Current Events > Why are there so many insane sociopaths in US politics?

(+) Yeah! (+)

It can't just be a simple matter as people not knowing who they're voting for.
People are more politically aware than ever (I mean, you can't really avoid it...)

brainrot
fear mongering propaganda
rupert murdoch

It takes a certain kind of person to decide what they want to do for the rest of their life is run a country. It also takes a certain kind of person to be able to make decisions knowing that some people will be negatively impacted or left out. It turns out that kind of person just has a way higher likelihood of being a sociopath.

HylianFox posted...

People are more politically aware than ever

This is why, to a large extent. The more real info that someone who has been indoctrinated into certain beliefs is confronted with the more they dig in and believe in even more conspiracy theories that explain why they're actually right

This is not US exclusive

CADE_FOSTER posted...

fear mongering propaganda
rupert murdoch

Arent these two the same thing? Anyways fuck Fox news for brainwashing the idiots.

That's just America in general. Not just politics.

From 2017
https://www.splinter.com/the-long-lucrative-right-wing-grift-is-blowing-up-in-t-1793944216

If you want to understand intra-GOP warfare, the decision-making process of our president, the implosion of the Republican healthcare plan, and the rest of the politics of the Trump era, you dont need to know about Russian espionage tactics, the state of the white working class, or even the beliefs of the alt-right. You pretty much just need to be in semi-regular contact with a white, reasonably comfortable, male retiree. We are now ruled by men who think and act very much like that ordinary man you might know, and if you want to know why they believe so many strange and terrible things, you can basically blame the fact that a large and lucrative industry is dedicated to lying to them.

Because there was a lot of money in it for various hucksters and moguls and authors and politicians, the conservative movement spent decades building up an entire sector of the economy dedicated to scaring and lying to older white men. For millions of members of that demographic, this parallel media dedicated to lying to them has totally supplanted the mainstream media. Now they, and we, are at the mercy of the results of that project. The inmates are running the asylum, if there is a kind of asylum that takes in many mostly sane people and then gradually, over many years, drives one subset of its inmates insane, and also this asylum has the largest military in the world.

For years, the conservative movement peddled one set of talking points to the rabble, while its elites consumed a more grounded and reality-based media. The rubes listened to talk radio, read right-wing blogs, watched Fox News. They were fed apocalyptic paranoia about threats to their liberty, racial hysteria about the generalized menace posed by various groups of brown people, and hysterical lies about the criminal misdeeds of various Democratic politicians. The people in charge, meanwhile, read The Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard, and they tended to have a better grasp of political reality, as when those sources deceived their readers, it was mostly unintentionally, with comforting fantasies about the efficacy of conservative policies. From the Reagan era through the Bush administration, the system seemed to be performing as designed.But if this was a reasonably useful arrangement for Republicans, who won a couple close elections with the help of their army of riled-up kooks, it was a fantastic deal for the real engine of the right-wing propaganda machine: companies selling newly patented drugs designed to treat the various conditions of old age, authors of dubious investing newsletters, sellers of survival seeds, hawkers of poorly written conservative books, and a whole array of similar con artists and ethically compromised corporations and financial institutions. The original strategy behind demonizing the mainstream media may have purely political, to steer voters away from outlets that tended to present information damaging to the conservative cause, but the creation of the conservative media was also a revenue opportunity for shameless grifters from the very start, as Rick Perlstein showed in his classic Baffler piece on the snake oil-salesmen of the right.

The bottom-feeding amorality of the sorts of people who sponsored the right-wing press, and the crummy nature of the products and services sold, shows exactly who was supposed to be consuming it: suckers. Or, more specifically, trusting retirees, with a bit of disposable income, and a natural inclination to hate modernity and changean inclination that could be heightened, radicalized, and exploited.

The grown-up Republicans in Washington, meanwhile, still existed in their own genteel bubble of misinformationthey convinced themselves that the occupation of Iraq would be over and done with in a few easy monthsbut the major figures in the Bush administration, and its allies in Congress, were not men who got the majority of their news from Free Republic and Alex Jones. They put their faith in a fairly traditional conservative orthodoxy: That you can use the levers of power to quietly enrich your friends and their firms, while pleasing the masses with some combination of tax cuts, loud proclamations of religiosity, and a modest, popular war or two.

But the complete and inarguable disaster of the Bush administrationa failure of the conservative movement itself, one undeniable even to many consumers of the parallel conservative mediaand his abrupt replacement by a black man, caused a national nervous breakdown among the people whod been told, for many years, that conservatism could not fail, and that all Real Americans agreed with them.

Rather rapidly, two things happened: First, Republicans realized theyd radicalized their base to a point where nothing they did in power could satisfy their most fervent constituents. Thenin a much more consequential developmenta large portion of the Republican Congressional caucus became people who themselves consume garbage conservative media, and nothing else.