Why Is This Election Even Close?
Why Is This Election Even Close?
Win or lose in November, more than 70 million Americans will likely cast their ballots for Trump. Most of them know who Trump is. They hear his vile words and heinous promises—and they like what they hear. They are the reason the election will be close.
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Because the conditions required for fascism to take root have been incubating for decades.
Massive wealth inequality, insecure employment, non-existent labor laws and worker's rights, hollowed-out education, healthcare and social services, large corporations getting to write their own laws verbatim, political parties sucking dick for their donors, endless war ensuring unlimited money for the military-industrial complex, demonization of brown-people-of-the-week, fetishization of 'the troops' and ongoing acceptance of brutality.
People are poor, desperate, ignorant, exploited and forgotten, they're shown every day that killing the shit out of outsiders is the solution to all the country's problems, anyone pushing actual progressive ideals is shut down and demonized as a threat to the profits of the 0.1%, giving people a choice between rightwing bastardry and neoliberal bastardry as their only lens through which to see the world.
Give that the opportunity to flare up and of course it's fucking going to. The republicans want it, the dems do nothing to prevent it.
It's like watching a party get the wrong kind of rowdy all night, you keep supplying drinks regardless, then you wonder why it turns into a fight, oh no how could this ever happen?
I'm starting to feel like fascism is almost just like the default end-state of humanity, and we are evolutionarily bound to end up there.
it's an effective meta for rich people.
Once a group gets big enough you're not able to get everybody to agree. So you do things some people want and use force against the opposition. Combine this with larger groups fighting over limited resources and you've got a recipe for authoritarianism.
Agriculture was a trap.
I heard an interesting comparison lately saying basically that blaming the development of agriculture for late stage capitalism is like blaming calculus for the development of the atom bomb, and I would tend to agree.
It's looking like agriculture was probably used originally to keep us longer in community at sites like Gobekli Tepe, and probably was absolutely life saving for us at that time.
The real issue arose from not persecuting those who would horde various types of wealth more severely (or at all).
I disagree with that last part. It wasn't that we didn't persecute the hoarders. It's that we got into groups too large to achieve consensus and we forgot how to live without agriculture so we couldn't leave. That's why it was a trap: Suddenly we had to do it and couldn't stop. Nobody has to be hoarding things if we're all reliant on farming. We have to stick around.
What we did from there was just kludgy attempts to get a nomadic primate that lives in small groups to live in sedentary large groups. If we can't fathom the cosmos because the notion of "one million" is too large for the human brain to comprehend, how are we supposed to make sense of a planet with eight billion humans? If we can only remember about 150 names and faces, how are we supposed to feel belonging in a community of thousands, let alone millions?
Also, I didn't blame agriculture for late-stage capitalism. I blamed it for authoritarianism. Once you start having to enforce the will of the majority on the minority things start to suck fast.
It's an extension of Capitalism, both serve capital interests, but neither capitalism nor fascism are inherent to people
This is the correct answer.