To pile on, it dont think this attitude is productive. For every person that finds it motivation for positive change, there are two that take the criticism as face value and g8ve up or lean into it.
It is like basic child psychology. It is hard to get child to develop constructively by telling them they are awful and worthless.
This is why the right gets away with saying liberals hate America. Because as long as there is anything to criticize about America (which there always will be), some people simply cannot make a single truly positive statement about America, or even things that happened in or came from America.
Slate is even worse than The Atlantic in this regard.
> This is why the right gets away with saying liberals hate America.
Right can’t say a single word without bringing up Left first! What’s their obsession with them? Why they seek constant validation from Left? Pretty clear who’s hateful! Given the current mess, it’s also clear who hates America.
> This is why the right gets away with saying liberals hate America.
The right gets away with it because they are disingenuous children who argue in bad faith. Don't blame the people criticizing the US; those criticisms are usually valid and reasonable. The right needs to remember that being able to criticize the government/country was a founding principle of the US, and that just because someone says something critical, it doesn't mean hate. Seriously, it's like they have a child's level of discourse.
(In reality, they know exactly what they're doing, of course. The hypocrisy and simple ragebait is entirely the point. It's just bad faith bullshit.)
> This is why the right gets away with saying liberals hate America.
This is a form of victim blaming. The right side of American politics gets away with it not because the left complains, but because the right doesn’t get punished at the polls for doing it.
They don’t get punished at the polls because people accept, or are at least willing to entertain the implication, that the left wing dislikes America. And what sense does it make to vote for an unpatriotic politician? Would you want to work for a CEO who publicly disdains the company? (Gil Amelio’s infamous quote about steering the sinking Apple ship comes to mind.)
As long as the Democratic base insists on caveating every American achievement with the Omnicause, it will keep playing into the Gingrichian rhetoric.
> what sense does it make to vote for an unpatriotic politician?
I don't know? Ask everyone who voted for a second Grump term. Every one of his rambles is some kind of sour puss complaint about our country, and yet people are still lapping it up!
I'd say the better framework is constructive versus destructive. The average American just doesn't want to think about constructive solutions or constructive criticism. The nuance required for incremental improvement is just too much work. But tell them you're going to smash things and hurt people, and they'll buy right in. It's essentially pan-religious fundamentalism.
Of course then the corpos are all too happy to step in with their own constructive but proprietary and anti-individual-liberty solutions. Which points back to the real motives for why the destructive memes end up being so popularized to begin with - destruction creates a power vacuum for the corpos to step into, while constructive governmental solutions get corrupted by lobbyists to overtly benefit corpos.
> what sense does it make to vote for an unpatriotic politician?
I really dislike the concept of "patriotism". What does it even mean? I think you'll get different answers if you get different people.
If people think that being critical of the US makes someone "unpatriotic", then that's their problem. If that makes a critical politician less electable, so be it. The alternative -- politicians censoring themselves and pretending everything is amazing -- is much worse.
And I'm not sure where the right is coming from anyway. The whole concept of MAGA is that the US kinda sucks right now and Trump is the savior who will fix it. If anyone has been critical of the US, it's been Trump and the MAGA crowd. But of course hypocrisy is never a problem for the right.
For those that were attracted to it, Trump presented the idea that America and it's people are good at good at their core, and this can be brought back.
Those same people view rhetoric from the other side as saying America is and was fundamentally evil and corrupt. They take this personally as a condemnation of them and their family.
I looked up Gil Amelio’s “infamous” quote and it doesn’t seem incorrect given what Apple was going through at the time. Steve Jobs had just sold 1.5 million shares of Apple stock and tanked the stock, would you accuse Steve Jobs of hating Apple?
Toxic positivity is when you can’t criticize something even when it deserves criticism. Is America full of brilliant people? Yes. Is it in a steep decline at the moment? Also yes. Apple thrived because Steve Jobs did a coup and steered the ship. America needs the same, but not from an incompetent nincompoop like the current moron.
Ironically, it's this ritual self-flagellation that helped elect Trump.
Normies lost faith in the media partly because they were seen as not really loving America. And if you don't trust the media, then it's a lot easier to believe Trump's lies.
I feel like it's the other way around: Trump got elected because he was extremely critical of the US, and spun that as "America sucks right now because the liberals have ruined it".
And beyond that, he just said the right words to people who were not doing so well in the economy. Lies, of course, but very seductive lies, and for a while I even felt bad for some Trump voters for getting sucked into those lies. And then of course he leaned into the popular right-wing culture-war stuff.
(No longer, though: at some point you lose the ability to say "but I thought he would help me!" after the 500th time he hasn't helped you like he said he would.)
Both sides said that "America sucks right now". I think Trump said "Let's go back to when America was great" whereas liberals said, "America was never great, so we need to keep changing."
Worse, it was easy for some liberals to slide from "America was never great" to "and it's the fault of [white people|cis people|males]"
I'm not endorsing any of those views--I just think that's how some people perceived it.
> Normies lost faith in the media partly because they were seen as not really loving America.
I would argue they lost faith because the media constantly lies and distorts the truth to promote the ideology of capital. They are elite and disconnected, absolutely, just not in a left wing way, but a corpo-capitalist way (which only looks “left” if you’re to the right of capital).
eh, no that's false. They promote the ideology of ad revenue at most, which causes audience capture, which on the left means anti-capital crazy talk like pro-theocracy, anti-growth and other weird shit.
Social media promotes ad revenue (engagement). That's why it's full of brainrot slop and outrage bait. Legacy media promotes ideologies consistent with its owners, which is why for instance it downplays bad stuff Israel does and upplays bad stuff Iran does.
> Legacy media promotes ideologies consistent with its owners, which is why for instance it downplays bad stuff Israel does and upplays bad stuff Iran does.
Partly true, but also mostly wrong. It's all about the business model. Owners doing what you say can only do so much if the business model is based on selling ads and no one gets a salary if they don't attack jews enough for their audience.
The claim that Israels bad actions are down played is pretty doubtful. I always see 10x or more negative reporting of Israel compared to what I happen to know about the conflicts. Like in Swedish media it's always "Israel attacks Lebanon" but never ever "Hizbollah attacks Israel", even though that's what happens first.
It is like basic child psychology. It is hard to get child to develop constructively by telling them they are awful and worthless.