Election 2020

[David Horn]

(12-20-2020, 02:10 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(12-20-2020, 08:21 AM)David Horn Wrote: This is a good place to add this.  An Israeli academic from the Mizrahi community has taken-on the task of explaining the entrenched beliefs of that group to the rest of Israel, and why it applies more broadly to other nativist RW movements, like Trumpism.  The language is nearly identical. 

An interesting article, but it leaves out the basic difference between the old world and the new.  The old world mentality will build gas chambers, ship undesirable people off to Siberia, massacre the Armenians, and try to drive Israel into the sea.  We are more rational, enlightened, and benevolent, and only kill or lynch our minorities or renege on treaties one at a time.

The natives of the Middle East are much more into tribal thinking.  The members of other tribes are treated as subhuman.  The ideals of the Enlightenment and WEIRD are rarer, more easily overwhelmed.  Israel was so ready to increase their Jewish population that they neglected to bring in a more liberal immigrant.

The difference is that in the US, WEIRD can beat the tribal in the ballot box.  The difference is that the roundhead culture can overwhelm the cavaliers.

Now most people will see it in other terms.  They understand that the red culture is elitist, sexist and racist, that they will hurt the poor in order that their group will be ‘superior’.  I doubt many see it in terms of each crisis removing the greatest remnant of Agricultural Age thinking.

But the difference and the basic forces involved are being tiptoed around by Professor Mizrachi.

Don't assume a huge difference between the tribal factions, regardless of where they are.  Tribe is the second circle in the security zone we built over millennia as hunter-gatherers -- even predating agriculture -- so it's pretty primal.  It takes desire to set that aside, but it's still there, lurking beneath the surface in all of us.  Autocrats tend to stoke that innate trigger, probably without a lot of thought on their part. That's the primitive leadership style coming to the fore. You're right that the enlightenment ideas are hardening into a new paradigm (WEIRD seems as good an acronym for it as any), but it will take a long time for that to become engrained in the culture.  For now, it's an ongoing struggle of two models of communal life, and both will continue a lot longer than we will.