This weird breakdowns on Twitter or ESS of voters not pledging fealty to Biden or Clinton, or breaking down at the possibility of people making legitimate demands, concessions, and pleas for relief and help met with disgust.
It's clear that both liberals and conservatives are quite reactionary but why do the former even attempt to pretend to be good people if they're just defending their privilege and identity?
They’re West Wing liberals. They believe that the system is functional and leads to just outcomes. Trump is proof that the system is nonsense. If he loses, they can presumably blame Russia for 2016 and then assume all is right with the world. If he wins, they can still blame Russia (or China, or Bernie Bros, or Jill Stein again for sake of nostalgia), but the damage will have been done, because it puts them in a position where one of two untenable possibilities is true:
OR
Either way, a second Trump victory is an indictment of the system that they have convinced themselves is valid and worth defending. The policy doesn’t matter anymore. For them, to a certain extent, this is an existential threat to some part of their identity. Either American democracy is a sham, or meritocracy is a sham, and they need both to be legitimate in order to sleep at night. That’s why they don’t care about anything other than getting Trump out of the way. It has nothing to do with policy and everything to do with maintaining the worldview that they have invested themselves into.
They're rules nerds and they're being forced to confront the fact that the rules don't really matter.
Two more related parts of being a rules nerd are 1) their material position makes them able to be involved in politics only on the periphery; the outcomes don't matter that much evening they truly do want change, and they're either white or white-collaborators; and the rules and system are set up for their benefit. And 2) the rules don't matter, but were given to the wonks to act as their idea of being involved in politics; if the come to the realization that the rules are bs and just for show, then they will have to admit to themselves that what they have done to be involved in politics is a sham. At least some of them have been tricked and don't want to admit it.
wonk womp
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aka fascists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aestheticization_of_politics
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Fucking this. The worst thing to happen to American political discourse was the West Wing - it seems to have broken the brains of libs in your country and around the world.
Ironically you're doing liberal idealism by thinking a tv show has more impact on people being fascist than their imperialist and colonialist material class interests.
Yeah, fair point. I can see how that comes through. My belief is that media can give us the language and ideals to further normalise behaviour. I don't disagree that the class interests of the libs have a gigantic impact on the way they function, but I believe the media they consume (in particular, the West Wing) gives them an excuse and a language to speak to one another about it without looking too fashy.
It's probably best described as a delusion to justify exploitation, much like the notion of White Man's Burden was during the 18th and 19th century colonial empires
That's a perfect analogy - Sorkin is basically Kipling for a modern era.
Media may not directly shape culture, but it can definitely crystallize and give form to the shapes that are already there, half realized. For example: South Park didn't make people transphobic out of nowhere, but it definitely gave a form to it and helped turn a shapeless, chauvinist-biased ignorance into open, fully formed hatred and contempt. Similarly, the West Wing didn't create Liberals from whole cloth, but it did crystallize their preexisting biases into one easily exploitable shape.