To beat Trump, we need to know why Americans keep voting for him. Psychologists may have the answer
To beat Trump, we need to know why Americans keep voting for him. Psychologists may have the answer
US culture is an incubator of ‘extrinsic values’. Nobody embodies them like the Republican front runner, writes Guardian columnist George Monbiot
US culture is an incubator of ‘extrinsic values’. Nobody embodies them like the Republican frontrunner
Many explanations are proposed for the continued rise of Donald Trump, and the steadfastness of his support, even as the outrages and criminal charges pile up. Some of these explanations are powerful. But there is one I have seen mentioned nowhere, which could, I believe, be the most important: Trump is king of the extrinsics.
Some psychologists believe our values tend to cluster around certain poles, described as “intrinsic” and “extrinsic”. People with a strong set of intrinsic values are inclined towards empathy, intimacy and self-acceptance. They tend to be open to challenge and change, interested in universal rights and equality, and protective of other people and the living world.
People at the extrinsic end of the spectrum are more attracted to prestige, status, image, fame, power and wealth. They are strongly motivated by the prospect of individual reward and praise. They are more likely to objectify and exploit other people, to behave rudely and aggressively and to dismiss social and environmental impacts. They have little interest in cooperation or community. People with a strong set of extrinsic values are more likely to suffer from frustration, dissatisfaction, stress, anxiety, anger and compulsive behaviour.
You're viewing a single thread.
It's embarrassing that nobody in mainstream liberal circles seems able to answer this very basic question: why do people vote for trump? It's not that they are racist womanizing nazis (though some of them certainly are). That is some of it, that's the convenient story, but it really misses the mark.
I'm a through and through liberal, I vote D in every race, I vote in primaries, etc. Some other comments here have gotten some good points in so I won't re-iterate them. Before all you tankies jump in and tell me that the entire point of the two party system is to capture dissent and manufacture consent and how the only point of the democratic party is to move the needle as little as possible while staying in power as often as possible, yes, obviously, we're all impressed that you went to college, now let's move on.
I'll tell you what Trump's appeal is:
- He, and his party, are the only ones who openly acknowledge that the entire system is broken and corrupt. This is a talking point among all major republican candidates. Most democrats don't even give lip service to this problem, they just blame republicans and promise things only if we somehow get them a supermajority. Bernie, AOC, and Warren may touch on this topic from time to time, but as a party, the DNC does not. Their position is largely that "the system works, and the reason it's not working well right now is because there aren't enough democrats". Trump says things are "the deep state" or "the swamp" or whatever, but he openly acknowledges that the entire system is corrupt to the core. That is very powerful and speaks to every disaffected voter regardless of why they are disaffected. He did so well and beat poll expectations in the year he won because he got people out the polls who had given up all hope in the electoral system, he got so many non-voters to vote. And they won't vote for anybody else. Hell, some trumpers are former bernie supporters who were so disgusted by the DNCs primary that they thought "well, at least this guy says it like it is, how much worse could be possibly be?". I don't know about you, but are there less disaffected people out there now than there was in 2016? Is the average person's economic position better? Are people feeling less socially isolated? Does the world feel more stable and safe? If not, that's how people like Trump get powerful. Trump is the symptom, not the cause.
- He speaks to people that, rightly or wrongly, feel ignored by those in power. Rural voters, for example, may actually get a bigger vote than those in cities, but it doesn't change that on most issues they get outvoted. They may have all of their social services funded by blue areas, but that doesn't change that their towns are constantly subject to brain drain and under-investment and have no real job opportunities, and that they are looked down upon by people in cities. Whenever politicians do pay attention to them, it's only a quick scam to get their vote and they never come through on their promises. Frankly, democrats could absolutely rake in the vote from rural counties if they wanted to, but for some reason it's like they don't even try. Their policies would be popular, much of the democrat platform is about serving the under-served, yet for some reason it's like democrats don't even try to capture rural voters. Protecting the environment is good for people who enjoy hunting and living in rural areas. Funding education and making job opportunities are easy wins in this area. Funding infrastructure is good for these areas. Remember how Trump delayed COVID checks to put his name on them? How come every build back better project doesn't have a similar requirement? Democrats are embarrassingly bad at taking credit for their wins.
- Republicans may not ever actually accomplish anything legislatively, but boy are they good at making noise and pretending to be fighting for something. And remember, if you believe the entire system is broken and corrupt, you don't care that congress isn't accomplishing anything. Hell, it might even be a good thing to you! Most democrats are absolutely milquetoast. Nobody cares about policy, they care that their politician is speaking their language and fighting for them. Republicans do this well. This grandstanding about the border? What a great show. Passing laws that have no chance of surviving a court appeal but make their base happy? Every month. Their refusal to vote for things because of the "national debt"? Great strategy. Look, I know some or all of these issues are baseless, but that doesn't mean they aren't effective.
