So, Andrew Yang's podcast got a bit dark today talking about the downfall of belief in democracy, and how social media and the rise of the internet seems to have an impact in negative belief in democracy. You know, as someone who has been around on the internet for a while at this point, I kind of have some views on this, and that's what I want to discuss here.
The internet as the new printing press
Remember how during the middle ages all of the information was controlled by the monarchies and the church? You had one church, and all of the services were done in latin. People couldn't read the bible for themselves. And then you had monarchies with tight information control. And then things changed. The printing press came about and then people were given access to all of these ideas. And it led to the enlightenment. It also led to turbulence like the protestant reformation, which broke the grip of the catholic church, and the development of social contract and natural rights type philosophies, which weakened the divine right of kings and eventually led to the rise of democracies.
Well, I feel like the internet has done that. I can imagine, in ages past, most Americans just had a steady diet of information given to them. First it was newspapers, and then Radio, and then TV. And people, outside of scholars and the highly educated, were only given information from those sources. So what they were exposed to ended up dictating their views. This is propaganda at work. And while we had tumult in the 1930s that I'll get to in a bit, the internet kind of counteracted that. Suddenly people were allowed to view whatever information they wanted. And this led to people accepting views that they otherwise wouldn't have.
I myself have changed in drastic ways because of the internet. It was because of the internet I was able to become an atheist and put my thoughts on religion and spirituality at the time into perspective. I was educated too, in political science and sociology no less, but ultimately, the internet allowed me to supplement my studies a bit, and this led to a lot of non mainstream conclusions.
The same thing happened with politics. After becoming an atheist, I had to rebuild my entire political view from the ground up too. And this led me to leave conservatism and move to the left, adopting a form of human centered capitalism as a positive force for good in the world (as I see it). I never really questioned the underpinnings of democracy as a concept, but I did realize after 2016, which will be a main focal point in this article, that our democracy is not as free or democratic as we like to make it out to be, and I feel like this actually is the huge reason why things are backsliding. Long story short, i feel like Americans are waking up to the flaws of American democracy, and that's causing a breakdown of the belief system, especially as we go into a new party realignment.
The last time this happened
The last time the world faced problems like this was the 1930s. The world fell into the depths of the great depression, and with that, society's fabric unraveled.
During this time, we had three great ideologies controlling parts of the world, liberal democracy, communism, and fascism. Communism arose in 1917 in Russia, as poor conditions there led to the people rising up and getting rid of the czars. Lenin formed the soviet union, which was the first communist society based around worker councils. Under Lenin's rule things didn't seem awful, but then he died and Stalin took over. And that led to the country becoming a hardcore authoritarian dictatorship, as Stalin was a rather psychotic dictator who just mass purged anyone he disagreed with and had questionable policies. Later on, China, North Korea, and Cuba would follow suit in their own ways, with the two former countries basing their ideals on Stalinist Russia at the time. Generally speaking, communism wasn't the utopia people thought it would be, and a lot of this was due to the ideology at the time. People like Lenin thought that if they would have a communist revolution that it would lead to a "dictatorship of the proletariat", after which, the state would fade away. But...as it turned out, it just led to a dictatorship with a highly inefficient command economy that made people both poor and oppressed.
The rise of communism led to red scares in the 1920s, but at the same time there was a healthy labor movement that really took off in the 1930s as people couldn't survive under capitalism as it existed. let's face it, raw capitalism sucks too. And in this case, you had high unemployment, people being wage slaves, pay being low, rent being high, and life being unliveable. This led to a rash of leftism in the US that really took off in the 1930s, with some fearing the same thing that happened in Russia would happen here.
At the same time, the rest of Europe went in the other direction, toward fascism. The losing axis powers, and even some allies who felt displaced from negotiations like Italy, felt unhappy under liberal democracy. The Weimar Republic formed after World War I in Germany, and by the 1930s problems were rampant. The terms of the treaty of versailles, which unfairly blamed Germany for the war, put the country under harsh conditions. They had to pay tons of reparations to other countries. Hyperinflation gripped the economy on top of the global depression. Germany wasn't allowed to militarize, and German attitudes became one of resentment against the allies. This led to funny mustache guy taking power, claiming to "make germany great again" to make a difference to a certain American president. He rejected the terms of the treaty of versailles and focused on an economic recovery that put the country in the best state it had been since world war 1. Massive public works projects in infrastructure and rebuilding the military put people to work, and things seemed to improve. While he was popular at the time, he started using the situation to seize power for himself and turn the country into a dictatorship. This led to him doing things like killing the Jews, who he believed were the source of the world's problems, and eventually going on territorial conquests to expand Germany. This led to World War II, and the holocaust. Yeah. He was not a nice guy.
