Oh for the love of God.
Reducing the current political climate of the United States to “we didn’t punish the Confederate States of America hard enough” is the kind of historically illiterate, rage-bait nonsense that thrives online because it’s emotionally satisfying, not because it’s true.
Yes, Reconstruction after the American Civil War was mishandled. Yes, former Confederates regained power. Yes, Jim Crow laws were a moral stain and a catastrophic policy failure. All of that is real.
But to pretend that modern polarization, institutional decay, media fragmentation, algorithmic brain rot, primary-election extremism, and post–Citizens United v. FEC campaign finance insanity are somehow just delayed consequences of not lining enough people up against a wall in 1865 is obscene. It is cartoon history. It is Tumblr-tier cause-and-effect thinking.
America’s current dysfunction has proximate causes. Social media incentive structures. Partisan media silos. Gerrymandered districts. The aftershocks of the 2008 financial crisis. The political realignment of the South over decades. None of that is explained away by “we didn’t punish them hard enough.”
And let’s be honest about what that statement implies. It implies that mass punitive retribution 160 years ago would have somehow engineered a permanently virtuous republic. That is magical thinking. Nations are not firmware you can permanently patch with one decisive punishment event.
This is the kind of meme that sounds profound to people who consume history as morality theater instead of as institutional analysis. It’s outrage fuel. It’s not serious.
You want to critique Reconstruction policy? Fine. That’s a legitimate academic discussion. But boiling the entirety of 21st-century American political dysfunction down to one glib sentence about punishment is lazy, inflammatory, and historically unserious.
We can do better than this. Or at least we should.
Reconstruction was a failure because the south was too ignorant and stuck in their ways, while the north was tired of their bullshit and just didn’t want to deal with it anymore. So in the long run, culturally, the racism and ignorance never changed in the south.
“…polarization, institutional decay, media fragmentation, algorithmic brain rot, primary-election extremism, and post–Citizens United v. FEC campaign finance insanity…”
These are all the result of two main things; the massive amount of data now available that can be mined and used to predict behaviors and sociological outcomes. The incredible amounts of capital that has been created by those able to take advantage of that data. They literally know how to get people to react like monkeys pushing a button to get a treat. Every web page you visit, post you share…, every click you make is another data point that can be used to model your reactions and combined into a larger aggregate.
You can point that data weaponization at two things, money and politics. With money, you now have people who just stare at spreadsheets all day and make financial decisions based off models and data mining. They have already stripped all the easy wealth that can be stripped. For example, you can’t find a good deal on a used car, in an auto trader anymore. Things are priced not what they cost to make, plus a profit, but what people are willing to pay for them. That’s where the marketing comes in. They know what gets almost anyone to respond, so they tailor their marketing based off all this data they gather. And it works.
Shrinkflation, enshjitification, moving industry overseas to cheap labor, robotics, etc… None of these things have made products cheaper so much as they just made more profit for the shareholders. But now, its not even the people who own the shares but private equity. Blackrock, Bezos, Musk, Ellison, etc… they have so much wealth that it is a tiny fraction for them to pay someone else to figure out how to extract more. It’s not enough to own 65% (arbitrary number) of an industry, they have to constantly fight for each additional %. But they do, because they are no longer the ones doing it. They pay someone else to simp for their hoarding. They are not geniuses. (Clearly the opposite for some of them.) Some of them do have great success stories, but all of them came from wealth and without it they would be another Joe Schmoe.
Now you have these rich white men with massive amounts of wealth who think they are god’s gift to the human race. So they also grab for power, and in today’s world of data, money is quite literally turned directly into power.
You have a system that can convince people that a $1300 smart phone, that will last for 12-18 months before you start jonesing for an upgrade, is a smart purchase. That data is also used to convince people to vote a certain way, to believe a certain way.
Now that brings us back to the south.
People are already instinctively tribal. It is in our DNA. We are hard wired to be “us vs. them”. Racism is the underdeveloped two year old of tribalization. “You look different, so you must be different, and different is bad.” It is the one of the most basic institutions of ignorance. It doesn’t take a whole lot to think your way past it, but when you already believe, it is much easier to continue that belief than to challenge it.
That is a perfect recipe for manipulation and control. We now have true oligarchs supporting a madman because he was an easy sell to the largest group of voters.
The left will fracture itself, fighting over whats a better system of government, how to fight climate change, genocide, abortion, it goes on. The right just has to say, “We’re better than those people, vote for me and we’ll rise together.” They validate those ignorant tribal instincts.
