this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2025
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politics

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121
Prescient post from a decade ago (www.vox.com)
submitted 1 week ago by mosaic@lemm.ee to c/politics@lemmy.world
17 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Incredible that this was written before even the first trump presidency, and it so elegantly captures this moment in time.

What are your thoughts? I don’t see how democracy in the US survives this moment. Can other democracies in the rest of the world live on alone, or will they too succumb to technofeudalism?

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[–] xyzzy@lemm.ee 3 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Interesting read. Basic conclusion from 2015 is that a presidential system is inherently flawed and systemic forces are pushing us toward repeated high-stakes crises. An accurate read of the situation at the time.

With that in mind, it's interesting that the author minimized the likelihood of a coup. The natural outcome of increased power in the executive, increased gridlock in Congress, historically low approval of Congress, and the expectation that presidents are held accountable by the citizenry for the state of the country (all things that were cited in the essay) is an executive who decides to bypass Congress in bigger and bigger ways in order to get things done.

What's a bit surprising is the majority in Congress supporting and welcoming that move.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 25 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It's absolutely nothing against this absolutely phenomenal read, just something that hit me while reading:

but Chilean democracy broke down in the 1970s.

Yeah, that passive voice "broke down." I wonder why that happened.

The exact reasons for why are disputed among scholars

Uh... okay, I get that American involvement is just totally unrelated to the topic of this article, but you don't have to go out of your way to pretend it's a big mystery. You can just use your passive voice and move on, to keep things focused.

For a less catastrophic, more realistic view of the kind of thing that could happen here, it’s useful to look to some less-familiar but more-recent events in Honduras.

OH, COME ON NOW

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 17 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

What's really funny is that they're literally using the same kind of attacks and tools that they did to destabilize Chile.

Ask Milton Fuckin Friedman about Economic Shock Treatment.

It's all the tools of American Imperialism brought back home to bear down on our own populace.

When Bush took us to war in Iraq, I knew this was coming someday.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 7 points 1 week ago

Yeah. Down to including interfering with the election to put our guy in power to be able to do all this heinous stuff, over the strong objections of the populace.

Somewhere, Augusto César Sandino is looking on with interest, watching how it's going to play out.

[–] BaroqueInMind@lemmy.one 19 points 1 week ago

What an amazing as fuck read. Thank you for this, OP!

[–] Dimmer@leminal.space 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)

US Democracy died on Jan 21, 2010 when CU V FEC was decided, if not earlier.

[–] HubertManne@moist.catsweat.com 1 points 6 days ago

yeah this is like the worst thing and likely followed by the patriot act and related stuff.

[–] PalmTreeIsBestTree@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I saw John Boehner at a bar in Southwest Florida some years ago. That dude was having a good time.

[–] ctkatz@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I can't believe I'm saying this but I miss john boehner. he was sane.

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 6 days ago

Also it allowed me to say "boner" and Beavis-laugh a lot.

[–] fallowseed@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

wait til you read marx

[–] Feathercrown@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I thought modern communists agreed his work wasn't really the best?

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Probably not but I personally think Debord is wildly underrated compared to Marx because I think Marx really underestimated the important of communications systems in capitalistic alienation and how to fight capitalism. Debord got it in spades. Society of the Spectacle is criminally fucking underrated.

Further, at this point with the Internet of Things, commodities are communications.

[–] archomrade@midwest.social 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

If Marx had predicted our current internet communication hellscape all the way back in 1870, he would be more than just an anti-capitalist boogeyman but a bonafide prophet

20% of Americans were illiterate in 1870

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

Telegraph was being widely used by 1870.

First transatlantic telegraph was 1858.

Many have argued that the telegraph was a qualitative shift from prior communications methods because it was truly the first that spanned the world in a short amount of time. The internet on the other hand is considered a quantitative shift that just adds more of what existed on top of the already existing framework.

In other words, the building blocks for that sort of thought were there.

[–] archomrade@midwest.social 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Fair, but Marx wasn't a technocrat. He was primarily concerned with how the working class could overthrow capital, and the working class was primarily illiterate - transatlantic telegraphs wouldn't have been a relevant tool to them in their ceasing of capital from the bourgeoisie.

Marx specifically wrote the Communist Manifesto in easily-understood language so that the few literate members of the working class could organize and recruit those who wouldn't have been able to read it themselves. Even if he understood the telegraph to be a revolutionary technological innovation, it wouldn't have been relevant to an impoverished working class that did not have the luxury of basic education.

Not that it would have been impossible for anyone to see the potential significance of the telegraph back then, but that was never going to be a Karl Marx who optimistically thought the revolution could happen within his lifetime (and here we are almost 160 years later not even a step closer to that reality)

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Absolutely, I was not dogging on Marx, just pointing it out.

And further, while I think Debord is really onto something, his work would not have existed had Capital not already been written. His work functions on literally copying Marx's (and others!) own words and changing the words to fit his own narrative. He called it detournement. The modern equivalent might be "culture jamming" where you're take a corporate message and twisting it into a message of freedom and rejection of corporate control.

Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author's phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.

And I would personally even detourne this statement from Debord. I think "false idea" and "right idea" are too strong. I would use "unhealthy idea" or "antisocial idea" and "healthy idea" or "prosocial idea." I think "right" is kind of tooting his own horn just a bit too much.