On Politics

A rant about politics

> The political well has been poisoned beyond recovery, there are no intelligent, fair, and well thought out discussions anymore only shit flinging and slander campaigning. There is no coming to a common understanding or compromise, one side has to 'win' and the other 'lose' like a sports match.

It has always been thus. Nothing new under the sun. US politics is a messy business. The divisions in the 19th century were even sharper than they are now, and they didn't have the Internet. There were instances of legislators using violence against one another, not just cruel words. I do suspect however that the US is about 10 minutes away from a second civil war.

Compromise is really over-rated. Ever heard of the three-fifths compromise in the Constitution? How about the Missouri Compromise?

If you think politics is like a sports match today, you should look up the Nika Riots on Wikipedia. I remember when we covered them in one of my college history courses, and I was like, "Holy shit! That is so modern!"

> News stations have turned into brainwashing manipulative garbage that only further serve to divide the nation in twane.

When people talk about the breakdown of civility in US politics today, what they're really seeing is the breakdown of a certain mass cultural consensus that lasted from about 1950 to 2000. That's basically the Cold War period of US history. When I was growing up in the 80s, practically everyone watched the evening news: either on ABC, NBC, or CBS. They were more or less interchangeable. They typically said the same things at the same time. It was so homogenous that the big three news anchors -- Rather, Jennings, and Brokaw -- all had fairly similar sounding voices. The US came together around the TV. That's how it was. That world is gone, and I do not miss it.

You do have a point though about the news being manipulative. For years, I have said that it is tailored to pander to and amplify our worst instincts. My "dad", the guy who raised me, was a very virulent white supremacist. He was always reading a newspaper or watching TV news. I think it made him more fearful, and the fear in turn led to greater hate. It ate him up from the inside, like a cancer of the soul, until he was little more than a shell of a man. I try to avoid paying much attention to the news. Sometimes I have to follow it, but I keep it to a minimum.

> It doesn't matter the economic or ruling system, the aggresively greedy and power hungry will always find ways to poke holes into whatever system you happen to pick over time. Why? to gain an advantage, to rise to the top of the game. Because they can and get off on it. This is the reality of human social hierarchy. Tops and bottoms of the social ladder are natural structures for social animals to create, and us human beings have come up with some interesting hierarchies for sure.

Hierarchy is not a given. That's one of the bedrock principles of Anarchism.

In closing, I'm currently reading Robert Paxton's book, The Anatomy of Fascism. This quote sprang to mind while reading your rant.

"Becoming a successful contender in the political arena required more than clarifying priorities and knitting alliances. It meant offering a new political style that would attract voters who had concluded that “politics" had become dirty and futile. Posing as an “antipolitics" was often effective with people whose main political motivation was scorn for politics. In situations where existing parties were confined within class or confessional boundaries, like Marxist, smallholders’, or Christian parties, the fascists could appeal by promising to unite a people rather than divide it. Where existing parties were run by parliamentarians who thought mainly of their own careers, fascist parties could appeal to idealists by being “parties of engagement," in which committed militants rather than careerist politicians set the tone. In situations where a single political clan had monopolized power for years, fascism could pose as the only nonsocialist path to renewal and fresh leadership. In such ways, fascists pioneered in the 1920s by creating the first European “catch-all" parties of “engagement,"17 readily distinguished from their tired, narrow rivals as much by the breadth of their social base as by the intense activism of their militants."

Please be careful not to fall into that trap.