Our mistake was to assume we lived in a greater nation than we do. Our mistake was to see the enjoyment, the extraordinary stability between idealism and pragmatism, the vitality, the generosity, the coalition-building of the Kamala Harris marketing campaign and assume that it should overcome the politics of lies and resentment. Our mistake was to assume that racism and misogyny weren’t as unhealthy as they’re, whether or not it utilized to who was keen to vote for a supremely certified Black lady or who was keen to vote for an adjudicated rapist and convicted prison who admires Hitler. Our mistake was to assume we might row this boat throughout the acid lake earlier than the acid dissolved it.
We knew what the issues have been, and we needed to repair them. The principal issues that received us to this bleakest second in American historical past are intertwined. They’re the disaster of masculinity, the failure of the information media and the rise of Silicon Valley, and in a manner they’re all the identical downside.
The media may be the best to explain. A democracy requires an knowledgeable citizenry, and the US media over the previous eight years specifically created an more and more misinformed citizenry.
When individuals are extra involved {that a} trans lady may play on a softball staff than that the local weather disaster may profoundly devastate the biosphere and far of life on it, human and in any other case, for the following 10,000 years, the media has failed. When folks fear about crime when it’s low, an economic system when it’s thriving and immigrants once they do a lot of the laborious work that sustains that economic system and commit fewer crimes than the native-born, the media has failed to achieve them.
When it got here to Donald Trump, they went straightforward on him, they usually time and again let him and the far proper set the agenda. They consistently handled asymmetrical points as symmetrical ones – if the Democrats resisted Republican outrages, either side have been “polarized”. Within the media the whole lot had two sides, even when one facet was the reality and the opposite was the lie, one facet was the human rights or the regulation and the opposite facet was their violation.
They went delicate on Trump’s criminality and incompetence, and his sheer quantity of scandals meant that the previous ones have been forgotten as the following one erupted. He wouldn’t have received his 2016 minority victory had the US information media adequately conveyed that Trump was not the enjoyable fictional character within the actuality TV present The Apprentice; he was a serially bankrupt man repeatedly accused of sexual assault with a whole lot of prison ties and a historical past of not paying his payments, being helped on by the Vladimir Putin regime, which had itself severely corrupted the data surroundings of the election.
After all what the Putin regime did with its hacking and leaking, its troll farms stirring up strife and spreading misinformation, was exploit vulnerabilities that Silicon Valley had created, and that Silicon Valley was not involved in fixing so long as the income rolled in. Silicon Valley was created by white males and maybe as a result of the immensely rich titans of the trade that arose initially appeared harmlessly nerdy, or maybe as a result of the US authorities on the time when the mega-corporations arose was so neoliberal, they have been by no means held in test as their enterprises got here to dominate the world in vital methods.
Social media arose like a college of sharks within the info pool and started to devour the financial base of the mainstream media, to undermine the filtration techniques that had restricted the unfold of hate, lies, misinformation and disinformation. However to speak about it as an info pool is to underestimate how a lot it has modified consciousness itself, how addictive and the way distorting it’s, the way it manipulates values and feelings and beliefs.
Younger males appear significantly weak to its choices, and plenty of dank corners of the web recruit them into misogyny and white supremacy by way of influencers and incel subcultures, into antisemitism and conspiracy theories, and greater than that into changing into unmoored, destabilized, unwell, remoted.
The Maga proper with its indifference to the traditional points of excellent governance and its preoccupation with clickbait distractions is a web based monster and it has succeeded in making a extra indignant, aggressive type of masculinity, yet another satisfied that debasing and dominating ladies is important to its id, whether or not in porn or in Trump’s fantasizing aloud that Liz Cheney ought to face a firing squad and Harris face Mike Tyson. The countless memes of Trump as Rambo and rescuers and Jesus present how a lot the misplaced boys and Maga ladies need an authoritarian chief, and the actual fact they will make one out of the bodily and mentally pathetic Trump is an affidavit to the facility of tech-fueled fantasy.
After all Silicon Valley, media and the disaster in masculinity converge in Elon Musk, who used his possession of Twitter and his monstrous wealth to push Trump’s marketing campaign alongside and who apparently intends to be the facility behind the throne. Musk has turn out to be more and more unhinged and far-right himself. Strikingly, two different males near Trump have additionally turn out to be more and more delusional – Tucker Carlson along with his current claims about being attacked by demons, and Robert F Kennedy Jr, along with his nonsensical rantings about fluoridation and racist claims about Covid-19. JD Vance, previously a not very profitable enterprise capitalist, was chosen by Silicon Valley oligarchs as Trump’s vice-president and himself appears to have turn out to be a far-right extremist with an obsession about compulsory childbearing.
They look like deeply broken folks they usually have come to break the whole lot else, together with the local weather; human rights, particularly ladies’s rights, trans rights and immigrants’ rights; and the US economic system. The remainder of us and the remainder of the world would be the cleanup crew as a result of males like this by no means clear up after themselves.
Supply hyperlink
