| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago |
| > fish rots from the head Does it? Did it? We elected the "brazenly corrupt pedophiles." This question seems complex and important enough to not be resolved with a truism. |
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| ▲ | afavour 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| The brazenly corrupt also own the vast media ecosystem that can help swing elections. Should we all know better? Probably. But they control the education system too, so… |
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| ▲ | paulryanrogers 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Hard to say for certain. Though I do think it goes both ways. People at the bottom influence culture from bottom up, folks at the top from the top down. |
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| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > I do think it goes both ways If we flip the snake so it goes along the political spectrum, with the biting ends being extremists, I suppose the fish does rot from the heads. Top-down versus bottom-up is a more-complicated situation, and I suspect it's closer to turbulence than anything monotonic. |
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| ▲ | Waterluvian 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It really doesn’t. Trump wouldn’t survive election if the electorate didn’t seek, or at least tolerate whatever the hell you can call that. Americans will conveniently point fingers at him (as is their political tradition) but he’s a consequence of a much deeper disease. |
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| ▲ | kibwen 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Trump was not the beginning of the decline, only the terminal symptom. |
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| ▲ | kfse 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Terminal? We don't know if worse is yet to come. | |
| ▲ | marginalia_nu 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yeah I think Reagan's reforms of the antitrust laws, and the subsequent fall of the Soviet union are probably some of the first dominoes toward the new gilded age. The lack of competition from the Soviets is probably one of the bigger systemic causes. The cold war in no small part a war for hearts and minds in the democratic world. It was existentially important that the west believed in America, both the US itself and its allies. As long as the Soviets were around as existence proof for an alternate world order, the US needed at least visibly have its shit in order. If today's clown fiesta had unfolded 50 years ago, well comrade, сегодня мы все говорили бы по-русски. |
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| ▲ | htx80nerd 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| [flagged] |