- For all ills people are facing in life whether social or economic, the right has a clear boogeyman or two to point at and blame. Is that blame appropriate assigned? No. But at least they have somebody or something to blame. Liberals blame... republicans? That's a particularly dangerous strategy when dems are crushing it in elections and when the republicans can't even vote as a block in the house of reps. Dems are too afraid to ever point the finger at "the rich" or other easy targets, instead they're always like "it's complicated" and "nuanced" and nobody gives af about that, it's not how people vote.
- Republicans are 100% better at social media and running their own media. Fox News is a genius concept that liberals still have yet to copy effectively despite being around for.. two decades? Play the fucking game liberals, it's how you win. Democrat messaging is milquetoast through and through. Their social media game has gotten better the past few years, but I'm not convinced they have surpassed republicans in this yet.
Your second point is far more important than many people realize. I was born, raised, and now live in "flyover country", and I totally get the appeal of Trumpism to people here. The sense of abandonment is real and pervasive. It feels at times like we've been turned into a caricature, a punchline for city-dwellers on the coasts. Just a bunch of dumb, racist hicks whose opinions and agency don't matter because "LaND DoeSN't vOte", as though there aren't millions of us living here, many of us even (shockingly) in cities of our own. Those cities don't apparently don't matter though because they're not NY or LA.
The amount of hypocritical elitism I see from supposed leftists who turn their noses at desperate blue collar workers in the rust belt hurts my heart every time I see it. The right's biggest recruiting tool here is not the racism, or the homophobia, or the crazy batshit christo-fascism. It's the ever-present messaging that "the left doesn't want you". If you want to belong somewhere, join the Trump train. These people used to be the leftists in North America a century ago. Now it's all been beaten and ridiculed out of them, and all that's left is populist rage and a list of enemies who have "wronged" them. When I bring this up in leftist circles though, more often than not the response I get is some variant of "lmao fuck off". I am still a staunch leftist, but it's through gritted teeth that I stand by some of my coastal comrades.
The land doesn't vote thing is about disproportionate representation, that somehow your opinions matter more because you're from a state with less people, not that "we" dont consider you worthy of having a say. It's just frustrating that tens of millions (costal state) = hundreds of thousands/single digit millions (think: Dakotas) in terms of representation and therefore control of the Senate/Presidency.
That is an issue with our current system, and you're correct in that it's not fair to people in more densely populated states. The flip side however is that without this disproportionate representation, people in more rural areas might not see any of their issues addressed as politicians no longer need their votes to win. There is no perfect solution, certainly not with our current FPTP system. My objection to the argument is that it's often used as a thought terminating cliche to justify ignoring "flyover" voters.
The amount of hypocritical elitism I see from supposed leftists who turn their noses at desperate blue collar workers in the rust belt hurts my heart every time I see it.
Are there social welfare programs the left has proposed like single payer healthcare, UBI, etc which are designed not to help people in rural/rust-belt areas?
Leftist policies would absolutely help rural america, and may be the only thing that can now. What annoys me is the unwillingness to actually try and convince people to vote for it. The attitude is one of "we're right, our policies work, all you dumb hicks are just too busy fucking your sisters to see it". A lot of magats are already socialists, they just don't realize it anymore. They've lost their faith in the federal government and no longer have to vocabulary or the safe spaces to explore those concepts. I'm not saying they didn't bring a lot of this on themselves, but a lot of them were so close to figuring it out before trumpism took over and the rest of the left just let them go and said "good riddance", and that frustrates the hell out of me.
I’m not saying they didn’t bring a lot of this on themselves, but a lot of them were so close to figuring it out before trumpism took over and the rest of the left just let them go and said “good riddance”, and that frustrates the hell out of me.
I get that, but at a certain point - you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. If we succeed in getting UBI or Single Payer Healtcare, we will do so without them, and they'll hate us for it even as their quality of life improves. At a certain point (and IMO we're several years past it) why is it on me to subject myself to that? I'm no spring chicken. I've been talking to people who disagreed with my viewpoints on social issues and politics for about 30 years. Only in the last 10ish did the folks on the "other" side of those discussions become what they have become.
My neighbor has a rotating array of hand-drawn signs in his yard proclaiming that various groups I'm either a member of or supporter of are idiots and morons who are destroying the country. He isn't targeting me personally, but he's got no reason to think I'm not in one of those groups, nor does he have any reason to think most of the rest of our neighbors aren't. What conversation am I going to have with that sort of guy that will heal the country? How is that one-sided article from Cracked going to help make that better? Is there a part of the country where Democrats have yards full of signs about how much they hate Republicans? I don't live in nor have I seen pictures of that part of the country if so.
