03-10-2017, 10:30 AM
(03-10-2017, 04:29 AM)Galen Wrote:(03-09-2017, 06:43 PM)Kinser79 Wrote:(03-09-2017, 12:29 PM)David Horn Wrote:(03-08-2017, 09:11 PM)Odin Wrote: Great article I ran into in The Atlantic: Trump Has Caused a Civic Surge in America
Quote:... The surge will likely outlast his presidency. Americans today are rushing to make up for decades of atrophy and neglect in civic education and engagement. But as they do so it’s important to remember that citizenship is about more than know-how. It’s also about “know-why”—the moral purposes of self-government...
And this is the crux of the issue. The populace is no longer mediated by a self-assigned coterie of gatekeepers, so the information comes directly to each of us without the benefit of analysis or even basic fact checking. Some of us will take the time to fact check, and some from that group will go further and do the research to understand the information. The rest will operate on emotion and instinct. That may work eventually, but the process of getting there will certainly be messy or even dangerous. Let's hope it isn't existential.
It isn't existential. The simple fact of the matter is that the means of generating and reproducing news has changed. We've been through this before, back when the Printing Press was invented. It caused some chaos for a while but eventually Liberal Democracies arose and solved the problem. I imagine that eventually there will be a move to push for direct democracy now that we have near instantaneous global communication.
It seems to me that the scale of government may very well go down. In the second leg of the economic crisis we have been in since 2008 and the inability of the state to deal with it will definitely make state solutions much less credible. In a very real sense the Soviet Union went down because people, including those running it, ceased to believe in it.
Donald Trump gives us all much more cause than Barack Obama did to so distrust the government that we do everything possible to avoid what it doesn't do almost mechanically. I will need Medicare and Social Security.
Donald Trump is doing what Barack Obama had no desire to do -- causing the American people to ask what the government can do TO them. State solutions under Donald Trump begin with "first enrich my cronies". We can hold out for better -- and must.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.