As the New York Times’ coverage of the Israeli Genocide has made obvious to even the blindest most tribalist of people, the “liberal” media was and is just as hard spouting propaganda as the far-right one.
Personally I think that the decay from Journalism into “Opinion Forming” in the traditional more liberal Press long predates the Fox-News Age and their destruction of the trust in the Traditional Press for temporary political gains of “their side” created the prime conditions for the rise of the made-up-outrage “Press” that so well fits the modus operandi of far-right populism and hence fed and was fed by made-up-outrage far-right populist politicians like Trump.
People used to believe in the Press - it was what is called an Authoritative Source.
What the breaking of Trust in the Press - the greatest most influential of Autoritative Sources - did was create an environment were most people don’t believe in Authoritative Sources, hence were each individual - ignorant, untrained in analytical thinking, with neither the time, the access or the knowledge to trully dig down on a subject - is on his or her own to figure out what is true and is not.
This new environment didn’t just open the doors for the likes of Fox News, it openned the doors for Anti-Vaxing, Russian interference, countless Internet conspiracies and an Era were Politics is essentially professional scam artists managing scams - the damage is way vaster than merelly their some sleazy manipulative “news” pieces.
I absolutelly blame them for that: for the sake of momentary political gains for their team, newsmedia which for decades were trusted and respected broke the entire Trust Hierarchy and created the conditions for chaos and what looks more and more like Fascism.
The other side, that of assholes being assholes, is nothing compared to the betrayal by those you trusted.
Well, having lived in a country with actual Proportional Vote, I would say that the “just win” mindset is derived from the two party system you get in First Past The Post representative allocation systems like the US, probably with a pinch of the higher aggressiveness of baseline American culture.
That said, I don’t think the aggressive “just win” posture we see reflects them being different, quite the contrary: it’s Theatre for the masses because the two sides of the Power Duopoly are too similar, so lots of posturing with loud disagreements serves to both keep their own tribe (the people whose relation to politics is similar to their relation to sports: they have chosen a “team”) inspired and acting as unthinking supporters and keeping the rest of people thinking there is true competition when there really isn’t. This is why most of the fight is happening in the Moral field (stuff like LGBT rights) rather than anything to do with Power, Wealth and Quality Of Life - in the things that matter the most for those politicians both parties think the same, leaving only the things they don’t genuinelly care about as the field in which put one a very loud, very dramatic theatrical play about how difference they are.
By the way, I liked your idea of using “enshittification” for Society and Politics and I hope you don’t mind if I use it in my own posts.
Personally my own approach to help change things is to go around pointing the inconsitencies out to get at least some people thiking about it. I’m also a member of a small political party in the country I lived in and was also in one back when I lived in Britain (though there it’s a lot like the US and, frankly, at best things will need to get a lot worse before people are pissed of enough to change them).
Well, I think that church pastors replacing the Press as authoritative sources is not at all unexpected, though I don’t think that’s part of the cause of loss of trust in the Press, I think it’s in part a consequence and in part something that already happenned.
My home country - Portugal - was Fascist until 1974 and the Fascist Regime used the Church (which around here was 100% Catholic) through the perceive authority of priests, to tell people what to believe in matters that were social, economic and even political rather than religious, especially in the northern part of the country. This was especially easy because most people were either illiterate or close to it.
It’s funny that you mention the Tea Party: For some years now I’ve been convinced that we live in the time of the fall of Ideologies, in that the fully defined Ideologies from the early XX century that included visions for how the country should be, keen awareness of how Power works, their own specific folklore of visual elements and even specific language (say: the overuse of “proletariat”), and other such things, such as Fascism and Communist, were pretty much dead and buried in the West by the mid/late XX century and were replaced by the “laisser faire” of neoliberalism which doesn’t really has a vision for the future, is all about The Economy never about Power or People (even though it’s definitelly about Money being the one and only Power, though that’s not how it sells itself) and is sold to us very much as a hands off “que será, será” way of managing a nation.