I know that's a lot of rhetorical questions there at the end, I don't intend that to be as confrontational as it might sound. That cracked article pissed me right off though. If I'm being generous I'll call it misguided.
I think you and I might be more closely aligned than we realize. I agree that there is nothing we can do now. The fascists have been too radicalized for too long. What irks me, and what pissed me off enough to write multiple walls of text yesterday, is the attitude I see from progressives that "these people are all just stupid and immoral, their beliefs and motivations are inherently evil so it doesn't matter what they think or why they think it, there's nothing we can do". Like, yeah, that may be the case now, but it wasn't always so. If the left had made more of an effort reach out to rural americans, say 30 years ago, before the mega churches and republican party had such a firm lock on the area, many of them could have become valuable allies. What we are seeing now is, in my opinion, the metastasization of a cultural disease that was left untreated. When people like myself tried to suggest that we do something though, the response was always the same "eh, fuck 'em, they're just a bunch of assholes, what could they possibly do other than bitch and moan?" Well, now we know.
That cracked article is nearly a decade out of date now, and I admit it's not the most helpful. I like to use it because it loosely illustrates the point I've been trying to make for years. Namely that what we're seeing now is not evil for the sake of evil, but the end result of a long process of alienation and radicalization of a group that was once firmly rooted on the side of democracy and, in some cases, leftism. Thanks for reading my word salad.
Well I have to agree. I think we're just lamenting different aspects of the same thing. I can't argue with the meat of what you are saying here.
Thanks for reading my word salad.
Not at all, thank you for expounding!
It feels at times like we've been turned into a caricature, a punchline for city-dwellers on the coasts. Just a bunch of dumb, racist hicks whose opinions and agency don't matter
So build something worth visiting? The French and Italian countryside is mainly populated with uneducated conservatives, because most smart people understandably leave. They are still amazing places to visit that attract people the world over.
When your biggest draw is "the world's largest ball of yarn", why should people care about you? People in cities don't ridicule you; they never even think about you. You think about them and how they live in an amazing place, constantly downplaying the benefits of living in a place that has no tourists making everything crowded and expensive.
I'm going to break this down because it seems like you're coming at this from a place of honest ignorance.
So build something worth visiting?
There are lots of things worth visiting that you would find if you bothered to look. For example:
The world's oldest and largest collection of military aircraft is in Dayton, Ohio
The largest cave network in the world is in Kentucky
Indigenous earthworks all throughout the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys
Plenty of small, charming, non-trumpian towns
These are just a handful of things off the top of my head in and around my home state of Ohio. It ain't Hawaii, but we do have lives. You should come and visit sometime, maybe stay for a while and help push us back toward the left. Plus, you get rust belt prices on everything ($100 for 2oz of weed in Michigan).When your biggest draw is “the world’s largest ball of yarn”, why should people care about you? People in cities don’t ridicule you; they never even think about you. You think about them and how they live in an amazing place, constantly downplaying the benefits of living in a place that has no tourists making everything crowded and expensive.
How about starting with the fact that there are tens of millions of your fellow countrymen living here and oh, by the way, THEY GROW YOUR FOOD. If you truly believe that the only value a person or community has comes from their ability to attract tourists, then I suggest you try not eating for a week and see if that changes your mind. Believe it or not, I don't sit around all day begrudging all those awesome coastal cities out of jealousy. I don't think about you much at all to be honest. What does irk me is the fact that, when people do talk about us, it's almost always dismissive and condescending. There's east coast, west coast, the south, the southwest, and that big flat nothing in between. In shows, memes, and movies, the midwest frequently either doesn't exist, or serves as some far-off no-mans-land that the character is trying to escape. It's all tornadoes, children of the corn, and naive or racist simpletons. It doesn't have a culture, it is the absence of culture.
But who cares anyway? Ok so there's some nature and generic museums, it's nothing you couldn't find in Philly or Fresno, and the racists are still really off-putting. Why should you care? I'll tell you why; because we need your help. The midwest, and in particular the rust belt, used to be a hotbed of leftist politics. In the span of less than a century, these people have turned from ardent secular socialists to rabid christian fascists. What we're seeing now isn't just the same old assholes being assholes. Many of these people are honest-to-god fascists, and it's spreading like a plague through the center of the American continent. I'm sorry for the wall of text but this is a really personal issue for me. I've lost a lot of friends and one of the first symptoms, before the cult worship, before the authoritarianism, before the capital storming and mass violence, is "the left doesn't want me, the 'coastal elite' don't want me, the corporatist republicans won't help me, I have been politically abandoned" (obviously not literally).
You nailed it. The Dems should win overwhelmingly given how divided, useless and repugnant the Repubs have been for the last decade. Unfortunately, the race is closer than it should be.
