Politics as Sport: The Naive Democracy of the U.S.
Social media provide one easily accessible version of the marketplace of ideas in the U.S. While still gated by some levels of privilege, social media platforms include a fairly wide range of people participating by both posting who they are and what they believe or viewing those posts.
Claimed political affiliations and support for political parties and candidates are often expressed through social media, but even more revealing are posts that people seem to believe are somehow not political but in fact expose the real politics beneath the rhetoric.
One of the most revealing and disturbing is the pattern of conservatives posting about socialism, communism, and (more rarely) Marxism—proving that they have no real idea what the terms mean but have embraced them as broad and clumsy slurs of an imagined (and oppressive) Left.
As I have explained several times, there is no real Left of consequences in the U.S., even in academia (where I have worked for almost two decades).
After posting The Market Fails Education yesterday, I followed up a discussion on Facebook with this: Republicans in the U.S. are market fundamentalists who are averse to publicly funded institutions, and Democrats are market-first, public tolerant.
A genuine political Left with power in the U.S. would be public-first and market tolerant, but this simply doesn’t exist within any real power structure in the country.
Market fundamentalism or market idealism drives a great deal of political discourse, ideology, and then policy in the U.S. In almost all real ways, the CONTINUE READING: Politics as Sport: The Naive Democracy of the U.S. | radical eyes for equity
