“The United States, just months before its 250th birthday as the world’s leading democracy, has tipped over the edge into authoritarianism and fascism,” Garrett Graff, the American historian and author, wrote in August. “In the end, faster than I imagined possible, it did happen here.”
One awakes to new horrors each day. And it is difficult to grasp – and painful to realize – just how far gone we are, and how quickly it has happened.
I’m with you. The school system is designed to keep voters stupid and uneducated when it comes to civil matters. But at some point, you can’t use it as an excuse. Yes, the system was against them, and miseducated them to this purpose, but they’re still making the decision. You can’t just handwaive away 100% of responsibility for the decisions people make as being a result of being victims of circumstance, because then there’s no such thing as a human being being responsible for their decisions.
True, but don’t forget that the internet essentially destroyed the last guardrail against stupidity: social exclusion.
Pre-internet (not even social media mind you as prior to that, BBSes and forums existed), if you were a dumbfuck, you got excluded. No friends, no hanging out with people, nobody wanted to spend time with you. And most people being social beings, you’d want to avoid that, therefore you either didn’t voice those opinions, or learned to change them.
Then came the internet and suddenly, the morons found brethren. First were the conspiracy theorists who were already excluded, finding safe havens to hide out at. But then slowly - and this is where mass social media, and easy access to it via smartphones and tablets, and affordable computing, comes in - the other morons, let them be racists, antisemites, homophobes, transphobes, etc., slowly discovered that hey, while they might be alone in their surroundings, they’re not alone when you account for 7 (back then, today it’s 8) billion people!
And so the last guardrail was gone, and stupidity, a la Idiocracy, has begun to spread.
Not to mention that the Nazis, coming out of hiding, were quick to utilise these new spaces to recruit people. Now with less overt racism and antisemitism, they preyed on the newer generation.
Remember when around 2012-13-14, all the big meme sites - 9gag, iFunny, etc. - slowly became more and more extremists, racist, and overtly Nazi? That was a somewhat coordinated move, capturing the youngest generation knowing full well their parents aren’t yet tech-savvy enough to do anything about it. Kids under 20-22 lack the reasoning skills older people do, this directly leads to lesser understanding on how bad their actions are, and how they’re being influenced. Which did happen slowly but surely, and resulted in the Trunp win just a few years later.
Mind you I’m not saying these people don’t need to take responsibility for their actions - they most definitely do. I’m purely explaining the reasons why things unfolded as they did, so we can prevent it in the future.
The real mistake was not finishing the job of getting rid of all Nazis back in 1945.
People were dumb and voted for fascism before the Internet, you know
In limited numbers, sure.