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My apologies for getting the timelines slightly mixed up. In my defense I was 4 at the time. However, Bush winning in '88 despite being neck deep in an administration full of openly admitted liars doesn't exactly bode well for your argument that US voters aren't pretty A-OK with corruption.
Nah, it's a human one, and one that's extremely common in the US despite our governmental structure all but guaranteeing that one guy alone can't fix things.
We love simple power structures, because we're simple beings. It's also why I think there is more to horseshoe theory than people want to admit. Communists claim to want gay space communism but seem A-OK with some stupid asshole being basically a dictator as long as its their type of stupid asshole.
Once we formed up larger civilized order, it took us millennia to conceive of a different type of governance aside from "what one stupid asshole says goes".
I somewhat agree? I think? But I'm not sure it has much to do with anything we're discussing.
Bush Sr's claim to fame before joining the Reagan team was as the guy who cleaned up the CIA after Ford replaced Nixon. He successfully distanced himself from Reagan, while tarring Mondale with a number of Massachusetts scandals.
It's a media-based one. Mass media has been pivotal in expanding and inflating the reputations of larger-than-life individuals (real and imagined). Without mass media, "Superman" is just another pagan icon of a neighboring tribe.
Its strange to see the American right champion Europeans like Macron and Merkel or literal Monarchies in the UK, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. They'll endorse coups such Anez's failed takeover of Bolivia or Park's military junta in Korea or The Jakarta Method in Indonesia or Juan Guaido and Fulgencio Batista looting the Venezuelan and Cuban treasuries. They'll shrug their shoulders at the electoral college, the corrupt SCOTUS, and the blatant disenfranchisement of any number of their states.
But when a popular President wins a landslide in a free and fair democratic election, they suddenly start to see the Tyranny of the Masses. Whether you're a South African post-Apartheid Congress or a Mexican President who wins with over 60% of the vote, you're constantly under the microscope, under the theory that you can't win a legitimate election unless your population loves American more than the Americans love themselves.
Go figure.
I mean people belong to cults. I don't think they joined because of the news (which doesn't even cover them). People are idiots.
I'd agree full stop right there. They're a strange beast. In a way it's possible (though not something I'd bother with) to feel somewhat sorry for them...what with them being so anti-immigration in a country teeming with nothing but immigrants.
I put myself as a top plop on the pile, friendo.
I'm convinced I'm pretty immune to being sucked into a cult, but aside from that I consider myself about as stupid as your average people.
EDIT: I also don't think of us as "sheep" or "glassy-eyed automatons". I think we, as a species, are a different type of stupid. We spend most of our lives deluding ourselves into thinking that we're somehow above (or the winners of) the natural order. We spend enough time in denial to buy a second home there. Our true nature isn't all that much different from a monkey picking flies off of its shoulders in the jungle....just with more zoom calls.
That's the joke, yes.
The top plop of shit is just as indistinguishable from the rest of the shit, it was just plopped more recently.