We're stuck between an imaginary past used by authoritarians to protect white supremacy and an imaginary future peddled by corporations and the wealthy to enrich themselves.
If we're going to get out of this crisis, we'll need to escape both.
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jaredyatessexton.substack.com/p/the-war-over…
If we're going to get out of this crisis, we'll need to escape both.
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jaredyatessexton.substack.com/p/the-war-over…
So much time is spent on the spectacle of Donald Trump that we often miss the larger movements at play in this current moment.
We're caught in a mythological America that was spun to further wealth and power, and we have to move beyond it.
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We're caught in a mythological America that was spun to further wealth and power, and we have to move beyond it.
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The future that is being presented to us by corporations is marketed as an escape from our problems and this crisis, but it's only a means of hiding it and profiting off the destruction.
The past peddled by white supremacists and this fake future are directly linked.
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The past peddled by white supremacists and this fake future are directly linked.
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The mythological story of America is one of white supremacy that launders crimes committed in the name of profit and power.
It's a story concocted and carried out in the interest of protecting the wealthy and furthering their interests.
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It's a story concocted and carried out in the interest of protecting the wealthy and furthering their interests.
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In this mythology, America is the chosen protector of the world, a champion for freedom, and the history of modern society, with its industry and exploitation and suffering, was inescapable.
This story launders the cruelty used to accumulate wealth and power.
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This story launders the cruelty used to accumulate wealth and power.
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To dive into this mythology, its ramifications, and consequences, we have to start at the end of the Cold War, when the United States became the sole superpower and began to author its own reality that it required all other nations to live within.
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The American mythology requires us to believe the US "won" the Cold War, but honestly, we all lost.
It destroyed any semblance of freedom or reality, and allowed the wealthy to consolidate control. We're still bleeding from that conflict.
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jaredyatessexton.substack.com/p/everyone-los…
It destroyed any semblance of freedom or reality, and allowed the wealthy to consolidate control. We're still bleeding from that conflict.
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jaredyatessexton.substack.com/p/everyone-los…
The end of the Cold War allowed neoliberal forces obsessed with prioritizing the interests of the wealthy over democracy and mass politics to construct a new world order.
In this new system, people were left to their own devices while the wealthy prospered.
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In this new system, people were left to their own devices while the wealthy prospered.
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The shift to neoliberalism was bipartisan and created a new economic consensus.
Corporations were allowed to move beyond borders in search of cheaper labor, while Americans were "destined" to become the managers of this new system and become even more prosperous.
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Corporations were allowed to move beyond borders in search of cheaper labor, while Americans were "destined" to become the managers of this new system and become even more prosperous.
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Neoliberal globalism didn't care about the fates of anyone besides the wealthy. American towns were hollowed out as industries left and as market forces destroyed the status quo.
Education was captured by profit seekers, cutting off millions from joining the system.
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Education was captured by profit seekers, cutting off millions from joining the system.
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What demagogues like Donald Trump promised was a renaissance of the past that was impossible.
"Making America Great Again" was an opportunity to cement the past lie while playing make believe about the present, all of it undergirded by white supremacist notions.
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"Making America Great Again" was an opportunity to cement the past lie while playing make believe about the present, all of it undergirded by white supremacist notions.
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Trump's entire appeal was pointing to the "lost America" of the past that never actually existed and promising that he alone could bring it back.
He couldn't. And no one can. But it was incredibly profitable as a product and an appeal.
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He couldn't. And no one can. But it was incredibly profitable as a product and an appeal.
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MAGA is a lie that time can be rewound, that actions can be undone if someone just wants it bad enough.
It's a con job, but an incredibly powerful con that sparked a latent authoritarian impulse in a population that believed the past mythology.
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It's a con job, but an incredibly powerful con that sparked a latent authoritarian impulse in a population that believed the past mythology.
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It's very important to note that MAGA is in line with authoritarian appeals that have gained traction around the world.
Globalism has provided an avenue for promises of opposing the new system and returning populations to mythical pasts that never existed in the first place
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Globalism has provided an avenue for promises of opposing the new system and returning populations to mythical pasts that never existed in the first place
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Around the world, Right Wing authoritarians have sold themselves as saviors capable of rewinding time to mythical pasts, all in order to create illiberal regimes that pervert history, the law, and politics in order to create protected groups like white evangelicals.
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Currently we are watching National Conservatism emerge as an illiberal group determined to bring Putin and Orban style illiberalism and authoritarianism to the United States.
This is capitalizing off MAGA and the promise to rewind time.
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This is capitalizing off MAGA and the promise to rewind time.
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Battles over history and education are focused on this idea: that if only a group can take control over how we see ourselves, what stories we tell, then it can control the future and essentially return us to a past that, again, never existed in the first place.
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But we have to talk about the alternative.
Corporations like Facebook are now promising a virtual reality future filled with our fantasies, a fabrication that is dressed to look like pop culture visions but is just...a rebranding of our past with glitzy graphics.
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Corporations like Facebook are now promising a virtual reality future filled with our fantasies, a fabrication that is dressed to look like pop culture visions but is just...a rebranding of our past with glitzy graphics.
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The current alternative to MAGA, National Conservatism, and this return to the past, is a fake future in the stars and a virtual world.
But none of these are real. They're simply distraction to keep us from interfering with the accumulation of wealth by the powerful.
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But none of these are real. They're simply distraction to keep us from interfering with the accumulation of wealth by the powerful.
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What people like Elon Musk are selling us is a futurist religion, the idea that they are savior who will keep us from apocalypse by either plunging us into virtual reality, a heavenly fabrication, or shooting us into the stars.
But it's a distraction. That's all.
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But it's a distraction. That's all.
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The promise made by these billionaires is that if we simply get out of their way, if we don't trouble them, they'll certainly give us salvation.
It's a religion. You have to have "faith." And they're peddling the same history and idea MAGA and National Conservatism do.
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It's a religion. You have to have "faith." And they're peddling the same history and idea MAGA and National Conservatism do.
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Both MAGA and the futurists are telling us to remain faithful in the mythology of America's past and future so that the wealthy can continue to gain power.
On one hand, they promise a return to the past. On the other, a future that's been promised for generations.
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On one hand, they promise a return to the past. On the other, a future that's been promised for generations.
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The war over "the past" and "the future" is nothing but a battle over who controls the mythology that has failed us.
It's a con job, both ways, and the only means of making any of this better is to unravel that mythology and find something real.
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It's a con job, both ways, and the only means of making any of this better is to unravel that mythology and find something real.
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The past we are sold is a mythology and this future we are being sold is a mythology as well.
Before it's too late, we must recognize how we have been led astray in the interest of profit and power and rediscover the truth behind these mythologies.
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Before it's too late, we must recognize how we have been led astray in the interest of profit and power and rediscover the truth behind these mythologies.
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