So....ultimately, this put the US in a tough spot, as it faced many of these forces too. On the far left was a faction that wanted the US to become a communist state like the Soviet Union, and on the right, there were a lot of fascist elements that led to some wanting us to be like Nazi Germany. And FDR, realizing he had to save liberal democracy and the republic, had to implement strong reforms that fixed the country. This led to the rise of New Deal Liberalism. FDR put people to work on infrastructure, giving people jobs that the free market failed to do. he implemented labor regulations, conceding to long term demands of the labor movement such as that for a minimum wage, safety laws, and the 40 hour work week. He taxed businesses at up to 90%, although this was more for show than in practice. And he established social security for the elderly. While some hated him for this, he was quickly able to suppress dissent. He blackmailed the supreme court with court packing, while arguing the country needed this for its very survival, and the right lost almost all influence in the US. FDR saved America, honestly. He saved us from going in either a fascist or communist direction. How? BY SOLVING PROBLEMS AND RESTORING PEOPLE'S FAITH IN THE SYSTEM.
As I see it, people turn on democracy when democracy does nothing for them. When the system is unresponsive to their demands. For decades the US had suppressed the labor movement. The demands FDR addressed were common rallying cries in years past, by the likes of Eugene Debs of the socialist party. But, the US, being a 2 party oligarchy, conveniently ignored the people for as long as they could until the demands became so great that they had to cave into them to save the people. The same pattern happened about 70 years prior with the slavery issue culminating in the civil war. America has a habit of doing this. It likes to sweep problems under the rug and continue with business as usual until the country, one way or other, forces a change. And, when Yang talks about the decline of American democracy, I feel like that's what's happening today.
How we got here, as I see it
Honestly, as long as belief in the system works, we're fine. What happens where people start questioning the state of democracy is that democracy simply stops working.
Let's continue where we left off. FDR saved democracy. He enacted the New Deal, and realigned the parties to the point we had a democratic monopoly on politics. The right was weak, and it largely couldn't resist the new deal, which was overwhelmingly popular. This led to republicans being wiped out electorally, and not coming back until the 1950s when war hero Dwight Eisenhower ran on the republican ticket as a moderate. FDR was insanely popular, and only death caused him to leave office. He actually planned to do far more once World War II was won, and proposed an economic bill of rights, but this was not to be as he died before the war ended. This led to Harry Truman to take over, and he was significantly less popular, barely winning his 1948 reelection and by 1952 the dems ran out of steam. This led to Dwight Eisenhower winning as a moderate republican. He ran on preserving FDR's legacy and ended up also expanding the interstate. In the 1960s the democrats took over again, but by that point the country faced new sets of problems in the form of the cuban missile crisis, vietnam, JFK's assassination, and the war on poverty and civil rights movement. These issues made the democrats far less popular, and the country more divided, and the civil rights stuff really caused a schism.
This led to the decline of the new deal coalition starting in 1968. The southern democrats abandoned the party and voted for Wallace, feeling betrayed by the party over civil rights. The rest of the party was also divided, with the establishment faction pushing Humphrey and the anti establishment not going along with it. Sound familiar? This led to Nixon winning the presidency. Sound familiar? However, unlike Trump, he won in a landslide. The fact was, the rest of the country was just over the democrats. Vietnam was unpopular, civil rights divided the party, the war on poverty also divided the country. And things just weren't in a good place. Nixon himself was a liberal republican much like Eisenhower, but he spoke to racists and authoritarians in a coded manner. But then he lost the trrust of the country himself due to his corruption over his reelection, and resigned. Ford took over, but was never really popular, leading to the democrats winning again in a sort of last hurrah for the new deal coalition. By this point the country was facing inflation, an invasion of the Soviet Union of another sovereign country, a hostage crisis, and various other issues. Sound familiar? And ultimately, people just lost faith in the democrats by this point. Between them being too culturally left at times, having bad optics, the establishment wing of the party being weak and ineffective, and nothing happening, the people just turned away from the left and embraced the right.
This led to a party realignment in 1980. In retrospect, the parties started realigning back in 1968, but it took several elections for things to get straightened out. And this led to the decline of the new deal paradigm that had united the nation since the 1930s. What replaced it was a conservative paradigm, and this is where things really start accelerating where we start understanding politics as we see it now.
