zlacker

>>mwseib+(OP)
Are we headed for a system wide collapse (in the US, but perhaps elsewhere?).

The current environment is one of crisis mounting on top of crisis, each with increasing urgency and each never getting solved.

Just to count them

- issues of executive power concentration (pre trump even..), now alongside corruption and ignoring rule of law

- US overextended and largely illegitimately engaged militarily across the world

- mass surveillance without consent

- covid & associated economic devastation

- racial justice

- unending sense of riots, damage etc..

A friend of mine lived in East Germany when the Wall came down. I recall there was one event after another that eventually culminated in the collapse of East Germany and communism.

Is the US experiencing something similar? Not just in terms of government effectiveness but even legitimacy?

>>softwa+qb
No, it’s just the media narrative you’re seeing. Not reality.

>>eanzen+Ec
Which parts are the media narrative?

The “imperial presidency” is part of an ongoing trend of increasing executive power for decades. High unemployment from Covid is objectively true. Ineffectiveness combating Covid at a Federal level is hard to debate...

>>softwa+Ed
We used to have media that tried to be objective. They produced an Overton Window that was pretty centrist.

Those days are gone. Now we have Fox with a clear bias or slant, CNN with a clear bias to the other side, and NBC somewhat more centrist but still not objective. (If you want relatively unbiased US news, try Reuters.)

That's bad enough. But people don't just get "news" that way; they get it from Facebook and Twitter. The "news media" is now the people that you subscribe to, whether or not they know what they're talking about. If they feel like the system is failing, the narrative you see will be that the system is failing, whether or not it actually is.

Then you have people trying to manipulate that feed. Start with the two political parties. They try to get the feed to say "You have to elect us!" One way to do that is to manipulate the feed so that it indicates that the system is failing because of the other party. There are also far-right and far-left activists, who want to manipulate the feed so that people think that the system is failing due to both parties, so that people will turn to the extremists as the only hope.

And then you have foreign disinformation campaigns, deliberately trying to destabilize the US. "Your country is failing" is a great narrative for them to foster in order to destroy peoples' faith in the viability of institutions.

Look, the system isn't in great shape. The imperial presidency was a thing clear back with Nixon. It got beat back with Watergate, but it's been growing again. Competence in government has also been... let's be charitable and say "not always as evident as we would prefer". But it seems to me that there is a media narrative (or mostly "meta-media", if you want to use that term for Facebook and Twitter) that is far stronger than the circumstances warrant.