People will be writing about this for years.
Last night I caught up on The Daily (Social Distancing) Show, taking in an episode where several African political scholars broke down what went wrong in the US and giggled about us thinking democracy was so easy. It hurt. A lot. Yet, it only hurt because they were right. We sit on this political, moral, and economic high horse loudly professing how much better we are than everyone else and yet we fall prey to the same nonsense that everyone else does. Worse: we never see it coming.
Back in 2015 The Daily Show ran a multi-week bit that compared Trump to a African Dictator. Here’s the bit if you haven’t seen it:
I laughed my butt off but I also saw the warning in what was being said. See, one thing a dictator also has is loyal and willing followers. We found out that Trump is in fact everything that bit suggested and the people ate it up. But why? And why is it so hard for people to recognize what he is and take a step back from devout support? I can offer an answer to that last part: Because they are being spun.
We rely on 5 key social institutions for our socialization: School/News, Church, Family, Friends, and Work. I believe you only need to control three in order to control individual thinking. So, if the Church is reframing everything he does as ‘of God’ and the News (which replaces school as your ‘education’ once you leave) is being filtered through Pro-Trump networks, all you need is one more. Now your job is professing how much money you’ll make because of Trump or your family is all Pro-Trump, or your friends are all experiencing the same filtering as you through school/media and Church so now you have 3 by default. Once you get to the point where it negatively impacts you to think Trump is bad, you’ve hit the point of indoctrination. Now you have to go the other way and be a soldier for Trump.
This is tough stuff to deal with. When we see it in other countries we say, no chance it happens here. When we see it in fiction we laugh it off. When it happens to us we pretend it isn’t happening as out country plummets through the floor. We screwed this up and over the next two years leading up to midterms it is only going to get worse. Strap in folks. This isn’t over. This is just the beginning of us coming to terms with how these battles are about to be fought.