What we’ve seen in the late XX century and onwards was the rise of Politics being done using Marketing - saying what people want to hear, moment by moment, using techniques from Marketing to determine what to say and measure impact (such as focus groups), changing what’s said if people change in what they want to hear (hence said politicians often being accused of flip-flopping), all of which to obtain powder and use it I ways that have nothing to do with what voters wanted. This is still how to this day the Democrat Party works and ditto the modern Labour Party in the UK (aka New Labour).
I think the Tea Party was a reboot of traditional ideology in the US and I actually think the Republicans are at the moment the only party with an actual ideology (not a good one, but one none the less).
Mind you this doesn’t mean it’s not still theatre for the politicians involved (maybe circus would be a better word), it’s just that their beast is as much theirs as it is the crowd’s and they’re forced to give the crowd what it wants, which started as something they’ve convinced the crowd they wanted but then the crowd took it, made it its own and changed it (look at the whole anti-vax movement for COVID which is pretty senseless and how things like anti-mask which is even more senseless came out of it).
I think Republican politicians are just as fake as Democrats, but they’re ridding a bull, not controlling a donkey with the promise of carrot and at times the use of a stick like the Democrats, so you get a lot more loud circus from the former and at times they are dragged into things far beyond what they wanted.
Last but not least there is a true market of ideas within the present day Republican party and the politicians competing for attention in that market are each doing it by trying to be more loud and outrageous that the rest. Meanwhile the Democrat party has used procedural tricks internally to make sure a handful of people control who gets the top positions, so there is no markt of ideas in there hence the party keeps being led by bland politcians who use techniques from Marketimg to control public oerception and voters.
And yeah, I think that, like in Britain, things will go too far and the US will end up doing something it cannot undo. Then again I think the US has been in a post-imperial decay path since the 80s, same as inevitably happenned to all nations that were once great powers.
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As the New York Times’ coverage of the Israeli Genocide has made obvious to even the blindest most tribalist of people, the “liberal” media was and is just as hard spouting propaganda as the far-right one.
Personally I think that the decay from Journalism into “Opinion Forming” in the traditional more liberal Press long predates the Fox-News Age and their destruction of the trust in the Traditional Press for temporary political gains of “their side” created the prime conditions for the rise of the made-up-outrage “Press” that so well fits the modus operandi of far-right populism and hence fed and was fed by made-up-outrage far-right populist politicians like Trump.
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It’s all about Trust.
People used to believe in the Press - it was what is called an Authoritative Source.
What the breaking of Trust in the Press - the greatest most influential of Autoritative Sources - did was create an environment were most people don’t believe in Authoritative Sources, hence were each individual - ignorant, untrained in analytical thinking, with neither the time, the access or the knowledge to trully dig down on a subject - is on his or her own to figure out what is true and is not.
This new environment didn’t just open the doors for the likes of Fox News, it openned the doors for Anti-Vaxing, Russian interference, countless Internet conspiracies and an Era were Politics is essentially professional scam artists managing scams - the damage is way vaster than merelly their some sleazy manipulative “news” pieces.
I absolutelly blame them for that: for the sake of momentary political gains for their team, newsmedia which for decades were trusted and respected broke the entire Trust Hierarchy and created the conditions for chaos and what looks more and more like Fascism.
The other side, that of assholes being assholes, is nothing compared to the betrayal by those you trusted.
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Well, having lived in a country with actual Proportional Vote, I would say that the “just win” mindset is derived from the two party system you get in First Past The Post representative allocation systems like the US, probably with a pinch of the higher aggressiveness of baseline American culture.
That said, I don’t think the aggressive “just win” posture we see reflects them being different, quite the contrary: it’s Theatre for the masses because the two sides of the Power Duopoly are too similar, so lots of posturing with loud disagreements serves to both keep their own tribe (the people whose relation to politics is similar to their relation to sports: they have chosen a “team”) inspired and acting as unthinking supporters and keeping the rest of people thinking there is true competition when there really isn’t. This is why most of the fight is happening in the Moral field (stuff like LGBT rights) rather than anything to do with Power, Wealth and Quality Of Life - in the things that matter the most for those politicians both parties think the same, leaving only the things they don’t genuinelly care about as the field in which put one a very loud, very dramatic theatrical play about how difference they are.
