We are schooled almost to our DNA in the basic idea of our society, our civilization, our politics including ‘free speech’ for issues to be ‘debated’ and that’s how our culture picks answers.
And it’s now an anachronism.
For our whole history, we’ve had a minority of crazies. However far back we want to go — let’s go with the John Birch Society that the Kochs’ father co-founded.
They'd run around saying the nation would be mind-controlled by communist-added fluoride in the water and doing the math showing nuclear war was a good idea, we’d win.
But who cared? As a minority, they were just filling that role of ‘freedom’ for ‘other voices’ to get to talk also, and the people rejected them.
And that’s now it’s long been. Ignore those crazies, they’d only be dangerous if they had power.
Until now. In recent years, we’ve had so much money pouring into public opinion-altering media, stirring up outrage for purposes from undermining the government to ratings, they’ve created a monster.
Now the seeds of delusion they have sown are reaped into the trumpenstein monster (and his son, Paul ‘Eddie Munster’ Ryan et al), voters irrational but outraged making the ballots into WMD’s.
They won.
And this is the ugly picture when they go from crazies to ignore, to crazies in power.
This is the failure of our model of government, which rests on the rationality and well-informed status of the American people for its stability — things now absent in the electoral majority.
Our weapon is the truth and rational approach to politics — which we should be prepared to offer as the alternative as the monsters burn the place down and there is a backlash.
Talk radio, Fox and other components of the right-noise machine have worked all too well. We haven’t known how to respond to zombie-like hordes carrying signs about Obama trying to destroy the world, except to try to ignore them and hope they remain a minority.
They didn’t.
So now, in addition to fighting for good policy, we’re fighting a propaganda war against the other side whose goal is to create an irrational state among as many as possible.
This in ways is a sort of re-litigation of the enlightenment — but with new, advanced modern weapons like ‘think tank’ propaganda machines, billions in budgets for propaganda, and the media system. The bad news, bookies have the odds with the bad guys for the foreseeable future — but we should have a window for progress in the coming backlash before they cement their power further.
And we need to win. Because in the absence of that, the chaos they create will be solved by a new order, based on things other than democracy, as oligarchies always have been.
By supporting good media and not bad, among other measures, we’ll help win the fight. We have change — and it’ll either be defeated and return to a rational system or it’ll solidify into the irrational and corrupt. It won’t stay like it is either way.