need to deal with it accordingly.
Trump himself was supposedly trying to withdraw from Afghanistan, and Trump clearly predates the Afghanistan withdrawal. I think people dearly want MAGA fascism to be linked to the military adventurism they spent their life claiming was the defining feature of right-wing US politics, but it's not
Right, but most Americans had basically forgotten Afghanistan even existed. Biden's popularity didn't crater because of some imperial attachment to the idea of victory in Afghanistan, but because we got deluged with endless news coverage about foreign policy catastrophe
Oh I’ve read darkness at noon I just don’t remember that
Okay but that was literally a generation ago. And again, the same trend has happened everywhere, it’s hardly an American thing. And it’s not really in evidence at the micro level - many MAGA supporters were literally not even born for 9/11.
I have… never heard of this??
I mean, surely you can imagine hallucinatory reactionary fearmongering targeting ethnic minorities or immigrants absent the war on terror? I don’t think there’s a lot of evidence that politics of this nature needs particular real-world antecedents to spread
I’ve never seen that and it doesn’t sound like a real person. Here’s what I saw a lot of: people watching Fox News and becoming MAGA
Explain how that mechanism works on the micro level. Do you know anyone who sat around dwelled on the Iraq war and ultimately decided to go fascist 15 years later
“Going crazy from the internet or the television” is an incredibly widespread condition but many people still insist that our new fascist politics either reflects “how they always were” or must have deep roots in the political economy. Buddy it’s just YouTube poisoning
How many people in your real life that since 2018 have become really angry about America's global dominance or some crap. None. Now how many people do you know who have gone crazy from the Internet? I know plenty in addition to well known public figures like Musk or Rowling.
Psychology not philosophy
There’s still plenty of unpacking to do around fascism, it’s just more about the dark recesses of people’s psyches and how those veins of resentment can be used to suborn entire populations than it is about evaluating and debating the stated claims of the ideology.
I don’t really personally feel this way but it’s clear a lot of folks do and it’s been a real problem for confronting the fascists
It’s high-tier truthiness for educated progressives. Many such cases. We all want to live in the apotheosis of all our past correctness
It’s just the internet. Smart people spend their entire lives being rewarded for attaching dramatically and politically rewarding narratives to history so it’s not surprising to me that we all want to make it a product of US liberalism’s biggest bugaboos but that’s not how the real world works
One strange advantage of fascism is that a surprising number of intellectuals appear to find talking about it incredibly boring: it’s so facially evil. “Fascism bad” doesn’t seem worth anyone’s time so it often gets attacked only as part of a collateral attack on other, more interesting targets.
History is not full of inevitable culminations. It is full of blind turns and dead end alleys. Stuff happens, and then it’s superseded by other stuff, and then that is superseded by other stuff still.
I know it feels dramatically unfulfilling that the US was blundering along and then suddenly – BAM! – a new technology comes down that totally changes our politics and makes us all fascist. Like you would never plot a movie that way. None of this was foreshadowed in the first act! But that’s life
“The internet gives ideologies that rely on mass indoctrination an extraordinary boost by giving propagandists unregulated access to the entire population” is a bad theory in a lot of ways: boring, simple, doesn’t show the folly of US imperialism or neoliberalism. It just also happens to be right
The obvious Occam’s razor cause is just the internet, not any American sonderweg theory that sweeps in all the mistakes of past administrations and just so happens to prove that none of this would have happened if everyone had just listened to us before
Why is reactionary politics equally or more prominent in the UK, France, Germany, Brazil, etc, though
Physics isn't my area, but when I heard physicists talk about the cranks they get, one theme that comes up over and over again is people who have spent absurd amount of time developing idiosyncratic theories while not even being able to do linear algebra. This is a common way people fail.
This is disorienting because if you spent a huge % of your waking life on an issue, why wouldn't you effort to know it in and out? But that lazy obsessiveness is why crackpots are able to be crackpots. Creationists are like that. Free energy types are like that. It's just how people are.
He both deeply believes in it and is shockingly lazy about his beliefs, so they come across as unserious and semi-coherent. This is typical of cranks - obsessively into a topic while somehow not willing or able to develop any rigorous understanding of it.
Trump/RFK are decapitating our public health system, a pillar of American greatness. So Dem Govs should scour every corner of the law for creative new ways to defend their people from this madness. Dems should polarize this debate to the max. Thoughts on this here: newrepublic.com/article/1998...
It’s a smug and insufferable comment only tangentially related to the underlying point
RFK pretty clearly just believes in this stuff. It’s not some wheels-within-wheels plot
Yes, but not “let’s level our entire medical infrastructure and replace it with woo-woo insanity”
You can kind of wave your hand and say “oh it’s just eugenics” but destroying the health care system for everyone is a weird form for eugenics to take. I kind of think they’re just a bunch of insane cranks!