Reagan was popular in the 1980s, and his ideology of deregulating everything and government being the problem was very popular. And one thing he deregulated here, relevant to Yang's discussion, is the media industry. For much of American history, the fairness doctrine was a thing for radio and TV. Due to limited bandwidth on the radio and TV bands, media was required to be fair and balanced and give all sides a voice. it led to a media that was very bland and very limited in its actual spectrum of debate. And it largely led to discussions being had within the acceptable paradigm at the time. Which for the most part was relatively culturally liberal. But the decline of the fairness doctrine led to conservatives being able to make their own media giving a voice to conservatives who had long felt not adequately represented under the old system. So older networks like ABC and NBC started to be deemed the "liberal media", while conservatives started giving a voice to middle americans who had long felt neglected.
This led to the right radicalizing starting in the 1990s. Hopped up on these new news networks, they started becoming more ideologically conservative, leading to a wave of conservatism which further wiped out the left. Newt Gingrich had the contract with america in 1994, leading them to overturn the democrat's decades long control of congress, and allowing for conservatism to become even more dominant.
Meanwhile, the left had shifted right as well. The establishment of the democratic party decided the problem was they were too far left and this led to the rise of the "new democrats", who were culturally left, but not crazy left like the old 1960s-1970s left, but fiscally moderate. Under the pressure of the republicans in congress, Bill Clinton became insanely moderate, to the point of just being a de facto republican. He pushed for things like welfare reform, and don't ask don't tell, and the repeal of glass steagal, and it simply reinforced the right wing hegemony in the US. While the right did this to the left in the 1950s, they started moving right again with Barry Goldwater and later Ronald Reagan.
In the 2000s, the GOP became more extreme, and this is where I became interested in politics. At the time, the dems were everything evil in the world to conservative me, while in reality the democrats were bending over backwards to accommodate the right, and actually alienating parts of their voting base in the process. 9/11 caused a patriotic fervor to cover the nation, with people expressing virulantly pro american sentiments that were actually deeply alienating and toxic in retrospect. Democrats lightly criticized them starting in 2003, and got a bit shriller over the war on iraq, and the GOP just kept bullying them into submission. Inevitably the democrats proved correct on the matter, but it took a while for people to realize that. But Bush's popularity imploded in his second term and by 2008, people wanted change.
2008 was really the beginning of the modern realignment process of the republicans. From 1980-2008, the establishment mostly kept control over the party. It was in charge of its agenda, and most of the voter base was in the same page. But honestly, things were changing. The GOP was genuinely unpopular. Bush era neoconservatism became highly unpopular not just with the left, but the right, and there were calls to return back to traditional conservatism. Ron Paul represented my views as a conservative at the time, and was socially libertarian, fiscally conservative, and anti interventionist in foreign policy. And while most people fell in behind McCain, well, he was basically a Bush third term and unpopular.
Meanwhile on the left there was a dynamic between Obama and Hillary, where Obama was seen as cool and progressive, while Hillary was more centrist and moderate. And this is one of those scenarios that really opened up pandora's box I think. Hillary I think, given the more conservative state of the country, might've been more of a uniter at the time. While I don't think it would've lasted, she would've been an effective executive like Obama, and I dont think that she would get the same hate Obama did.
Obama being a more left leaning candidate at the time, and I can tell you as a conservative unhappy with the GOP, I probably would've been more open toward Hillary at the time. Because I KNEW she was moderate. But Obama? He came off as more left wing, and there was a lot of rhetoric of him being literally socialist. In addition, a lot of conservatives actually seemed openly racist and hostile toward his black and islamic backgrounds, thinking he was a radical when he wasn't. By this point, the conservative narrative was so strong them and the left were in two different worlds information wise. And this was before the internet became prominent. And you started seeing glimpses of the future in which the right would start seeing the left as a literal threat to the country. Had Hillary been the nominee, this could've been avoided, but Obama stirred up the hornet's nest.
Ultimately, between low conservative morale, and high democratic morale, Obama won. And this caused the right to start shifting its alignment even further right. The tea party arose to prominence in 2010, and essentially was that "return to conservative principles" that conservatives like me wanted. And they wrecked the more moderate establishment republicans. But it didn't take very long for me to realize after they took power in 2010 that they were horrifying. I highly disliked their policies in practice, and it shook me to my core enough that I felt comfortable fully abandoning conservatism, leading to me supporting the democrats in 2012. Meanwhile, obama? Obama was moderate just like I expected Clinton to be. He was compromising with the right, and the right just kept screaming he was socialist. He wasn't. He did the bare minimum to fix things, and as I moved left, I realized this.