Look at Cowbee. Dude (could be several people, who knows) is an arm of that. Shitty propaganda put forth in an environment they control, so there is no real dialogue or real ability to challenge. They are tribal and use it to try and sell a dumbass ideolgy and undermine others. Now imagine they had a billion dollars. They could pay an army of people like them to make a thousand soap boxes to drown out dissent or contrary thought. They play on your ignorance. They know you are not an expert, so they can make whatever wild claims they want, backed with premade arguments.
Or Charlie Kirk. That fucking douchebag. He made a career out of debating children. He had to learn what, 10 different arguments? His only real talent was to have zero shame. He was valuable to the people with the money. He would go out there and say the things they knew were lies because they profited from it and he didn’t care. And the morons would eat it up.
Lets take that back to Cowbee (sorry not sorry to pick on you). I have no idea who Cowbee is and they may be a sincere person who legitimately believes in what they say. Except their behavior has every ear mark of a Charlie Kirk style propagandist and so I immediately don’t trust anything they say. It is polished enough too, that part of me thinks they are actually a professional at it. Or they could really just believe that bullshit and spend 16 hours a day online.
Politicians have been playing that game for millennia at this point, but they never had the kind of tools that they do today.
And the lack of racial equity in this country, going way beyond even reconstruction, has prevented any real mobility for a non-white. It is just reconstruction on, when it is so much more obvious to see.
So by not stamping out the ignorance and hate, it was allowed to grow and become a ridiculously easy tool to abuse by those with the money to take advantage of it.
After race it is religion. Then sex. Then ideology, social standing, what football club you like…
If you look at my post you can see why I am terrible at this. I’m all over the place, thoughts aren’t fully justified, points aren’t very well made, I need to let it go about Cowbee…
But there are people that are good at this. Their technique is thoughtful, refined, and well funded. And they are so good at selling hate.
The same mentality that didn’t stomp out the south is the same mentality that lets MAGA get away with their bullshit.
But boiling the entirety of 21st-century American political dysfunction down to one glib sentence about punishment is lazy, inflammatory, and historically unserious. We can do better than this. Or at least we should.
I think you are way over analyzing the idea here, that it was the first of many major opportunities missed to start turning the country towards a more equal and progressive future, but our country has demonstrated over and over that it doesn’t actually want that.
If there WAS a huge show trial and hangings as their should have been, would that have altered the course of history? Maybe or maybe not, but it’s what should have fucking happened, and I kind of resent and suspect people who have to get on a soapbox to defend our failures of the past. We analyze the past to reduce harm in the future, ideally, so understand how useful this simplified message in this post could be towards that end before deciding you’re the main character who needs to set shit right.
Reconstruction was not mishandled, it went down exactly how the wealthy and those in power wanted it to. It set the standard for how those with means respond to crisis, buy low, sell high, stoke animosity for “others” among your voting base as if they are the source of their woes. The Gilded Age and Yellow Journalism came on the heels of the Civil War for a reason. Accountability for war would have been long, tedious, and if done legally would have fizzled because most people have lives that need attended to. By the time Davis or Lee was tried, appealed, retried, and hung most Americans would have moved on and barely read about it in the paper, their bloodlust simmered.
The technology may have changed but we are in the same loop. A substantial portion of the population has achieved social progress over the decades and either wants to push further, prevent regression, or see what they gained actualized. Wishing the Confederacy had been punished is an exercise in modern wishful thinking, pretending like if just one or two things were done differently we wouldn’t be where we are today. But I doubt it would look much different if we had hung leadership, or what, mass executed every soldier who wore a grey uniform?
And now that point is moot, they’re all dead, the shoulda/coulda/woulda of revenge is meaningless. If we want to break this cycle of crisis-elite power grab-discontent-blame your neighbor who is not like you, the source is not in just holding accountable the ones who become the faces of the fight, but all the quieter ones that gamble on both sides and then cash in when one wins without the rest of us noticing they were playing us all. Current leadership is just the metastasized ugliness of a disease that never gets treated. Removing it would only mean we didn’t have to see it in all its hideousness for a while, but it’d still come back with a new face.
Every last leader of the Confederacy could have been hung and we’d be in the same position we are today because Northern elites and power climbing Southerners would have bought up what they could and filled political offices with candidates that promise “vote for me and I’ll do X” but never deliver or “your grievances are with the other guy whose success is a loss you were entitled to”. If we don’t want to end up here again we have to use the lessons of Reconstruction (ie capitalism and it’s handful of elites don’t care about morals/social equity/justice) and get to the root of what makes any fight for progress so difficult and makes backsliding into tribalistic appeals to emotion so easy.
historically illiterate, rage-bait nonsense that thrives online because it’s emotionally satisfying, not because it’s true.
That pretty much sums up Lemmy. Much of the rhetoric around American history and politics is based on feelings.