Obviously fascist politics are fertile breeding grounds for conspiracy theories but historically the race war people and the vaccine autism people have been rather different groups. It’s strange and not inevitable they merged. First-term Trump didn’t really have anything like this
I love how everyone has decided that Gourevitch’s perfectly reasonable point - that it’s bizarre Trump is embracing weirdo woo-woo junk science - needs to be viciously and personally dunked on. Quick, call him an idiot and talk about eugenics so everyone can see how smart you are!! What a site
at this rate, führerprinzip will become an accepted interpretive canon by 2028
Trump will rewrite US voting rules by fiat! He will demand 10% of every company! He will annex Canada and tariff every country on earth! He will abolish half the government with a wave of his hand! Can he do these things? Of course he can, he’s the president and that means you have to obey him
We’ve devolved from a government of laws and rules to a vibe government, where the president just kind of gets to tell everyone what to do because he’s the president and everyone knows you gotta listen to the president
Not a very long path from "Why wouldn't you want the regime to deploy federal troops in your city when it reduces carjackings?" to "Why would you be opposed to the erection of internment camps for deviants when it reduces crime?" And a good chunk of mainstream media will just follow along.
Maybe it's irrelevant in practical effect but I am genuinely so curious about the emotional and mental experience of being someone like this. There's really no part of you that rebels? That thinks "Maybe this time I should just tell the truth, respond like a human?"
Watching him, Lankford clearly knows how bad Kennedy is. He doesn't subscribe to the conspiracy theories. But he's trying to contort himself into a political shape that lunatic MAGA voters will accept, which requires him to pretend RFK is pursuing valid science and not speaking directly ill of him.
I don’t even understand what’s happening. It’s real stared-too-long-into-the-abyss stuff
I think it goes to the way fascist movements welcome and elevate criminals, liars, and cranks, because those people find it easy to participate in the basic fascist bargain of surrendering their morals and principles in exchange for unthinking fealty to the leader
the 21st century has seen two changes: media fragmenting massively, and also, the amount of time spent consuming media rise to unprecedented levels.
you're aware that false information was absolutely everywhere during the french revolution, right? that conspiracism and popular paranoia were huge drivers of the revolution? the oddity here is basically the 20th century, where centralized mass media kept popular opinion relatively sane and factual
In recent years, only one segment of the left-of-center has really retained this veneer of savvy, which is the hard left. The problem is that the viewpoints it is expressing are often nearly as toxic for electoral progressivism and liberalism as the far right is.
You want people to feel socially pressured to adopt the liberal viewpoint so they don't sound dumb to their friends, like how everyone in 2020 suddenly knew that police violence against black communities was a huge problem or in 2018 suddenly knew that women faced endemic harassment.
The solution here is not to have liberals rush out there and make #TrumpsMedicaidSteal trend, or something stupid like that. It's to have them talk about things in a way that SEEMS TRUE, SEEMS INTELLIGENT, and SEEMS TO EXPRESS A COMMON-SENSE VIEWPOINT ANY REASONABLE PERSON WOULD HOLD.
It's the savviness gap - the consensus used to be that the "savvy" take on events and narratives was the liberal/progressive one. Now, the "savvy" take is the right-wing one. They're the ones perceived as telling hard truths, while liberals are perceived as engaging in elaborate speech rituals.
Liberals don't understand the role of influencers, which is MOSTLY NOT to incept ideas into the public consciousness. It's to make the liberal/Democratic viewpoint on existing subjects and topics look like the smart one.
My contribution to the meme-overse
The perfect Dem messaging campaign couldn’t do one-tenth as much damage to Trump as a TikTok meme where thousands of people gleefully scoured every aspect of the admin for signs of current or impending deadness. People scouring Biden videos for signs of senility is literally what elected Trump
The “Is Trump dead” thing is amazing because it turns his health and frailty and physical degradation into a compelling meme
There actually IS a way to change prices week to week: YOU BLAME TARIFFS. The problem is that businesses are afraid to do that so they can’t
Trump isn’t going to see your mean skeets laughing that he might be dead but all your friends who also don’t have plans for the weekend will
Stop trying to talk about things you don’t understand
It’s impossible to know for sure what would have happened in a second round with different candidates and there was never going to be a third round
Uhhh I’m pretty sure there’s no state law controlling DFL lawn signs? I’m not sure what he’s talking about? He’s not the endorsed candidate, though, and rushing a bunch of stuff to print the day after the contested convention obviously produces this risk
The reason you know Trump isn’t dead is that his underlings aren’t publicly shivving each other
(Is this Susan Du of the Strib?)
I’m really sick of the courts finding this administration broke the law in some unprecedented way, but they get to keep doing illegal things for a few months as a little treat. They’re defaulting to rewarding lawbreaking.
Arguably the best crop art year of all time but this one made me howl
That’s not really an accurate description of the ideas or people who were mostly responsible for the French Revolution
I really cannot express how good this bun is
If you had to pick a single best state fair item what would it be I vote Hmong bun
normal guy at a party: hey man how’s it going Charlie Kirk: I will outbreed you
Don't make me tap the sign. Biden passed legislation that resulted in the biggest material wage improvement for working class people in decades Biden did what the left claims is their top goal and he never got credit for it
what have you done tho