Too many leftists make the lazy assumption that half of America is a bunch of racist, homophobic cretins. There is a kernel of truth behind that assumption, in the sense that rural communities tend to be small-c conservative, more religious, more homogenous, and less keen on cultural change. But Trump is none of those things, so what gives? The real answer to the rise of Trumpism is alienation.
I live in a pretty rural area. Just a couple of decades ago, millions of people in flyover states could easily get decent, secure factory or resource sector jobs right out of high school. All those jobs created vibrant communities, but now most of those jobs are gone and there is little chance of those jobs coming back. The vast majority of regular blue-collar folks don't really give too much of a shit about hot-button cultural issues like homosexuality or Palestine or abortion. They may not like those things, but those issues are peripheral to the main issue, which is having a well-paying, secure job that doesn't involve sitting at a desk all day. They know in their bones that is was the corporate establishment, in cahoots with the "liberal" elites in the boardrooms of the coast, that got rich by shipping all of their jobs overseas. And they are fucking pissed off about it. I completely agree that a real labour-oriented populist like Bernie could have done well in the rural states, but instead we got Trump, who is a fake narcissist populist who is just riding the wave of alienation.
I agree with all of this, and it is well articulated.
But what is your explanation for -why- things are the way they are? -Why- are Democrats so ineffective and blind? You're (seemingly) just a random person on the internet, yet you can see all of this; Democrats have the best paid consultants and advisors and pollsters and they still don't see it. How can that be?
You openly say this:
Dems are too afraid to ever point the finger at "the rich" or other easy targets, instead they're always like "it's complicated" and "nuanced" and nobody gives af about that, it's not how people vote.
Yet also pushback against this:
the entire point of the two party system is to capture dissent and manufacture consent and how the only point of the democratic party is to move the needle as little as possible while staying in power as often as possible
yes, obviously, we're all impressed that you went to college, now let's move on.
Why would we "move on" from a very plausible explanation of reality? Do you disagree with this argument, or are you just dismissing it because you find it to be too abrasive to fully come to terms with? Don't we need to name and describe the problem, and encourage others to do the same, if we have any hope of solving our problems?
You, correctly, notice that Democrats are terrible at acknowledging the legitimate problems that normal Americans face, particularly those in rural areas. But aren't you doing the same thing by refusing to even acknowledge the reasons for why the Democrats are so ineffective? We can't ignore or look past our problems and expect them to be solved - and I only have one life, so I'm more concerned about systemic solutions than I am about protecting the feelings of our Democratic elites
Politics have become identity for a lot of people and for the people who have not chosen this road it's very difficult to engage. You no longer have an abundance of open dialogue anymore. I can't remember the last time i even tried to talk about social issues with people without hearing some bullshit talking point from Facebook/CNN/Fox or whatever that has ended the conversation before it's really begun for them.
Your point being that is is very difficult to get people to see the Democrats for what they are because so much of the public has internalized the tribal/group identity of "Being a Democrat"?
I'm getting saying to "move on" from that to say "I'm not proposing we scrap everything and start from fresh, I'm assuming the context we live in with our current government and political structure having some sense of legitimacy, now let's explain why these parties behave the way they do within that context". There are obviously wider discussions to be had, I was just trying to limit context.
Our method of voting has a lot to do with it, ranked choice, STAR, or other voting methods can solve a lot of problems with our governance and political system. Not all of them, but some. All the radical alternatives I've seen proposed to our current economic and political system are either untested or failed spectacularly in the past, often because they don't have good ways to handle bad actors. Not that they can't succeed in the future, just that I'm a little skeptical of trying them again without some major revisions. I'm all for experimentation though, our systems have to continue to grow and change, it is very unlikely that any system at any given point in time is the best system humanity could ever come up with. It's easy to talk about "revolution" and critique the current system, but most proposals for how to do that involve a lot of blood and instability that could be avoided if we can intelligently use the levers of power available to us currently. Yes, there are incentives which prevent us from adequately using those levers of power (such as the way money influences elections), but they are not un-overcomeable. Most people don't vote, if those non-voters voted, especially outside of a two party context but even within it, and particularly if they voted in the primaries, our political landscape would look a lot different. If people never participate in primaries, then yes, we will always get a choice between two candidates chosen by the party elite. But, if MAGA world can get their crazy sauce guy to be the nominee, certainly liberals and leftists can nominate somebody equally crazy. Right? They won't though. Because the people who would nominate somebody who isn't milquetoast mostly sit home during primaries and local elections. I've been one of those people, I get it, the whole game is rigged, why play right?