I’ve said it before, the way things are presented are indinguishable from right wing rhetoric. The only difference is the goal. It’s all emotional dogmatic nonsense with no space for disagreement. Conform or be downvoted for wrong think.
Oh for the love of God. Reducing the current political climate of the United States to “we didn’t punish the Confederate States of America hard enough” is the kind of historically illiterate, rage-bait nonsense that thrives online because it’s emotionally satisfying, not because it’s true.
Yes, Reconstruction after the American Civil War was mishandled. Yes, former Confederates regained power. Yes, Jim Crow laws were a moral stain and a catastrophic policy failure. All of that is real.
But to pretend that modern polarization, institutional decay, media fragmentation, algorithmic brain rot, primary-election extremism, and post–Citizens United v. FEC campaign finance insanity are somehow just delayed consequences of not lining enough people up against a wall in 1865 is obscene. It is cartoon history. It is Tumblr-tier cause-and-effect thinking.
America’s current dysfunction has proximate causes. Social media incentive structures. Partisan media silos. Gerrymandered districts. The aftershocks of the 2008 financial crisis. The political realignment of the South over decades. None of that is explained away by “we didn’t punish them hard enough.”
And let’s be honest about what that statement implies. It implies that mass punitive retribution 160 years ago would have somehow engineered a permanently virtuous republic. That is magical thinking. Nations are not firmware you can permanently patch with one decisive punishment event.
This is the kind of meme that sounds profound to people who consume history as morality theater instead of as institutional analysis. It’s outrage fuel. It’s not serious.
You want to critique Reconstruction policy? Fine. That’s a legitimate academic discussion. But boiling the entirety of 21st-century American political dysfunction down to one glib sentence about punishment is lazy, inflammatory, and historically unserious. We can do better than this. Or at least we should.
You are not putting two and two together.
Reconstruction was a failure because the south was too ignorant and stuck in their ways, while the north was tired of their bullshit and just didn’t want to deal with it anymore. So in the long run, culturally, the racism and ignorance never changed in the south.
“…polarization, institutional decay, media fragmentation, algorithmic brain rot, primary-election extremism, and post–Citizens United v. FEC campaign finance insanity…”
These are all the result of two main things; the massive amount of data now available that can be mined and used to predict behaviors and sociological outcomes. The incredible amounts of capital that has been created by those able to take advantage of that data. They literally know how to get people to react like monkeys pushing a button to get a treat. Every web page you visit, post you share…, every click you make is another data point that can be used to model your reactions and combined into a larger aggregate.
You can point that data weaponization at two things, money and politics. With money, you now have people who just stare at spreadsheets all day and make financial decisions based off models and data mining. They have already stripped all the easy wealth that can be stripped. For example, you can’t find a good deal on a used car, in an auto trader anymore. Things are priced not what they cost to make, plus a profit, but what people are willing to pay for them. That’s where the marketing comes in. They know what gets almost anyone to respond, so they tailor their marketing based off all this data they gather. And it works.
Shrinkflation, enshjitification, moving industry overseas to cheap labor, robotics, etc… None of these things have made products cheaper so much as they just made more profit for the shareholders. But now, its not even the people who own the shares but private equity. Blackrock, Bezos, Musk, Ellison, etc… they have so much wealth that it is a tiny fraction for them to pay someone else to figure out how to extract more. It’s not enough to own 65% (arbitrary number) of an industry, they have to constantly fight for each additional %. But they do, because they are no longer the ones doing it. They pay someone else to simp for their hoarding. They are not geniuses. (Clearly the opposite for some of them.) Some of them do have great success stories, but all of them came from wealth and without it they would be another Joe Schmoe.
Now you have these rich white men with massive amounts of wealth who think they are god’s gift to the human race. So they also grab for power, and in today’s world of data, money is quite literally turned directly into power.
You have a system that can convince people that a $1300 smart phone, that will last for 12-18 months before you start jonesing for an upgrade, is a smart purchase. That data is also used to convince people to vote a certain way, to believe a certain way.
Now that brings us back to the south.
People are already instinctively tribal. It is in our DNA. We are hard wired to be “us vs. them”. Racism is the underdeveloped two year old of tribalization. “You look different, so you must be different, and different is bad.” It is the one of the most basic institutions of ignorance. It doesn’t take a whole lot to think your way past it, but when you already believe, it is much easier to continue that belief than to challenge it.
That is a perfect recipe for manipulation and control. We now have true oligarchs supporting a madman because he was an easy sell to the largest group of voters.
The left will fracture itself, fighting over whats a better system of government, how to fight climate change, genocide, abortion, it goes on. The right just has to say, “We’re better than those people, vote for me and we’ll rise together.” They validate those ignorant tribal instincts.
