(Yesterday, 01:35 AM)IdeomotorPrisoner Wrote: Its easy to sell reclaimism...
Perhaps you mean
revanchism?
Quote:A thin skin + a joyless approach to how the awakened were gonna fix all past...
Certainly the attitude of the woke towards those they perceived as their opponents did not help. Enthusiastic social reformers always go too far, arousing resentment among those who feel threatened or demonized by their actions. Elsewhere, I have described the woke as the new Puritans; this indicates that the attitudes you describe are hardly original, nor are they confined to any single political tendency. Personally, I dislike fanatics of all persuasions.
However, ‘progressive’ enthusiasm and hostility towards ‘conservative’ opposition* scarcely justify the reaction they provoked in America, which has been quite disproportionate and often violent. Popular reactions to past movements of the same kind – to the Puritans, for example – were rarely so unmitigatedly hateful, nor so violent.
We agree, I think, that the reaction, the
revanche, was inflamed by other factors. And certainly, one of them was the conspiracy you mention. But the conspirators would never have succeeded so brilliantly without several other factors also contributing their weight.
One was, indeed, Covid, and the mishandling of it by the US Executive, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths – a toll greater than that of the First World War. But by the time Covid arrived, the conspiracy had already succeeded: Trump was in office, put there largely by public resentment against the woke and the educated, progressive elite.
The financial collapse of 2008 was nearly as big a contributing factor as Covid, and its effects have lasted longer. And of course there were other factors, too. But the real force-multipliers were the rise of social media and
the leveraging of it by foreign actors to influence the beliefs and behaviour of American voters.
I dispute none of this. However, none of it has happened in anything like the same degree anywhere else in the world. All of us suffered from the 2008 collapse, the Covid pandemic and most of the other factors plaguing America, but we have coped with them far better. In my own rather poor but highly social-welfare oriented country the per-capita death-toll from Covid was a fifth that of America’s – which was
one of the highest in the world. That shameful statistic shows how far the right-wing capture of the US State had already advanced by 2021.
* * *
And that is the point
I am making. American exceptionalism, in this one case, is justified. There really is an effective difference between the US and other countries. The argument in my previous post is that the difference is constitutional. Other countries, whether democratic or not, have strong governments that can control the exploitative tendencies of private capital. America does not; it deliberately restrains the power of government while permitting its citizens to arm themselves to the teeth and abdicating a large portion of its responsibility for ensuring their fair treatment under the law. That is why the USA is the land of unfettered capitalism running riot, the land of media-driven consumerism that corrupts and degrades state and citizenry alike, the land of absurdly unequal contrasts between rich and poor, the land of
enshittifaction, the land of everyday mass murder, the country that must make exploit and make war on the rest of the world to satisfy the gaping maw of its insatiable economic engine.
* * *
The 'woke Trojan horse’ is merely a strategem, and getting too hung up on it is dangerous. The actual problem is constitutional. As
de Toqueville pointed out not long before the Civil War, the only real protection American citizens have against each other is their institutions, which mandate a weak government and an over-mighty executive that arrogates more power to itself as history unfolds – in part because it is only in the Presidency that Americans can find even a promise of the protection they need against each other. And that’s really all I have to say here.
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* Both terms are extremely misleading, hence the quotes.