The Trump Death Star Implodes - 0 views
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cancel culture free speech disinformation young culture politics
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My sense (as a younger boomer) of what drives young people’s concerns is a combination of anxiety about where we’re headed, and their beliefs regarding the absolute inadequacy of status quo institutions for navigating present and future perils. They are done, exhausted, and completely devoid of patience and tolerance for any pleas to “let the system work”.
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In addition, they seem more attuned to how profoundly unprepared (still, to this day) we all are for handling aggressive manipulation via social and traditional media.
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They seem to intuit that legacy standards of civil discourse have been corrupted and weaponized, and that some new standard is required. Decades of bad faith arguments, predominantly from right wing media and the Republican party, whether about climate change, racism, health care, tax policy, worker protections, or social disparities, are a major factor in that disenchantment. The traditional standards of evenhanded, open discourse have been turned against democracies around the world, at times with very negative consequences (Hungary, Poland, Chile, Venezuela, Brazil, etc.).
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Impatience with stubborn faith in past American experience is hardly a vice in this context. Democracy is not guaranteed, and is perhaps much more fragile than we’re comfortable admitting. The Trump presidency is prima facie evidence these concerns are justified.
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Perhaps there’s way more to this story than we know, and perhaps the perceived intolerance of these situations is really the early emergence of new ideas about the scope of freedom of speech, one that balances freedom of expression with social equity and the protection of democracy.
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This is where the younger generation falls short, so far: the rationale for their discomfort isn’t well articulated. Consider the discord in the media the first step in a process of recognizing the problem, if only at an intuitive, emotional level, and the beginnings of (hopefully) a clearly delineated, more rational process of figuring out where the new boundaries of First Amendment rights and responsibilities lie in our lovely new age of weaponized social discourse.