What happened with the coup
Welcome to Sex and the State, a newsletter about power. To support my work toward decriminalizing and destigmatizing everything sex please buy a subscription, follow me on OnlyFans, or just share this post!
~~~~~
I’m going to write at greater length about this but since a few people have asked I wanted to share my initial outline of my thoughts about how we got to the coup.
In 2018 I read a Guardian article by Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde, who focuses on political extremism and populism. This led me to his 2004 paper about the populist zeitgeist that swept European liberal democracies beginning in the early 1990s.
Mudde’s definition, description, and many of his ideas about populism perfectly describe and predict what’s been going on in America up until this point.
Very briefly, journalism’s transition away from print and radio to the internet and television has created a race to the bottom where “news” outlets now compete for eyeballs. People tend to prefer to consume, share, and discuss content that stirs up identitarian conflict over boring facts. Emotionally compelling opinion content is also far, far cheaper to produce than filing FOIA requests, interviewing sources, and doing original research and reporting. Social media algorithms promote the content that drives engagement and hides the content that doesn’t in order to keep users engaged.
This natural market competition (along with some anti-competitive behavior) has incentivized the proliferation of content that teaches Americans to hate each other and distrust institutions. Media is increasingly polarized, not just into Republican or Democrat or conservative or progressive but increasingly elitist vs populist. Some formerly Republican and conservative outlets and personalities have become more populist.
This is both in response to and exacerbated by a K-shaped recovery, worsening economic inequality, declining economic mobility, and increasing deaths of despair.
Populist media personalities and politicians have been actively spreading disinformation and discrediting institutional journalism. At least half the public not only doesn’t trust institutional journalism, but believes journalists are immoral and untrustworthy. The open elitism of the media personalities who tend to hew closer to the facts has not helped shore up trust in media.
Populist media personalities and politicians have also fanned the flames of America’s existing virulently nationalistic, xenophobic, and chauvinistic tendencies. Knowing they don’t have the numbers to maintain an electoral advantage they’ve systematically successfully disenfranchised huge swaths of the electorate and justified it by convincing their audiences that voter fraud is widespread enough to swing elections despite there being no evidence this is true.
These conditions are perfect for a charismatic authoritarian leader, with the help of spineless opportunistic politicians and media personalities to incite “the people” to believe the results of a free and fair election are fraudulent and violently revolt against accepting the new leader who they believe is corrupt, immoral, and will work against their best interests.
Until we ameliorate the factors that created and exacerbated this populism — declining prospects for the bottom half of earners, widespread disinformation, a lack of trustworthy reporting and analysis, a surplus of polarizing content — I believe we should expect the next charismatic authoritarian leader to be younger, smarter, and far more effective at implementing a populist agenda. I fear we can expect more isolationism, mercantilism, nationalism, xenophobia, censorship, and chauvinism unless our elites can credibly offer better prospects for the bottom half of earners.