You are right to point out that the basic incentives of our political system produce bad outcomes, including the uselessness of the democrats. Changing the voting system is one way to fix that, that's some that can be done within our current political structure. Another way to fix those kinds of base incentives is by adopting new economic systems that have rules which are not enforced by people or trusted parties. If we eliminate the need to trust people to implement rules, we can solve a lot of problems. This is, imo, one of the main failings of communism. It put the power of the government and the market in the hands of the state with few roadblocks for bad actors. We needed to trust somebody to manage the state and the market, which concentrated immense power in one place. At least capitalism splits the power between the two, kinda.
Regarding changing incentives, for example, there is a trend in capitalism for capital to aggregate into monopolies. We rely on government (a trusted party) to prevent that, but they are subject to regulatory capture and aren't particularly effective. If the entire US economy used a blockchain instead of the government for this role, a rule could be enforced such as "once you have accumulated a billion dollars, congratulations, now you can't accumulate any more" or things like universal income could be baked in at the protocol level. A 2% tax is levied on all transactions that goes into a pot, and once a year that tax is distributed evenly to all people who have the currency. No party needs to be trusted to do that, it just happens automatically. Just like every 10 minutes a new block is added to the Bitcoin blockchain and that's gonna keep happening forever no matter what your national government has to say about it. Blockchain technology can be decentralized, trustless, and immune to nation-state level attacks. You may be a rich and powerful person who is used to getting their way in the legal or political system, but you are still bound by the same laws of physics and math as the rest of us. That's a powerful thing.
The nice thing about using blockchain technology is that:
- We don't have to do it one whole national economy at a time. You don't have to overthrow a government and shed a bunch of blood just to try out a new economic system. Instead, these ideas can be proposed, people can use and try them, and if they work well they will grow organically and eventually displace whatever other current economic systems are in use, just as trade and capitalism inevitably did to all the other forms of economy that existed before it.
- Voting can happen within this same system, in a transparent way. This means, for example, people could vote on the % tax that goes to universal income or whatever. And when the vote is complete? The changes are made to the protocol immediately and automatically, without anybody having to be trusted to make those changes. These technologies have massive potential to increase people's participation in democratic systems.
- We can create rules which are counter to the way that incentive structures organically work. Capitalism's aggregation problem is not something that one person is enforcing, it comes out of natural power laws and things that aren't related to "economy" or "money" at all, they're related to resource scarcity and how power works and human psychology and a whole bunch of other things. But we can create rules, within a network, that are counter to those power laws, that don't rely on trusting any party to "act correctly" either because incorrect acting is forbidden or because we have aligned their incentives so any self-interested party will act correctly, just as our current system aligns incentives to produce certain behavior.
Blockchain is mostly talked about in popular culture as it relates to finance, investing, scams, etc but really what Satoshi did (the author of the Bitcoin whitepaper and software) was solve a problem humanity has had for millennia: how do you administer a system where you can't trust the parties who participate in it and where you can't select a single party or party(s) to administer it properly? Having an answer to that question has implications way beyond the minting of currency. Ultimately, the more systems we can build that are based on code instead of trusting individuals or groups of people to 'do the right thing', the less we will even need government as a structure.
So, personally, that's where I am focusing my efforts these days. I believe this kind of technology has the capacity to change human society in profound and important ways and undo many of the injustices of our current economic and political systems. Much of it needs time to mature, but the framework has been put out there and now people just need to build on top of it.
Why do you think blockchain would be immune from regulatory capture? Hasn't the general story of crypto-adjacent items thus far been one of immense gains for the few and immense losses for the many?
And isn't the historical rule of statistics/maths such that it is clear that these "objective" measures are actually very easy for the powerful to manipulate for their own ends? Lying with statistics is very easy to do, for example.
What prevents Peter Thiel-types from framing and shaping the code that governs whatever blockchain-connected system emerges? And what prevents Cambridge Analytica type entities from manipulating public opinion such that only the "right" kind (the evil kind) of blockchain is the one that "spontaneously" becomes the natural choice of the grassroots?
The error of the Leninists was, among other things, thinking that because they had an exceptional understanding of how historical economic structures have been controlled and shaped by the powerful that they, therefore, would themselves be able to use this knowledge to create a new type of state that was exempt from these failings. That obviously did not occur. And I fear that the STEM types who understand blockchain, and who generally have sincerely good intentions, will similarly be blindsided by the realities and insurmountable corrosive strength of global capital
Which doesn't mean that no better world is possible - it is. It just means that I don't think we can trust a computer code to impartially distribute a truly moral justice throughout the country/world. Because the oligarchs will seize and corrode such a code and subvert it to serve their own ends; it doesn't matter how isolated and untouchable such a blockchain is - if it can be made then it can be remade. And I don't know how you stop them from doing that given that their wealth gives them practically unlimited power
Why do you think blockchain would be immune from regulatory capture?
