uspol, cynicism, evil thoughts, wall of text
Ever since Trump started his campaign, the Evil Sociologist in me has had a morbidly curious impulse.
It kind of wants to see Leftist Trump. It's desperately curious what would actually happen if a narcissistic and incompetent socialist, maybe even an outright Leninist, got into office.
Would we fall prey to our own equivalent cognitive glitches? Could we become a cult of personality, too? Could we run a line of bullshit equivalent to the Birther conspiracy or Pizzagate?
I genuinely do not know. Our resilience against Trump's gaslighting has been pretty encouraging... but then, he offers us nothing good at all, so where was the challenge?
I've seen some pretty massive leaps of logic from our side during this mess. They've scared me sometimes. But it's so hard to judge them, especially in an environ this surreal, where the gaslighting has been so constant.
Could *our* madness just be a side effect of dealing with *their* madness, something that will heal up if our opponents just stop fucking with our information stream?
For instance, I'm still embarrassed to say, when my friends started insisting most of Trump's online support was coming from bots, I thought they were just dehumanizing the enemy. I was dead wrong on that one. Sometimes paranoia is the correct and factual response.
But I still wonder. Is there really something fundamentally different about us? Is this a conservative problem or a human problem? What exactly *would* it take to turn Us into Them? Could one bad agent, taking advantage of our own tendency to see ourselves as the Good Rational Ones, turn us into a personality cult?
My Inner Evil Sociologist can go fuck themself, 'cause this is not an experiment I want to see performed. I'm content to just leave this shit in the vault and never have to know.
re: uspol, cynicism, evil thoughts, wall of text
@Aradia @zebratron2084 I would posit that it’s a human thing, not a conservative or liberal thing.
I’d point to Lenin himself, to Mao, Stalin (or, slightly more nuanced, Kruschev) as examples; in a more general sense how Israel’s origin in leftist politics got handwaved when facing genocidal warfare; and I’d point to Truman’s feud with *unionized labor *, although we usually think of him as nigh saintly.
re: uspol, cynicism, evil thoughts, wall of text
@Aradia @zebratron2084 So yes, it’s easily possible for leftist ideologies to get hijacked *with leftist popular support*. I think with someone like Mao it becomes painfully obvious. I think Aradia makes a point for *how*. People faced with this sort of thing while actually better off either dismiss the down side as uncomfortable but hard to fix, or they actively become partisans for the elite.
re: uspol, cynicism, evil thoughts, wall of text
@zebratron2084 Is there a difference between being ruled by a demagogue as long as working class folks are getting housing and health care?
That's the point we're at now.