Radicalization of a large plurality

[THIS IS A DRAFT OF A LONG (BUT IMPORTANT) ARTICLE ABOUT POST-TRUMP AMERICA

The long road to radicalization starts with generational disconnection

The most important information coming out of the 2020 Elections is the under-polled persistence of Donald Trump’s support. Despite clearly losing the election – moreover, despite his administration’s near-complete failure in the face of Covid-19’s election surge – Trump was able to garner the most votes, 74 million, cast for a Presidential candidate except for the 80 million votes cast for his opponent, Joe Biden. Much of the media, punditry and social media is either fixated on Trump’s baseless and increasingly desperate claims, or has blown past the election back to Covid-19 and the incoming administration. Yet the deeper lesson of the election is that Trump’s dictatorial, hate-filled and abusive autocratic style is either celebrated or at minimum tolerated by nearly two-thirds white Americans in 2020 and a larger share of minorities from 2016. The result was a rebuke of the right, center and left coalitions as well as insurgents and the establishment.

Professional assessments fail because some talk about 1) the creeping normalcy of autocracy in the US as an aging republic like Greece, Rome, France, etc; or, 2) the indomitable power of social media and news platforms like Facebook, Google and Twitter; and 3) the unique evil of Donald Trump. None work: aging empires don't all collapse: the UK has been a continual democracy since the 17th Century; social media is powerful but no more so than other "new" (at the time) communications technologies like the printing press that ushered in the Reformation and then the 30 Years War that destroyed Europe, or the pamphlets of the 18th Century that devastated the same terrain with the Napoleonic Wars; or the newspaper/radio/ stadium/film nexus that ushered in Hitler and Stalin - propaganda. Finally, the "unique" evil of Donald Trump is a blessing because he's so incompetent and impulsive: real tyrannies only get institutionalized with great strategic care & energy: Stalin, Hitler, Napoleon (empire stage); Erdogan, Modi, Putin, Xi - they are smarter and strategic.

A better way to look at what's happening in the US in January 2020 is to look at the long-term radicalization of the rural white population that British Historian Arnold Toynbee, social historians Barrington Moore & Alexis de Tocqueville and chroniclers of mass movements Hannah Arendt, Eric Hoffer and Erich Fromm (among others) described as an increasingly disconnected, "proletarianized" (Toynbee meant demeaned, deprived and lonely, leading to depraved) previously dominant mainstream settled middle classes. That is what creates the pivotal "schism in the body social" as Toynbee puts it.

Longterm radicalization takes generations. In my native Turkey 40 years, starting halfway into founding father Ataturk's radical one-party-to-multiparty democracy.

but what about social media and fake news?

It is true - it works to manipulate minds, mainly for money and by tyrants, for Power. it works like this:

However, we shouldn't read too much into the weaponization of a new media form. It only matters when the underlying story of a society is old and out of date. Most new media forms that conform to a social system that's still ascendent - like television in the postwar order - get absorbed. And earlier forms of propaganda - from Martin Luther quoting newly printed local bibles to French Revolution pamphlets through the 20th Century's catastrophic propaganda machines of radio, stadiums, posters and film took advantage of, rather than creating, the social tensions they exploited. Here's how they worked before digital internet media:

"Meet the new boss, same as the old boss"

here are some charts about why propoganda "works" when an order is old: people lose connections and you can see that as their communities get infested with drugs, closures and remnancy (the old team stays while new generations migrate away) - more explanation later:

First, the so-called "privileged" American white middle class has been killing itself with despair for a generation, as Angus Deaton and Anne Case have documents in Deaths of Despair.

This is the same patter as the progressive social disconnection of Russian men after the fall of the Berlin Wall after 1989. See the next graph:

And it's not so far from the criminalization and neglect of the black community in the 1980's and 1990's crack epidemic and gang wars the epidemic fostered:

Similar despair indices are available for the expat Muslim diaspora in the 1990s (after the failed Intifadas and especially after the post-9/11 Mideast interventions, especially Iraq.

All these interventions, the contempt, incomprehension, demonization and criminalization creates a deep yearning for a savior how shines because of - not despite - the full contempt of who they consider the oppressor and media norms.

The simplified multi-generational graph looks like this: over decades:

Radicalization is like an epidemic: it follows the path of pandemics: stealthy incubation, explosive ascendency, grinding and violent consolidation and then burn-out.

There's only one way to deal with it - reconnecting the disconnected communities while at the same time fighting the true believers and opportunistic fellow-travelers - they create 80% of the energy (attention, engagement, promotion, spectacle, lies).

here is how the US military deals with it abroad - multi-level and multi-discipline simultaneously, real-time, dynamically (adjust to setbacks): in ecological terms, this is "swarming"

Today, this is President-elect Biden's job in the US and heaven help Britain and the EU (esp. France) if they use top-down industrial tools to deal with a peer-to-peer network phenomena.

The next post will elaborate on what works form according to the network paradigm.