Regulatory capture requires:
- Having a party which is trusted to administer a system
- Influencing the actions of that party to your benefits
Decentralized blockchains don't have the first requirement there. There is no trusted party to influence. Blockchains are trustless systems, in order to make them do something they are not designed to do, you have to influence not just one people or ten people, but at least half the people in that system, and even then, there are limits on what they can do because the people you didn't influence are still running the old version of the software and will simply ignore whatever your influenced people are doing since it isn't valid network activity. You can take your military and go around the world and hold guns to people's head, but unless you hold a gun to all the people's heads all the time, you can't make the blockchain do anything it wasn't designed to do. The term for this is a 51% attack and, at least in the Bitcoin ecosystem, the only thing you could achieve is a double-spend (spend the same BTC twice). You can't spend money that isn't yours, because that's an invalid transaction and will just be rejected out of hand by the older non-malicious version of the software.
Hasn’t the general story of crypto-adjacent items thus far been one of immense gains for the few and immense losses for the many?
That is one way to look at it. There are certainly many grifts and scams in the crypto world, just like there are elsewhere outside of crypto. They're bad. On the contrary, Bitcoin, for example, has faithfully kept to it monetary policy and all its promises now for 15 years running 24/7 365 without a single hack or hour of downtime. It has resisted attacks from nation-state actors. This is powerful stuff. Crypto doesn't have to have a "rich get richer" outcome, it can also be a tool to lift people out of poverty and give them autonomy, particularly the billions of people, with a B, who lack access to stable banking infrastructure or who have national currencies so corrupt they are basically useless and as a result, they have no ability to save money outside of the day's earnings. One other way this is true is that in a fiat economy the government prints money, right? The US aims for 2-3% inflation, this is its economic policy. Every time they print money, they devalue your dollar because those new dollars go to somewhere else. Your dollar is like a share in the US economy that went through a stock split, but instead of ending up with two dollars, you still have one and somebody got the other one. This is theft on a massive scale, not only from US citizens, but it's how we tax the global south and enforce US imperialism abroad. Our system of debt, regulated through institutions like the world bank, is all based on the dollar. But the economy is also growing right? So your dollar is becoming more valuable even if it's a smaller share of the total number of dollars? Even if those things even out (which they don't, the inflation rate is deliberately set higher than this), you are still having the difference in that value stolen from you. With Bitcoin, if you own 1BTC, you will always have 1BTC, and your share that represents of ALL BTC will stay the same because Bitcoin has a fixed supply. So when Bitcoin's economy grows, those benefits aren't given to whoever is operating the money printer, they are given to whoever holds Bitcoin. Same as when the economy shrinks. That, out the gate, is a more equitable system than fiat currency.
And isn’t the historical rule of statistics/maths such that it is clear that these “objective” measures are actually very easy for the powerful to manipulate for their own ends? Lying with statistics is very easy to do, for example.
Bitcoin isn't just a graph somebody drew. It's not located in a single place where somebody can just go in and draw a new line. It's decentralized, all over the globe, running according to a set of rules that can't be broken. Many have tried, the best hackers and brightest minds in the world have tried, it's not doable. This is because Bitcoin's protocol is based on cryptographic protocols which are as real as temperature or anything else physical. They are based on splitting things up into a mathematical space where trying every possible combination to break them would cost much more than the reward for doing so. As an example, in Bitcoin the way you spend it is by broadcasting a transaction to the network which is signed by your "private key" it looks like "I, Bob, want to send 1BTC to Alice - Signed, Bob". The private key is a number, it gets plugged into a math equation. If you don't have that number, you can't sign the transaction, so your transaction won't be valid, no nodes will relay it, and it never makes it into the blockchain. The money doesn't move. This means if you have the private key, you can spend the money, if you don't, you cant. But wait, couldn't you just guess the number? No. The number space you would need to go through is so vast that it's difficult to wrap your head around. If every computer on earth suddenly dedicated itself to guessing this number, they would all do so for tens of thousands of years before they ever got the correct one. That's what people are talking about when they say Bitcoin is based on math and physics. It's not just hyperbole.
What prevents Peter Thiel-types from framing and shaping the code that governs whatever blockchain-connected system emerges?
If Peter or anybody else releases a new Bitcoin client, they have to convince everybody else in the world who uses Bitcoin to use it. That's what prevents it. Thousands of eyes of some of the world's smartest coders looking over it, and yes, investments banks who need the Bitcoin protocol to remain stable and usable. You yourself can look at the code if you want, it's all public. In this way, blockchain technology is truly democratic. People can choose which blockchains to interact with, and even within those blockchains, which part of the protocol they want to follow. Is there some layer between the programmer and the user? Of course. Users have to understand what choice they are even making. Why should I use Litecoin instead of Bitcoin? Somebody has to communicate those differences for people to understand them. This is a problem in all political/legal/economic systems to some degree. Which gets us to your next question.
