Quote:
Originally Posted by JoltinJake
This is a great post. Bolded is key to me and I think explains a lot about what has changed in the past several years compared to, say, the previous 30 years.
In the past, enough people who were otherwise morally corrupt idiots with terrible views decided that they needed to go along with the elite consensus -- the trusted evening news anchor, political leaders, etc.
If everyone on TV agreed, they must be right. Maybe these people worried about being ostracized if they allowed their gut feelings to be known. Maybe they simply weren't exposed to their own gut ideas in a coherent manner by others, so they didn't share, assuming they were in the minority.
To a large extent, elites in the media had control. It's not really that these elites were purposefully manipulating idiots into obeying norms, it's that the vast majority of people who made up the professional media class were highly educated and so they already agreed on norms. And they repeated them on TV and in newspapers and so it filtered through the population.
But then the internet and the fragmenting of the media allowed more viewpoints to be heard. Soon the aforementioned depraved idiots were seeing other depraved idiots saying the things they always kinda believed and always kinda wanted to say. And then you get a presidential candidate saying those things, the ultimate affirmation.
Thinking about time and history, though, it's important to bear in mind highly fragmented, partisan 'media' was almost the rule for most of American and modern history. And by and large the political climate was much the same way: often violent or pervaded minimally by deep partisan mistrust, or dominated strongly by elites where the masses were expected simply to obey. But not some sort of egalitarian or benevolent fashion; the elites kept the status and others simply dealt with it.
The ideals of a well-functioning liberal democracy, complete with a non-partisan media that contained in it the trusted voices of authority who themselves were protectors of at least lip-service to rationality, science, egalitarianism -- that was a very modern creation.
Take American history. Once you go back to the early 19th century, you're talking about a relatively sparsely populated agrarian society with basically endless land to its west to conquer and populate. A hugely different society.
With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the creation of a mass-media environment, large immigrant populations arriving, and increased urbanization you get something approximating a context closer to our own. And I've made the point before, but the Civil War was obviously a deadly and violent conflict, followed in the following decades by the concentration of wealth and industrial power and propaganda power in the hands of relatively few. Followed by a strong populist reaction that itself came with violence, with discord, with disharmony. Both sides armed themselves with fiery, aggressive, highly partisan media and the concept of a non-partisan moral arbiter or truth arbiter would be seen as ludicrous. It wasn't sunshine and flowers.
And after the Depression set in by the 30s, before WWII, liberal democracy hung by a ****ing thread. The slimmest of threads. The US had it best, and STILL business elites set designs to stage a coup against FDR who was similarly trying to beat back the forces of a far more radicalized left wing in the US, and eventually got ensnared in a huge global, principally
ideological war.
That world we lionize and celebrate -- a well-functioning mass participatory liberal democracy where everyone gets along relatively well and the rule of law is king and we share some vague notions about rights beyond minimalist statutory protections -- that whole consensus really only existed after WWII. Most of the rest history looks nothing like that.
This is related to my point earlier about back-sliding democracy and norms and values, that a lot of the things we cherish and hold as immutable and assumed were long-standing and governed our interactions were in fact highly temporal, relatively recent advancements.
Glib, and sad, almost devastating for those of us who love it: but it may be that the liberal democratic order which dominated the last 70 years or whatever was never destined to last forever, in the same way Platonic cardinal virtues or the estates of the realm no longer govern social order, no longer inform how to govern. We are guaranteed nothing and while I would love to imagine history is really an arc of time that bends always to my ideals, it's probably not the reality. In many ways authoritarian impulses, or pivots to anarchy, or noblesse oblige -- all have proven far more durable and common and long-lasting than mass-participatory liberal democracies.
I am not a fatalist and I do not declare the old order dead, either. Just that we not become accustomed to seeing history as always trending toward justice, and fairness, and progress. Regression is real. I do not know whether history has favored rule by noble elites versus morally corrupt morons but that's sort of the point, that it's hard to suss out, and moral deprivation can be deep and pervasive and we are not so exceptional as to be promised something else.
tl;dr reply: I don't actually think idiots and the morally depraved have been constrained by the elite or technocratic consensus as a rule. That's a relatively very recent phenomenon, quite new and not long-standing.
Last edited by DVaut1; 07-06-2017 at 03:26 AM.