Look at Cowbee. Dude (could be several people, who knows) is an arm of that. Shitty propaganda put forth in an environment they control, so there is no real dialogue or real ability to challenge. They are tribal and use it to try and sell a dumbass ideolgy and undermine others. Now imagine they had a billion dollars. They could pay an army of people like them to make a thousand soap boxes to drown out dissent or contrary thought. They play on your ignorance. They know you are not an expert, so they can make whatever wild claims they want, backed with premade arguments.
Or Charlie Kirk. That fucking douchebag. He made a career out of debating children. He had to learn what, 10 different arguments? His only real talent was to have zero shame. He was valuable to the people with the money. He would go out there and say the things they knew were lies because they profited from it and he didn’t care. And the morons would eat it up.
Lets take that back to Cowbee (sorry not sorry to pick on you). I have no idea who Cowbee is and they may be a sincere person who legitimately believes in what they say. Except their behavior has every ear mark of a Charlie Kirk style propagandist and so I immediately don’t trust anything they say. It is polished enough too, that part of me thinks they are actually a professional at it. Or they could really just believe that bullshit and spend 16 hours a day online.
Politicians have been playing that game for millennia at this point, but they never had the kind of tools that they do today.
And the lack of racial equity in this country, going way beyond even reconstruction, has prevented any real mobility for a non-white. It is just reconstruction on, when it is so much more obvious to see.
So by not stamping out the ignorance and hate, it was allowed to grow and become a ridiculously easy tool to abuse by those with the money to take advantage of it.
After race it is religion. Then sex. Then ideology, social standing, what football club you like…
If you look at my post you can see why I am terrible at this. I’m all over the place, thoughts aren’t fully justified, points aren’t very well made, I need to let it go about Cowbee…
But there are people that are good at this. Their technique is thoughtful, refined, and well funded. And they are so good at selling hate.
The same mentality that didn’t stomp out the south is the same mentality that lets MAGA get away with their bullshit.
You can link that all back to stopping reconstruction early…
I think you are way over analyzing the idea here, that it was the first of many major opportunities missed to start turning the country towards a more equal and progressive future, but our country has demonstrated over and over that it doesn’t actually want that.
If there WAS a huge show trial and hangings as their should have been, would that have altered the course of history? Maybe or maybe not, but it’s what should have fucking happened, and I kind of resent and suspect people who have to get on a soapbox to defend our failures of the past. We analyze the past to reduce harm in the future, ideally, so understand how useful this simplified message in this post could be towards that end before deciding you’re the main character who needs to set shit right.
Reconstruction was not mishandled, it went down exactly how the wealthy and those in power wanted it to. It set the standard for how those with means respond to crisis, buy low, sell high, stoke animosity for “others” among your voting base as if they are the source of their woes. The Gilded Age and Yellow Journalism came on the heels of the Civil War for a reason. Accountability for war would have been long, tedious, and if done legally would have fizzled because most people have lives that need attended to. By the time Davis or Lee was tried, appealed, retried, and hung most Americans would have moved on and barely read about it in the paper, their bloodlust simmered.
The technology may have changed but we are in the same loop. A substantial portion of the population has achieved social progress over the decades and either wants to push further, prevent regression, or see what they gained actualized. Wishing the Confederacy had been punished is an exercise in modern wishful thinking, pretending like if just one or two things were done differently we wouldn’t be where we are today. But I doubt it would look much different if we had hung leadership, or what, mass executed every soldier who wore a grey uniform?
And now that point is moot, they’re all dead, the shoulda/coulda/woulda of revenge is meaningless. If we want to break this cycle of crisis-elite power grab-discontent-blame your neighbor who is not like you, the source is not in just holding accountable the ones who become the faces of the fight, but all the quieter ones that gamble on both sides and then cash in when one wins without the rest of us noticing they were playing us all. Current leadership is just the metastasized ugliness of a disease that never gets treated. Removing it would only mean we didn’t have to see it in all its hideousness for a while, but it’d still come back with a new face.
Every last leader of the Confederacy could have been hung and we’d be in the same position we are today because Northern elites and power climbing Southerners would have bought up what they could and filled political offices with candidates that promise “vote for me and I’ll do X” but never deliver or “your grievances are with the other guy whose success is a loss you were entitled to”. If we don’t want to end up here again we have to use the lessons of Reconstruction (ie capitalism and it’s handful of elites don’t care about morals/social equity/justice) and get to the root of what makes any fight for progress so difficult and makes backsliding into tribalistic appeals to emotion so easy.
That pretty much sums up Lemmy. Much of the rhetoric around American history and politics is based on feelings.
I’ve said it before, the way things are presented are indinguishable from right wing rhetoric. The only difference is the goal. It’s all emotional dogmatic nonsense with no space for disagreement. Conform or be downvoted for wrong think.