Election-Rigging Wrap-Up (Sponsored by friend-of-the-blog Brad Pitt)
Before we’d been interrupted by the news that a certain (very Italian-sounding) activist had jumped the 3-D printed gun, I’d been talking about how anyone who wants to actually win at US politics has got to treat it like the WWE; give the slack-jawed masses what they want But we’ve covered all that.
The counter-argument here, made by Trump, Vince McMahon, and all the other right-wing grifters/populists, is that I’m patronizing these good people (the aforementioned masses). Regular folks, they say, are perfectly capable of making rational decisions in their own best interests; there is no exploitation going on here. (As evidenced by the remarks from one pro wrestler in that McMahon documentary I’d referenced in an earlier post: “Who’s worse? The people who make the product? Or the millions of people who lap it up?”)
The thing is, the evidence doesn’t seem to support this. I saw couple of stats recently. One was that the US was outside the top 100 in the world for literacy rate. The other was that more than half the population reads at or below a sixth grade level. (I’m not a statistician… can someone tell me if those numbers are good??)
There’s that old quote about how the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. If you tend to believe that, then spending any time on social media within the last two decades will have only cemented your opinion. And that’s the problem; the curtain has fallen. There are simply too many opportunities for the [supposedly informed] average consumer/voter to reveal that they are not, in fact, capable of much critical thought whatsoever.
I present Exhibit 15d:
So, yeah. This is who the DNC is getting trounced by. (Both the companies running the AI and the people who think the images are real, that is.) As AI and social media advance, the lines between fiction and reality will blur further, making social engineering even easier.
Editor’s note: Coincidentally, Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that there would no longer be fact-checking on Facebook/Instagram, which will doubtless endear him to the incoming Trump/Elon administration. But, again, what do I know? Even a blind squirrel, etc.
I don’t mean to pick on Americans, here. You’ll have heard about the French woman who got scammed by “Brad Pitt”…
The other argument from these guys (Trump, Musk, Zuck, et al) is that there’s nothing inherently unethical about what they’re doing—they’re just holding a mirror up to society. If they’re morally bankrupt, then their immense success is proof that the general population is no better. I’d buy this argument if these guys didn’t happen to be directly profiting from both the erosion of literacy/education/civic responsibility and the general standard of living among their working-class fans. It’s like Marlboro pointing to their millions of “loyal” (addicted) customers as proof of the company’s/product’s virtue.
Still, there must be some truth to it: whether we like it or not, these guys are clearly tapping into something. We’re talking, after all, about 70 million(!) voters.*
So that’s the elephant in the room: the Zucks and Musks and Trumps aren’t doing anything that isn’t completely aligned with/incentivized by America’s core precepts. (Namely: Might Makes Right.) Our systems/institutions are so useless at curtailing these actors because, well, they are not actually designed to do that. You simply do not attain global hegemonic power without an insatiable, psychopathic thirst for blood. You need to have a singular, long-term vision for this sort of thing; the consolidation of power can’t be left to chance. You can’t be stopping and starting every four years at the whim of every new president. Which is why foreign policy has usually been taken care of by the CIA and other unelected bodies. Obviously, it’s nice if you can instate a president whose worldview happens to align with your own, in which case he can shoulder some of the PR burden (e.g. Dubya, with his war on terror, for example). But having a black guy or a woman to provide token “progress” and give people a false sense of agency is just as useful, in moderation.
But we’ve been over all that—and, as we’ve discussed, there’s evidence that the curtain has started to fall (hence the outpouring of public sympathy/support for Mr. Mangione, for example). It turns out that propaganda is a lot more effective when you allow your subjects to have a dignified existence. You can only bleed people dry for so long. Sure enough, there are—supposedly—a lot of people who are supposedly fed up. We noted this a few posts ago:
So, where is this mythical super majority that’s desperate for change? Well, they’ve been systematically beaten down, both psychologically and economically. Their anxiety, depression, and financial struggles have been individualized, and they’ve lost all belief, both in the electoral system, and in themselves, as far as their ability to affect change. That’s the catch: the people who are aware that they’re being bent over a barrel are also the people who’ve realized that voting for a broken system doesn’t actually do much. The only people who haven’t lost faith are the people whom the system serves (or those who still believe that the system serves them). (This bloc includes, of course, our AI-picture-commenters/AI-Brad-Pitt-victims.)
The other plot hole here, which you might have already figured out, is that, if both this “liberal majority” chart and the literacy stats mentioned earlier are true, then there would have to be a pretty significant overlap between the “slack-jawed masses” and this mythical, left-leaning, super-majority.
Which ties back, yet again, to my proposed blueprint. This isn’t about the [good] smart guys vs. the [bad] dumb guys anymore—if it ever was. That ship has sailed. Everyone is, statistically, pretty dumb. Strategically speaking, that’s not inherently a bad thing. It means you don’t have to be a physicist to work out that the billionaire/donor class do not care whether you (and the people you love) live or die, as long as shareholder value increases.
That said, it can be dangerous if people are dumb, pissed off, and if they aren’t pissed off in the right direction. Because of America’s utter (and not-incidental) lack of class consciousness, people don’t have the tools to articulate their concerns, let alone channel them in any sort of productive way. (Hence why we saw people voting for a New York millionaire on the grounds that he would “drain the swamp.”) Since Bernie, the only people filling this vacuum have been the grifters/gurus. But, again, they can only do so much to keep people distracted; as evidenced by Luigi, who reminded us that, for all of the right-wing’s apparent popularity, there remains a massive—hitherto untapped—reserve of pent-up resentment. I guess only time will tell!
Anyway, one of our loyal readers has been stuck in the hospital for the last few weeks after some surgery complications. He woke up for long enough to have the nurse take his picture yesterday; I promised him I’d post it.
You wouldn’t ignore a dying man’s wish, would you?