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Now clearly, we're not quite there yet, but the rise of groups like Identity Evropa, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, Rise Above Movement, Proud Boys, etc are all furthering the breakdown in political discourse and normalizing political violence. These group allegiances also act to politicize things that were previously entirely apolitical, simply through propagation. The Internet, like the advent of pulp publishing, the cinema, and radio before it in the Weimar Republic, has enabled a fantastic amount of stimulus and incoherent messaging that can be directly, without any kind of curation, accessed directly by younger people. This easily leads to a state of "hyperreality"[^5] if you're a leftist neo-Marxist or Bezmenov's "demoralization"[^6] if you're a rightist neo-Fascist. The particular emphasis differs between the two concepts, but the fundamental point of both is that an individual can no longer determine what is actually real and what isn't (i.e. societal gaslighting[^7], which creates a sense of alienation and impotence that creates learned helplessness[^8]). This trend has really been ascendant for the last twenty years or so in youth culture. This entire package overall creates a sense of cultural rootlessness amongst youth segments across all demographics. Note the simultaneous rise of "normie" and "cishet privilege" as insults towards majority culture in the background Internet cultural milleux by fundamentally opposing groups. The mass capitalization of culture has destroyed any sense of historical or cultural context for young people and the overall cultural and economic downturn since 2008 has also prevented their own integration into society in meaningful ways as individuals. They are plagued by impostor syndrome[^9] if they're inside groups and are plagued by fear of missing out[^10] if they're not. This psychological inferiority applies in every realm of their lives. They are buffeted from everywhere with contradictory messages. They are told by every form of media that they are inferior to an ever-shifting ideal. They are told that to exist socially as functional adults, they need to meet now-impossible cultural expectations--they need to be attractive, have lots of money, own houses, have high paying jobs, have great experiences all the time, etc. Fight Club was really prescient in nailing that emerging pathos: > Man, I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables – slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off. |
Now unlike in the Weimar Republic, youth in the United States don't really have public myths about frontline soldiers or the recent experience of the Bolshevik revolution to provide new forms of rootedness and resistance to the system that is perceptually ruining their lives. But they do have access to fundamentally off-limits cultural forms through the Internet that serve the same mythical function. They have access to historical information about systems that were ostensibly opposed to the current paradigm. In societal systems that are neither compassionate nor just, those suffering will look towards other systems to fulfill these ideals. While this is a major simplification, leftists have Communism and the rightists have Fascism. However, the United States state security apparatus was really, really effective at destroying the actual living cultural forms[^12] of these during the mid-60s and through the near present, and made their public social promulgation impossible (barring extremely insular communities like universities and prisons). The Internet has fundamentally changed this. Books that were previously impossible to find are publicly and immediately available digitally. Pamphlets, speeches, ideas, and memes that were publicly impossible to hold now have social venues. They have communities. They have reading groups. They have voluntary propaganda departments that are targeting people already ripe for indoctrination.
From Jacques Ellul's "Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes":
> Propaganda tries to surround man by all possible routes in the realm of feelings as well as ideas, by playing on his will or on his needs, through his conscious and his unconscious, assailing him in both his private and his public life. It furnishes him with a complete system for explaining the world, and provides immediate incentives to action. We are here in the presence of an organized myth that tries to take hold of the entire person. Through the myth it creates, propaganda imposes a complete range of intuitive knowledge, susceptible of only one interpretation, unique and one-sided, and precluding any divergence. This myth becomes so powerful that it invades every arena of consciousness, leaving no faculty or motivation intact. It stimulates in the individual a feeling of exclusiveness, and produces a biased attitude.
The main bulwark against the integration of these digital radicalized personae into people's normal daily existence has been that the "adult" political discourse simply didn't allow for it. In the last two decades the 24-hour news cycle, the rise of popular think pieces over neutral reporting, and Super-PAC-indoctrination have stripped every notion of good faith between political actors, their constituents, and their rivals. This was a powder-keg that the election of Barack Obama sparked for the right-wing and Donald Trump sparked off for the left. Now yellow journalism, astroturfing, and echo chambers are in total control of where the discourse travels in either direction. Neither side has any incentive to reduce the invective lest the other side win. Both sides have villanized their opponents so much by this point that the social penalty for not displaying tokens of loyalty is the same as actually being a member of the opposite group, effectively creating an extremely narrow opinion corridor[^13] on anything if you don't want to be considered a gulag-sending Stalinist or a jew-baiting Nazi merely by association.
The truth is that all signs point to some form of despotism coming to America[^14].
A final quote:
From "They Thought They Were Free" by Milton Mayer
> National Socialism was a revulsion by my friends against parliamentary politics, parliamentary debate, parliamentary government--against all the higgling and the haggling of the parties and the splinter parties, their coalitions, their confusions, and their conniving. It was the final fruit of the common man's repudiation of "the rascals." It's motif was, "Throw them all out." My friends, in the 1920's, were like spectators at wrestling match who suspect that beneath all the grunts and groans, the struggle and sweat, the match is "fixed," that the performers are only pretending to put on a fight. The scandals that rocked the country, as one party or cabal "exposed" another, dismayed and then disgusted my friends. (One sensed some of this reaction against the celebrated Army-McCarthy hearing in the United States in 1954--not against one side or another but against "the whole thing" as "disgusting" or "disgraceful.")
> While the ship of the German State was being shivered, the officers, who alone had life-preservers, disputed their prerogatives on the bridge. My friends observed that none of the non-Communist, non-Nazi leaders objected to the 35,000 Reichsmark salaries of the cabinet ministers; only the Communists and Nazi objected.
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1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_cascade
2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_proof
3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect
4 - https://mannerofspeaking.org/2010/05/12/some-chilling-public...
5 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality
6 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2OtFprM3No
7 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting
8 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
9 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome
10 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out
11 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_guilt
12 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
13 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_corridor#Overview
14 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ayxot9vQ_k