Originally published at: Maddow on How Authoritarians Erode Trust in Democracy
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That appeal to the Know-Nothing, trust-your-gut mentality destroys other things too. In studying how different countries fared during the height of the COVID pandemic, a distinction was made by researchers between public trust in government and public trust in civil institutions. The latter tended to be more essential to good outcomes (i.e. fewer deaths ) than the former.
This should all be obvious, of course. But since the fascists and their late-stage capitalist partners have (as part of their process) de-devalued critical thinking when it comes to history and political analysis it’s important that Maddow can articulate it in such a clear and pithy manner.
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There are two reasons why authoritarianism is an easy sell.
First, the authoritarian flatters and valorizes their potential supporters by making them the decider of what’s true. The authoritarian says “Don’t listen to the experts, you know more than they do, whatever you believe is right and it’s the ‘experts’ who are wrong.”
Second, it reduces the tension they feel. The real world is complicated, and you can’t always get what you want. The authoritarian says there is a simple solution to every problem, and that you can have whatever you want. You just have to trust ‘the leader’.
These are lies, of course, and always have been, but people want to believe them because they’re more attractive than the reality.
Opponents of authoritarianism have to take the opposite position: they have to say “No, your opinion is not always better than the expertise of people who are smarter and better informed than you, and no, there aren’t easy solutions to everything.” That’s a message no one wants to hear, so they go with the despot.
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Off topic, but why is there a trend now for videos autoplaying muted, so you miss the first few seconds of audio while you hunt around for the mute button, and then can’t skip back to the beginning so you have to let it loop round and watch it a second time…
I’ve just answered my own question, haven’t I?
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Yeah, that seems to be a feature of TikToks embedded on other sites. Also, some TikTik creators make their videos so that the end of the video seamlessly blends with the beginning, so that you initially don’t notice that the video has looped back to the beginning. There are some good creators on TikTok, but there’s also a lot of people just using various tricks like these to drive up views and engagement.
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This is actually a restriction in the browser, at least for Chromium based ones. You can either have the video autoplay muted, or have the user manually start the video and it’ll do so unmuted.
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