On occasion, I use CFI posts as a sketchpad, a place to jot some thoughts I’ve had before they are fully formed. Lately, that is, over the last 12 years and getting worse in 2025, I see social media lighting up with complaints about “MAGA”, “Christian Nationalists”, or more generally lazy people or one recently about how people who don’t read are the problem.
When I go looking for scholarship on how we got here, I find works throughout history about populism and keeping the populace ignorant. Since WWII there has been research on how propaganda works, how cults form, and with the recent drop in democracies in the world examinations of the rise of authoritarianism. Some of these include suggestions for how to fight these trends.
What I don’t find, is handbooks on how to shame people who vote without knowing what they’re doing, or recommendations that we purge people who can’t pass an exam on how their government works. I don’t find scholarly articles on how to blame the victims of decades of poor educational systems, or how the marginalized have only themselves to blame for not having power.
It seems there is plenty of sympathy and assistance available to the individual who has lost their job or has turned to addictions to deal with the stresses of the modern world, and not an equal amount of energy to address the system that arbitrarily fires people or creates all that stress.
Because it is easier to blame migrants and poor, or wokes, than to fix the system !!!
Because doing so, one can grab the power.
Because the ones who fight for power, and their friends and supporters, profit from it. In fact, the ones who holds the power have no interest in fixing it.
And i am not sure there is much sympathy for the ones seen as losers ….. Remember that for a puritan Wealth and successes are the marks of divine grace, that in the conservative doxa, people who fail are guilty.
Still missing the point. I link to a valid site that categorizes governments. That site (and I) say that democracy is not an easy to define term. It would be so nice if you could stop being a troll and contribute something.
Part of this problem is exactly what you’re saying, that people think they have agency when they don’t. They think their vote counts when it doesn’t. They think the system will work, and increase their rights, when it might or might not.
That’s the propaganda, that it is poor, do fix that.
Yeah, the powerful do the blaming, the propaganda, that is then believed.
More propaganda. When you go back that far, you can forgive the people who supported that. It’s more likely most of them truly believed it, but were actually ignorant. Today, it’s harder to forgive the ignorance, it looks more like willingly avoiding checking facts.
The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. More than 200 people were accused. Thirty people were found guilty, nineteen of whom were executed by hanging (fourteen women and five men). One other man, Giles Corey, died under torture after refusing to enter a plea, and at least five people died in the disease-ridden jails without trial.
The last death sentence for the crime of witchcraft was pronounced in France on July 14, 1625. Janet Horne (died 1727) was the last person to be executed legally for witchcraft in the British Isles.
I don’t forgive stupidity and bigotry.
I can understand that a red neck educated in the bible belt, in a poor racist family, be a bigot and a racist. but i don’t excuse him.
And i don’t excuse the leaders who enclose him in this mental jail.
Historically there needs to be a term for things that are wrong, were always wrong, but very few people understood that they were wrong.
Same goes for the person indoctrinated into racism. If we treat something like alcoholism as a disease then we need a similar process for anyone would learned that harmful practices were acceptable.
Here’s a meme version of what I’m saying. From Andy Borowitz who does comedy news headlines. The liberal version of this would be something about concentrating less on cultural issues or reducing time spent on debating discretionary spending.
Andy Borowitz
IF I MAY BE SERIOUS: if Trump really wanted to reduce immigration, he’d try reducing wars and climate change—both of which increase migration and refugees. As you were.
Have you got the ability to go deeper and explore why this regime as per previous regime doesnt really want to reduce immigration through no wars and climate change action?
I meant that only for those who have the excuse of not being exposed to a counter-narrative to their culture. I don’t forgive willful ignorance, but I can forgive someone’s actions because they don’t know better. Within my lifetime, that covered a lot of people. It’s harder to imagine now, especially when it’s a person who grew up in an industrialized country but poor schools and parents who range from abusive to simply not caring if their kids are paying attention to the world can lead to someone having a skewed view of justice, compassion, leadership, economics, etc.
What I said in the opening is that there isn’t an opposite version of this. Books like Jordan Peterson’s or Thomas Sowell’s have twisted versions of history, or even when they speak of common values like hard work, they do it in a way that blames the victims. Anything about the building of community or giving others a hand up is geared to getting someone to come to their side, where if you do, they’ll be accepted, but if they don’t buy into their whole package, then forget about all that community building.
This is still just notes. And I just went through and found typos, so that makes it worse. I could do more to define things, like propaganda. I mean any technique, like advertising, but applied to a political agenda. So, “get on the bandwagon”, “scapegoating”, plain fear tactics, claims of knowing better.
Blaming drug dealers and criminals for our troubles and saying they are coming for our children. Any program they don’t like is socialism, which is bad for us in some unexplained way, but their programs are good for the economy, also without explanation and counter to decades of them not working.