That said, I feel like during the Obama years two things happened. One, the right became even more radical, going toward the tea party, which was so far right that it actually did become damaging to the country. Things shut down under the republicans in congress. We had gridlock and extreme dysfunction. The GOP was willing to sabotage the very mechanisms of democracy itself to get its way. Which leads to the second thing. Obama was ineffective at dealing with the GOP. he just enabled this behavior and was a punching bag. And I feel like this led to a lot of people to become disappointed in Obama. I mean, for me the tea party caused me to completely lose faith in the right. And then Obama caused me to lose faith in the left too. Because the left was ineffective.
Which is what led to 2016, which is what I consider to be the powder keg realignment year similar to 1968, where all hell breaks loose. The GOP went into the cycle deeply unpopular, with Jeb Bush being the presumed frontrunner and no one really liking him. DOnald Trump quickly rises to prominence on the republican side due to him being more populist and having a "tell it like it is" attitude that resonated with conservatives.
Meanwhile the democrats were split between Hillary and Bernie. By this point Hillary was the centrist candidate I feel like many no longer wanted. Possibly a good healer in 2008, but just the wrong person for 2016, as that centrist ship had sailed. Bernie ran on "democratic socialism" but in practice his ideas were social democracy and FDR's second bill of rights, which is why i supported him.
For me, Bernie winning was essential for a good outcome here. Because I feel like his ideas would've united the country enough to rally everyone around him. But between Trump and Hillary, we entered the worst possible timeline.
For the right, it just allowed them to march even further right, this time flirting with literal fascism. Trump is essentially a fascist at this point. He's deeply authoritarian, has strong man dictator fantasies, and in 2020 literally tried to steal the election, inciting a mob to attack the capitol to overturn the results.
But the left....just ended up failing miserably. By using such dirty tactics to win their primary, they undercut trust in their own base, causing them to lose. They ended up trying to win the south, and ended up losing the rust belt, an area of the country struggling from recent decades of automation and outsourcing. But Hillary was very unsympathetic and unwilling to change the economic direction despite it being deeply unpopular, and instead incited a culture war against Trump.
So the democrats and republicans became embroiled in a culture war, while the country just marched further right economically. During the trump years, both sides radicalized in their own way. Socially the left became far left, much like the unpopular 1960s and 1970s version again. The right became far right, once again flirting with fascism.Economically the left became increasingly bifurcated as the wounds of the 2016 primary never healed. The democrats never admitted to screwing up with their left wing voter base, and the left became more and more alienated from the party. While some fell back in line behind the party, those who didn't often radicalized into literal socialism. Which is why the far left is as extreme and far left as it is today.
And while Biden won in 2020, it doesn't look good going forward. As it stands, there's no way he can win reelection, and the right is just increasingly far right and anti democracy. The center left claims to stand for democracy while only giving it lipservice and undermining any competition they have. And the far left, much like the right, has also developed anti democratic tendencies.
Lessons to be learned here
For me, I blame the current radicalization and development of anti democratic attitudes on the failure of the system to healthily work out a consensus. While social media does make it where we're able to retreat in our own bubbles, this problem had been developing for decades, back to the 1990s when the internet was only in its infancy. Simply allowing people to form their own echo chambers caused the division as we see it. And even without the internet, the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and Mark Levin and Fox News would've continued to divide us relative to the new deal era.
On the left, the split happened in part because of the internet, but let's explain what this actually means. The democrats alienated much of their own voting base. They were out of touch, outdated, and offering a platform no one really wanted. Hey Hillary, the 1990s called, they want their politics back.
The fact is, the democratic party, much like the USSR in its dying days, had become a gerontocracy. One of stagnation, and old ideas, and people being alienated from the system. I feel alienated from the system. It's been said in the USSR, "i pretend to work, and they pretend to pay me". I feel like this sums up America in the 2010s and 2020s. The parties have lost the plot. And while the right is simply listening to their hopped up increasingly fascist voter base, the democrats did not allow for a proper course correction, instead opting to enable the right, rather than push things back to the left.
Honestly, when I envisioned a new new deal in 2015, I imagined an FDR like figure coming along and providing a paradigm that restored peoples' confidence in the people. Not a radical socialist one like the far left has become, but a social democratic one. But in rejecting that, the democrats bifurcated into two factions where one is insufferably moderate and alienates everyone who isn't them, and the other is increasingly leftist and out of touch with reality. Bernie could've been that person. But instead we got hillary.
Had hillary won in 2008, and obama ran in 2016, would the same thing have happened? Im not sure. While I think obama would've been disappointing in practice, since he was anyway, I think that it would've alienated people. But it would've led to another course correction, that allowed the overton window to move left into that nice social democratic zone we want.