And what prevents Cambridge Analytica type entities from manipulating public opinion such that only the “right” kind (the evil kind) of blockchain is the one that “spontaneously” becomes the natural choice of the grassroots?
This is absolutely a threat, you are 100% spot on here. One key problem that blockchain can potentially solve, and I will skip over for now, is the centralization of social media platforms. Nobody should have the power to put the thumb on the scale that hard. But back to your question: Blockchain technology, just as it can be used for good, can be used for evil. CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currencies) are one of these kinds of threats. They would enable the government to see every transaction you to, in real time, and be able to block or intercept transactions at their whim. They also create a massive repository of everybody's financial data, ripe for hackers. And unlike decentralized systems like Bitcoin, they have central points of failure, and hackers can exploit them.
I would argue many nation states and other actors are indeed doing these kinds of PR campaigns right now. There are some very powerful people, like banks, who benefit from their rent-seeking behaviour and ability to print money without consequence, they do not want to see Bitcoin become the dominant global currency. Convincing people not to use Bitcoin is dollar-for-dollar the most effective way to attack the Bitcoin network. Nonetheless, year after year, on average, if you draw a trend line, Bitcoin continues to grow despite these efforts. It doesn't matter how you measure it: number of nodes, total market cap, liquidity locked in lightning, etc. I'm sure you have seen your share of headlines declaring that Bitcoin is finally dead, but nonetheless each year it is not. And while the value of a bitcoin, how much somebody will pay for it, will fluctuate with time, so long as the internet exists at at least a few computers are running the code, you will still always have 1 BTC and you will still be able to transfer it just as Bitcoin has promised you.
The error of the Leninists was, among other things, thinking that because they had an exceptional understanding of how historical economic structures have been controlled and shaped by the powerful that they, therefore, would themselves be able to use this knowledge to create a new type of state that was exempt from these failings. That obviously did not occur. And I fear that the STEM types who understand blockchain, and who generally have sincerely good intentions, will similarly be blindsided by the realities and insurmountable corrosive strength of global capital
You may very well be right about this, only the future can tell.
Which doesn’t mean that no better world is possible - it is. It just means that I don’t think we can trust a computer code to impartially distribute a truly moral justice throughout the country/world. Because the oligarchs will seize and corrode such a code and subvert it to solve their own ends. And I don’t know how you stop them from doing that given that their wealth gives them practically unlimited power
Their wealth doesn't give them power in the Bitcoin system because math and physics, I hope you can see that now that it's been explained a bit more. We can't trust computer code you are right, but we can trust networks of people who write, review, and run that code. At least, we can trust them in so far as we can trust anybody to do anything.
That's all very thorough, thank you.
But isn't the obvious "solution" to this (from a global elite perspective) to criminalize and aggressively prosecute any usage at all of non-governmentally approved bitcoin/blockchain? Including by criminalizing even visiting sites remotely related to it? Which would be successful given that the average person doesn't even use a VPN
The way to prevent power from being lost to this new type of system seems to be to create a government approved option, with all of the obvious govt/billionaire approved backdoors within it. And then to legally, socially, and culturally stigmatize the "actual" blockchain networks to make them equivalent to child pornography in the minds of the public. Which has already started to some extent by arguing to the public that the only reason you'd need bitcoin is if you're trying to buy heroin or child pornography - or products/services that are even worse. Just seems like the West etc could meaningfully kill this tomorrow if they devoted resources to it. The war on drugs didn't work but the war on crypto seems like it could because of the knowledge required to even participate at an entry level.
I agree that this hasn't been done yet, and maybe it won't ever be. But it seems plausible enough to prevent me from seeing this as remotely an inevitability. It all does make me think that perhaps I should really meaningfully invest in BTC or its equivalents though
But isn’t the obvious “solution” to this (from a global elite perspective) to criminalize and aggressively prosecute any usage at all of non-governmentally approved bitcoin/blockchain? Including by criminalizing even visiting sites remotely related to it? Which would be successful given that the average person doesn’t even use a VPN
You are right again! Yes and no. Yes because this is something they can try, no because other nation states have tried (like China) to ban bitcoin with not much success. They may reduce the bitcoin activity in their country, but they can't eliminate it, and Bitcoin will continue to grow. At some point in Bitcoin's growth, cutting your country off from it is like putting your own country under sanctions. The Bitcoin Economy is already larger than many countries. Mass censorship in general works for a while but is not successful long-term. The knowledge to fully understand the Bitcoin protocol does take some time to learn, the knowledge to use Bitcoin is no more than the knowledge to use Venmo or our existing banking system.