By the way, I liked your idea of using “enshittification” for Society and Politics and I hope you don’t mind if I use it in my own posts.
Personally my own approach to help change things is to go around pointing the inconsitencies out to get at least some people thiking about it. I’m also a member of a small political party in the country I lived in and was also in one back when I lived in Britain (though there it’s a lot like the US and, frankly, at best things will need to get a lot worse before people are pissed of enough to change them).
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Well, I think that church pastors replacing the Press as authoritative sources is not at all unexpected, though I don’t think that’s part of the cause of loss of trust in the Press, I think it’s in part a consequence and in part something that already happenned.
My home country - Portugal - was Fascist until 1974 and the Fascist Regime used the Church (which around here was 100% Catholic) through the perceive authority of priests, to tell people what to believe in matters that were social, economic and even political rather than religious, especially in the northern part of the country. This was especially easy because most people were either illiterate or close to it.
It’s funny that you mention the Tea Party: For some years now I’ve been convinced that we live in the time of the fall of Ideologies, in that the fully defined Ideologies from the early XX century that included visions for how the country should be, keen awareness of how Power works, their own specific folklore of visual elements and even specific language (say: the overuse of “proletariat”), and other such things, such as Fascism and Communist, were pretty much dead and buried in the West by the mid/late XX century and were replaced by the “laisser faire” of neoliberalism which doesn’t really has a vision for the future, is all about The Economy never about Power or People (even though it’s definitelly about Money being the one and only Power, though that’s not how it sells itself) and is sold to us very much as a hands off “que será, será” way of managing a nation.
What we’ve seen in the late XX century and onwards was the rise of Politics being done using Marketing - saying what people want to hear, moment by moment, using techniques from Marketing to determine what to say and measure impact (such as focus groups), changing what’s said if people change in what they want to hear (hence said politicians often being accused of flip-flopping), all of which to obtain powder and use it I ways that have nothing to do with what voters wanted. This is still how to this day the Democrat Party works and ditto the modern Labour Party in the UK (aka New Labour).
I think the Tea Party was a reboot of traditional ideology in the US and I actually think the Republicans are at the moment the only party with an actual ideology (not a good one, but one none the less).
Mind you this doesn’t mean it’s not still theatre for the politicians involved (maybe circus would be a better word), it’s just that their beast is as much theirs as it is the crowd’s and they’re forced to give the crowd what it wants, which started as something they’ve convinced the crowd they wanted but then the crowd took it, made it its own and changed it (look at the whole anti-vax movement for COVID which is pretty senseless and how things like anti-mask which is even more senseless came out of it).
I think Republican politicians are just as fake as Democrats, but they’re ridding a bull, not controlling a donkey with the promise of carrot and at times the use of a stick like the Democrats, so you get a lot more loud circus from the former and at times they are dragged into things far beyond what they wanted.
Last but not least there is a true market of ideas within the present day Republican party and the politicians competing for attention in that market are each doing it by trying to be more loud and outrageous that the rest. Meanwhile the Democrat party has used procedural tricks internally to make sure a handful of people control who gets the top positions, so there is no markt of ideas in there hence the party keeps being led by bland politcians who use techniques from Marketimg to control public oerception and voters.
And yeah, I think that, like in Britain, things will go too far and the US will end up doing something it cannot undo. Then again I think the US has been in a post-imperial decay path since the 80s, same as inevitably happenned to all nations that were once great powers.
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I mean, public radio and tv exists.
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Radio and television aren’t really considered specialty devices.
What’s “radio”? Television is the old word for “app” right?
Now we have hate boner political infotainment. It’s disgusting.
We need a free press, but we need to figure out how to deal with those that take advantage of their status… In this case, all of them…
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