US Authoritarianism

And I would've gotten away with it too if it weren't for you meddling empiricists!

Sometimes it’s faith. Others, it’s misguided distrust.

We’re taught to take facts as truth in primary school, then taught to challenge those facts in higher education. As we mature, our desire to doubt naturally grows. Without education on how to properly research, those misguided feelings of doubt lead to anti-vax, flat Earth, and Egyptian alien conspiracy theories.

They’re right in thinking the government is corrupt. They just don’t understand why they shouldn’t trust Truth Social either.

Hey Time Traveller, welcome to 2024!

Now I know back in the 19th, ideology was just a term to denote a set of ideas.

And that's cool and all. Viva la Renaissance!

But we kind of diverged from then and did some injustice to the etymology of the word. Now it's more like a synonym for dogma and it has negative connotations of irrationality and an unwillingness to examine arguments critically.

Hope you enjoy your time in the 21st century and wait until you hear about what we did with the word "Gay".

To put it another way, in a democracy where most people have to work for a living, its politically expedient for socialists to tell the truth and for aristocrats to lie.

Reality leans left.

Its more true for the left.

There are still truths the extreme left lies about for political reasons.

I just wish we had a political party where all truth was the priority.

Eh. A shared set of cultural norms from the 1980s/90s were instilled in the Millennial population by the survivors of the Great Depression and WW2. But then the political zeitgeist changed, as we moved into a Reagan Era. Now millennials are using a 40 year old lens to look at a world governed by increasingly fascist Boomers and elder GenXers. And these post-Reagan fascists are upset that Millennials didn't forget everything they accumulated over their adult lives.

Now we've got far-right authoritarians simultaneously tearing up the institutions of public education and churning out tons of news media and social media reactionary propaganda. So we've got a younger generation that's scrambling to find any kind of education. They're no longer getting a singular uniform neoliberal patriotism authored by a handful of pre-Reagan academics. Instead they're getting whatever the mass media funnel spits out - TikTok dances about our long history of genocide, Ben Shapiro rants about how Jimmy Carter destroyed the housing market, PraegerU and ChapoTrapHouse podcasts about whether or not unions are good, whatever brain worms Joe Rogan and RFK Jr are smoking.

Its not so much that Millennials got a "Woke" education as they got a Uniform education that we could all kinda agree on. But this education no longer makes any sense to the Boomers who have been ingesting endless fascist propaganda or the Zoomers that have scattered to the for corners of the ideological compass.

As that old school education is dissolved by the corrosive forces of reactionary politics, AI gobbledegook, and a fragmented modern educational landscape, we're losing the shared educational foundation we all used to be able to draw from.