Let's imagine for a moment that the US government decides to totally ban all citizens from participating in Bitcoin and all VPNs and all ways of accessing it. Somehow, they have gotten all of congress, many of whom own Bitcoin, to buy into this plan. They are talking about not just infringing on people's freedom, they are talking about essentially seizing or blocking millions of Americans from accessing something they own. Could they do it? Perhaps. But it's going to get difficult and contentious quickly. To be effective at any level, a national firewall is going to end up blocking more than just Bitcoin. That's collateral damage that impact the ability to engage with international markets. Plus, nationalizing and seizing assets is not a good look on the international market, ask Russia. And even assuming the US can implement the great firewall of China on its own soil, it doesn't stop Bitcoin from working. It doesn't stop the network from making new blocks and including transactions. It doesn't stop the rest of the world from using it. All you need to continue to access your BTC is a single working connection to the unfiltered internet. Where there is supply and demand to be met, the market will find a way, even in states with insanely controlled markets. Plus, many major crypto exchanges are located in the US. That's a huge potential money maker, just like a stock exchange. And will the US want to miss out on all that, plus whatever global trade which is denominated in Bitcoin? We will still be using some slow legacy system like SWIFT or our new CBDC which other countries may or may not want to use? They already don't want to use the dollar, the BRICS countries are really trying (unsuccessfully) to make something else the globally dominant currency. The problem is none of them can trust each other. Awkward part is that this is the exact problem Bitcoin solves, they just don't realize it, outside of a small handful of small countries.
The US unveiled the biggest package of sanctions it ever made against Russia. The EU did too. And yet it can't even get people to stop buying Russian oil. Could the US throw a tantrum and fight Bitcoin? Sure. But in the long run, I think they'd lose, and their markets and politicians are already pretty invested in it. And their regulatory agencies have cleared the way for Bitcoin specifically over other cryptos saying it's definitely not classified as a security. The US was probably going to lose their status as currency hegemon eventually, we really only gained that position because everybody else was blown up after the world wars. We have people in the presidential primaries, at least on the republican side, saying they will defend people's right to use cryptocurrency and fight CBDCs, some states have even passed laws to that effect. We have multi-million dollar bipartisan PACs funding pro-bitcoin candidates. Hell, you can pay your taxes in some states with Bitcoin. The horse is out of the barn. Bitcoin's market cap is $85 billion, it has passed the 1 trillion mark before. 85 billion puts it in the top 25 countries by GDP, right next to Switzerland. And remember that with Bitcoin's market cap we are talking about just the value of the currency itself, whereas GDP is the value of all trade in and out of a country. That's a higher market cap than the GDP of Sweden, Norway, Ireland, Israel, Vietnam you get the picture. And every year BTCs position gets stronger and the total transaction volume grows. And remember, this is just Bitcoin's market cap, the other coins have significant market pull, use case, and potential as well, though most are bullshit :).
But that's just speculation and opinion, who really knows what would happen. You are right that the future is not guaranteed. It's not guaranteed for Bitcoin, it's not guaranteed for the environment, it's not guaranteed for the dollar. Bitcoin's guarantees that the math it is based on stay true are essentially infallible. The question mark for BTC is "will people continue to adopt and use this?". The guarantees made by central banks and governments? They basically boil down to "trust me bro".
Fox News is a genius concept that liberals still have yet to copy effectively despite being around for… two decades? Play the fucking game liberals, it’s how you win.
Interesting bit of history thank you for this!
That goes nowhere?
Republicans are 100% better at social media and running their own media. Fox News is a genius concept that liberals still have yet to copy effectively despite being around for… two decades?
Because that doesn't work with democrats. You're missing something -- conservatives literally have different brains than us. They're driven by stories and images of fear. Trump just sounds like a hateful moron to me, there's nothing he does better than Biden. His "style" just appeals more to people who have a very different brain than mine.
In short: Trump is the lesser evil.
I just can't understand how ppl think of Biden as a better human being after how he handles Afghanistan, Palestine, Yemen...
That guy has zero appreciation for human life!
Trump will without question be worse for the middle east. Get the brain worms into check, for your own sake.
How can 'will be bad' be worse than being already bad? Somebody please explain me that logic.
It's good to speculate a bit, but let's check the facts and admit Biden have killed tens of thousands lifes and that is really evil no matter what.
Not wrong on Trump, no need to accuse other users of "brain worms". Removed for civility.
Oh.. so close, you almost had it. Trump is the far greater evil masquerading as a lesser evil.
Proud of you for trying though.
Trump will back everything that Bibi wants to do in Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and Lebanon:
“So I fought for Israel like no president ever before recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, which is a big deal. And [I] even recognized Israel sovereignty over the Golan Heights, something that they never even thought — we gave them that,” Trump said.
If you want unmitigated disaster in the Middle East AND here at home, vote for Trump.