Right now, we have a far right that's too far right and bordering on fascism, a far left that's too far left and bordering on communism, and a weak and ineffective center that people don't like. And I think that's the core reason why faith in democracy is failing. What good is democracy if you're not gonna get something you want anyway? What's the point if the corporations control the system? What's the point if you have two options and they both suck, and actively repress anything else?
I dont blame social media. Perhaps social media inflames this as getting more access to information and echo chambers exacerbates tensions, but I feel like the core problem is NOTHING IS WORKING. We keep bouncing between a crazy far right faction that everyone hates, and a centrist faction that everyone hates. The left is too left. The right is too right. And we just can't agree on a vision. Because there is no vision that is mainstream that actually unites people. The left wants what it wants, the right what it wants, the center keeps trying to maintain a status quo no one wants, and we've lost the plot.
Honestly, my solution for this IS the forward party. Yang offers the same ideas I originally had in 2015. And matches me better than bernie did in some ways. But at the same time, given how polarized people are I see people ignoring him too. The right thinks hes a communist, the left thinks hes a neolib, and the neolibs think he's too far left and inexperienced. So no faction wants to back him.
But, honestly, if he were able to be in charge, I think he would do best at realigning the parties in ways that are productive. Because he offers the solutions we need. Both on a political level and an economic level.
Beyond that, where do we go? I don't know. Biden is completely worthless on domestic affairs. He's facing tons of crises, some of which arent' his fault, but he fails to offer any meaningful long term change that resonates. He's going to have a mediocre obama like legacy or worse.
And Trump? Well, I'm scared of Trump at this point. I might actually end up having to break my "earn my vote" philosophy and vote for Biden to stop trump if he runs again. The more I think about it, Trump winning again SCARES me. Because this dude tried to overturn our democracy, and he incited an angry mob to do it. I don't think he should ever be allowed to hold office again and due to his personality type he poses a significant national security threat to the country in my opinion. If he wins again, he might try to become the dictator he dreams of. And his base might go along with it. That's dangerous.
Also, watching his handling of Ukraine is scary. He's oscillating between praising putin to threatening to nuke him, and oh my gosh, can this guy never be allowed to hold office ever again?
Still, even if he didn't, the alternatives aren't much better. The fact is, the cancer that is the republican party has been allowed to metastatize over the past 30-40 years, and at this point we might be stage 4. If it ain't Trump it might be DeSantis, or Pence, or someone else. And while I trust Pence at least to keep democracy intact, I dont trust anyone else. That voter base, that coalition of voters is still there, and if democrats don't get their crap together, they might be a force to be reckoned with for a long time to come. While the democrats just keep being this weak party that simply enables the right.
We need some sort of left wing shift to keep fascism out of the spectrum. But at the same time, we can't go so far left we start drifting toward socialism. Again, that's why I support Andrew yang and his policies. I think he's what the left should be. More liberal in some ways, but not stupid liberal. Also not socialist. offers practical solutions that resonate.
my second choice with be the bernie progressives, but while the elected representatives arent that bad, the base is becoming a problem, with the left wing voters starting to sound like the tea party in all the wrong ways. Progressivism is fine, but I could imagine a scenario where much like the GOP of the 1990s, the progressives of today become the socialist whackjobs of tomorrow. So while I could still get behind a bernie style progressive, they NEED to crack down on this obsession with socialism and SJWism in the party. These extreme ideas are cancer that much like the far right threaten the institutions of this country.
Seriously, there's a reason I have growing disdain for leftists. They're nuts. And recent events made me realize this. So I'm trying to carve out a more moderate direction that still drags the democrats to the left enough to fix issues, without succumbing to either socialism or fascism.
Honestly, if we could just go back to the 1960s political spectrum of the left being socdems and the right being also socdems/liberals, that would be great. Although I'd really like the yang style human centered capitalist spin to take off this time. I mean, I dont want to just return to the peak of the 20th century's paradigms. I want to improve on it.
And yeah, that's my views on this issue. it isn't social media per se that's driving the division. It's the failure of mainstream institutions. Social media just gives people more information and allows people to gather in relative echo chambers. Ultimately, I dont see a way to fix that without abridging freedom of speech. I don't want to do that. So I want to get a paradigm that would be popular enough to secure an electoral majority and is actually effective at solving problems. That's what we're lacking. As I see it, the reason we're facing the problems we are is because the right is too strong and the left is too weak and ineffective, and because as a result people are losing faith in the current system. If you want to restore that faith, you need a new democratic party that actually works.
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