I can’t find it right now but there was an interesting article a few months back arguing that conservative intellectualism isn’t a top-down phenomenon but is really an infrastructure for rationalizing and laundering the base’s resentments, grievances and bigotry
the-senat on
Makes me think of this:
>If you look closely at Hitler’s words, you notice that from the beginning of his political career, he thought that the German people were ignorant, weak, and foolish. “The mass of the people are lazy and cowardly,” he wrote. There was no point in trying to reach them with sophisticated messages about tariffs or tax levels or the minutiae of foreign treaties. It was the mistake of the middle-class liberals to try to deliver learned and tried policy lectures. Ordinary people couldn’t understand these things and wouldn’t bother to try. To sink into the minds of average people, the message had to be simple. It had to be emotional, and it had to be endlessly repeated. Hatred worked well, not intellectualism.
hibikir_40k on
The article describes what happens, but misses what is important: Why did it actually happen? And the fact of the matter is that strong intellectual underpinnings of any political movement are only remotely important when you are doing long term planning. If all you want to do is win, propaganda is all you need. None of your policies have to work. But as we learned in the Obama administration: Winning is easy young man, governing is harder
But on this, we have to face the failures of the US government’s structure. Even when one comes in with all the good will in the world, and is actually interested in solving problems, Any long term problem is only there precisely because there’s no reasonable, implementable intervention that will fix it. Otherwise it’d have been fixed already. So the US and large parts of Europe face the real problem: Propaganda alone is competitive because, given the way the system is set up, policy nerds are still going to fail, so they are not giving you that much better a deal once in power than most propagandists. If the argument was between Trump 1 and Biden, it’s not a won battle at all. It just happens that when the propagandist realizes that there’s no actual barriers, why not turn Latin American populist, and just loot? We stop getting Trump 1, which at least had some people attempting to govern in a semi-sober way, and then it all heads for collapse.
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I can’t find it right now but there was an interesting article a few months back arguing that conservative intellectualism isn’t a top-down phenomenon but is really an infrastructure for rationalizing and laundering the base’s resentments, grievances and bigotry
Makes me think of this:
>If you look closely at Hitler’s words, you notice that from the beginning of his political career, he thought that the German people were ignorant, weak, and foolish. “The mass of the people are lazy and cowardly,” he wrote. There was no point in trying to reach them with sophisticated messages about tariffs or tax levels or the minutiae of foreign treaties. It was the mistake of the middle-class liberals to try to deliver learned and tried policy lectures. Ordinary people couldn’t understand these things and wouldn’t bother to try. To sink into the minds of average people, the message had to be simple. It had to be emotional, and it had to be endlessly repeated. Hatred worked well, not intellectualism.
The article describes what happens, but misses what is important: Why did it actually happen? And the fact of the matter is that strong intellectual underpinnings of any political movement are only remotely important when you are doing long term planning. If all you want to do is win, propaganda is all you need. None of your policies have to work. But as we learned in the Obama administration: Winning is easy young man, governing is harder
But on this, we have to face the failures of the US government’s structure. Even when one comes in with all the good will in the world, and is actually interested in solving problems, Any long term problem is only there precisely because there’s no reasonable, implementable intervention that will fix it. Otherwise it’d have been fixed already. So the US and large parts of Europe face the real problem: Propaganda alone is competitive because, given the way the system is set up, policy nerds are still going to fail, so they are not giving you that much better a deal once in power than most propagandists. If the argument was between Trump 1 and Biden, it’s not a won battle at all. It just happens that when the propagandist realizes that there’s no actual barriers, why not turn Latin American populist, and just loot? We stop getting Trump 1, which at least had some people attempting to govern in a semi-sober way, and then it all heads for collapse.