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Ron R's avatar

The problem is BOTH the demagogues AND their audience. The demagogues get more extreme, their audience reacts by becoming more extreme, the demagogues respond by becoming even more extreme, and so on, and so on. It's a vicious circle, a self-reinforcing feedback loop. But the blame has to be assigned mostly to the demagogues, they KNOW what they're doing and they're doing it DELIBERATELY, to create the result they want, and they don't give a crap about the consequences. And we don't have enough voices of sanity on the right speaking out to counterbalance the voices of demagoguery.

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Travis's avatar

JVL, this weekend Triad tickled my erogenous zones something awful this morning, thanks for a great write up!

The deplorable vs demagogue question is a bit like the chicken vs the egg question in the sense of trying to find out which is the more important. For me, the answer is easy in both questions and they operate on understanding how deplorables and eggs work:

Just as eggs cannot develop or hatch without the incubation of the mother's warmth resting on their shells and keeping their temperature zones in the proper range so that the zygote can develop, the online communities of resentment cannot explode off of the internet and into reality absent the incubation of demagogues in the presence of a like-minded audience. That is the incubation that lets the eggs (deplorables) develop and eventually hatch (radicalize). Absent this provision of warmth by the mother, the eggs simply do not develop.

With "deplorables"--anti-liberal individuals with low trust in American institutions--they cannot "develop" (group-radicalize) without the environment that a demagogue cultivates. When it was Rush Limbaugh, his listeners were joined and group-radicalized via common ideology (Ditto Heads). This audience was like a proto-cult to what eventually became MAGA (with the Tea Party as an intermediate waypoint). What really accelerated this incubation/group-radicalization was the advent of social media. Now the Rush Limbaughs of the world are sent *to you* should the social media algorithms detect senses of institutional mistrust or a love of guns via who you're friends with or what kind of media you consume. Social media now brings the incubator to eggs in waiting. It brings the cult to the individual via the algorithms at the slightest sense of the individual being susceptible to the ideology of the cult.

In this sense I blame the deplorables less than the demagogues, because the demagogues unite the individuals and create a cult audience. Inside of that cult audience is where folks who don't trust institutions and hate liberals take their next steps into ideological bubbles of bias confirmation and eventually onto radicalization. It also gives these radicalized individuals an audience to impress, which sometimes leads to mass-shooters doing what they do to impress online communities of resentment brought together by *the combination of* algorithms and demagogues.

To tie the thread between Alex Jones, deplorables, algorithms, and Malcolm Gladwell, take a look at Gladwell's book "The Tipping Point" that discusses "Mavens". Mavens are key influencers that drive the direction of the crowd. For online communities or resentment and institutional distrust, the Tim Pools and Alex Jones' of the world are the Mavens, the algorithms are the accelerant that keep the cult growing, and the social media interfaces are the glue that holds it all together and provides a platform (YouTube, Discord, FB, TikTok, etc.). The Maven, the algorithms, and the platform lead to what becomes a "deplorable" cult.

To bring this question home to us, would the Bulwark audience/community exist absent the Never-Trumpers of 2015 starting this website? The chicken comes first because the egg doesn't hatch without the incubation. Gladwell's Law: The Mavens Matter.

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