The Death of the Euphemism
The Death of the Euphemism
The author of the video outlines some of the history surrounding the Southern Strategy of the 1960s US, whereby the opportunity of appealing to disgruntled white people using racist euphemism was recognized. He then describes how that has led into the political environment we find ourselves in today.
This is a video from 2018, so it's a post-mortem of Trump's election, and at the time was very incisive analysis, but retrospect has made it even more interesting to me and I am curious what people's thoughts are here.
Essentially the death of euphemism should be taken as a warning sign that the far-right feels more confident that they no longer have to hold up a mask and that, rather than having to court moderate republicans by giving them plausible deniability, they are going to get to dictate the terms for the party going forward.
On some level this does seem the case now as far as the republican primaries (i.e. all the candidates are still scrambling to prove they're as extreme as Trump), but Trump's defeat and the public's general rejection of extremist MAGA candidates in the last mid-terms indicate it's more complicated than that for the nation as a whole.
What do you guys think? If Trump loses this next election will the Republicans take it as a sign that they've misjudged the timing of dropping the mask and try to find some way to court moderate right-wingers again? Or do you think they will continue to double down on extremism in the face of a 2024 loss (assuming a loss, of course)? How much losing will it take to change minds in the Republican establishment, and how do you see the future if the radicalized base won't go back but doesn't have the numbers to carry an election?
I cannot recommend this, and the rest of Innuendo Studios' videos enough.
If you've got an afternoon to kill, this playlist (same creator) was truly perception changing for me. I have a brand new lens to understand politics though because of Ian Danskin, and I cannot overstate how much I value this work.
I only just stumbled across them recently, they're quite good at articulating what many of us understand to be happening but maybe don't always have all the pieces to put it together into a succinct thought. They seem like a pretty valuable resource so far.
This is a video from 2018, so it’s a post-mortem of Trump’s election, and at the time was very incisive analysis, but retrospect has made it even more interesting to me and I am curious what people’s thoughts are here.
Essentially the death of euphemism should be taken as a warning sign that the far-right feels more confident that they no longer have to hold up a mask and that, rather than having to court moderate republicans by giving them plausible deniability, they are going to get to dictate the terms for the party going forward.
This 2018 video pre-dates what we now know from the October 2019 books about Cambridge Analytica and their endorsement of this kind of aggressive approach. It's worked, and I see no evidence that people have lost faith in strong hate as a motivation technique - the copycats of what Cambridge Analytica seeded on the Internet and in society-wide culture have grown and it's become standard technique. It was already in play in 2014 bottom-up on social media and few people noticed, they just started adopting it, and then 2015 Trump started echoing it from top down.
Do you think that those technological tactics like we saw with Cambridge Analytica will reach a point of diminishing returns though? No doubt that the social engineering afforded by new technology will continue to be pushed, but how far out of reality can it really bring the majority of people?
You would think that if political actors have been going full steam on Cambridge Analytica-style strategies since the success of 2016, and that those strategies still work now that more people are cognizant of what's happening, we would see more and more right-wing victories, but it's not exactly how things are shaping up. While we see obvious victories for the right like the various supreme court decisions, those are decisions made by individuals who were being maneuvered into power long before 2016, and their decisions are still unpopular with the majority of Americans. We're seeing the right use the power they have obtained, but it's not making those in power any more popular (ex. Ron DeSantis is floundering, despite his many hate-victories).
So I guess I'm wondering if there is a hard limit to how many hateful people you can realistically scrape together with lies and social media manipulation and, if those strategies stop creating gains, what comes next? What we saw with the mid-terms is that most normal Americans don't see much appeal in going to "the next level" with MAGA. A lot do, but not enough to win elections.
Do you think that those technological tactics like we saw with Cambridge Analytica will reach a point of diminishing returns though?
No, not at all. This February 2017 story spells out the significance of what I think Cambridge Analytica was doing to people since 2013/14. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/02/23/harvard-scientist-worries-were-reverting-to-a-pre-enlightenment-form-of-thinking/
Carl Sagan's 1995 book, Demon Haunted World, spells out the fears he had about a future possibility of people favoring mocking and not taking science seriously. I think the pandemic was a demonstration of that, people didn't even care that their friends and family would die, they would argue against basic facts.
I guess I’m wondering if there is a hard limit to how many hateful people you can realistically scrape together with lies
I've lived in the Middle East, and been through a Internet revolution back in late 2010 in Africa. The Taliban won recently, once people get favoring lies and mocking each other, it almost never comes back. What Cambridge Analytica unleashed wasn't containable - it goes way beyond the individuals they target, it was incredibly powerful, it's a kind of technique that wins debate with appeal to the worst parts of the human brain.
"And our job is to get, is to drop the bucket further down the well than anybody else to understand what are those really deep-seated underlying fears, concerns. There is no good fighting an election campaign on the facts because actually it's all about emotion." - this was professionally trained psychologists/psychiatrists, this is weaponized against the flaws of the human brain after all human history learning. We may never recover and it be technique that just keeps getting applied until higher thinking is openly mocked. Like what you see in Cambodia during the Killing Fields years, but on a global scale. The Middle East has been in this cycle of fiction based hate over media content for well over a thousand years.