“Ur-Fascism,” wrote the Italian thinker Umberto Eco,
derives from individual or social frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the old “proletarians” are becoming petty bourgeois… the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.
.. This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies.
.. Mussolini himself “did not have any philosophy: he had only rhetoric.”
.. ordinary people and their values are mocked, especially among bien-pensant elites. And the idea that hard, honest work will yield a comfortable life—the core American idea, if we ever had one—doesn’t feel true anymore. The principle distinction within the middle class is now whether sending your children to college will leave them in severe, or merely moderate, debt peonage. And the intense competition at all levels of education reflects a growing fear that hard-earned success might not help your children enjoy the same. A world of social critique and thwarted ambition is a breeding ground for nihilism in the best and worse in the worst.
.. Eco also saw a “cult of action for action’s sake” in fascism. “Thinking is a form of emasculation…. culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes….the critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism,” the root of the cultural maladies fascism sought to eradicate. In a world of social chaos and murky values, the fascist’s bold measures appear otherworldly, supernatural, as marks of superiority. The fascist acts “before, or without, any previous reflection”—meaning his confidence and clarity are illusions: he knows the right path forward because walking resolutely makes the path right. Thinking before acting, on the other hand, reflects weakness of character, makes someone “low energy”; when they act—if they act at all—it will be in useless half-measures.
.. Truth, for the Ur-Fascist, was revealed “at the dawn of human history,” but was shattered, hidden in a thousand sources, “concealed under the veil of forgotten languages—in Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the Celtic runes, in the scrolls of the little known religions of Asia.” The little fragments of the “primeval truth” must be pieced together from a thousand sources, some contradictory. Thus, for example, the fascist world’s weird fascination with archaeology, with Zoroaster, with the Vedas.
.. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction.
.. Yet Eco thought technology could revive the Common Will, that “there is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
.. Mass-scale social media enables us to find a thousand backers for even our oddest opinions; its algorithms, given time, push us to see only those with whom we agree. Ideological monocultures are the new default; finding opposing viewpoints requires constant effort. That is where Eco was wrong: writing before the Internet was social and algorithmically optimized, he could not see that the new Leader, the new interpreter of the Common Will, is the self. The crowd is back, and it is everywhere.
Donald Trump Escalates Rhetoric Before South Carolina Primary
“Overwhelmingly, most Republicans disagree with his criticisms of George W. Bush, but most Republicans also don’t want to debate” Mr. Bush’s legacy, said Steve Schmidt, a Republican strategist who was a top adviser to Mr. Bush’s 2004 campaign.
Most people share Mr. Trump’s view that the war was a mistake, Mr. Schmidt added, and in a state heavy with military members, many families have grown weary of repeated deployments.
.. But when he had a dust-up with Mr. Bush during the final debate in New Hampshire and the audience booed Mr. Trump, he made the most of it, saying they were against him because they were major donors and he could not be controlled.
He has since used that line repeatedly on the campaign trail, even singling out Mr. Bush’s finance chairman, the billionaire Woody Johnson, as an example of the type of donor who is working against Mr. Trump — never mind that Mr. Trump and Mr. Johnson are actually friends.
.. That coarsening of the language in the campaign, Mr. Schmidt argued, reflects the toxic culture of social media, and such behavior is no longer considered as much of a risk.
.. “Accusing President Bush of lying about the war adds to the hard cap of Trump’s ceiling,” said Rob Stutzman, a California-based Republican strategist and a supporter of Jeb Bush. “But I don’t think it matters until this is a two-man or three-man race.”
Social Media: Destroyer or Creator?
Over the last few years we’ve been treated to a number of “Facebook revolutions,” from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street to the squares of Istanbul, Kiev and Hong Kong, all fueled by social media. But once the smoke cleared, most of these revolutions failed to build any sustainable new political order, in part because as so many voices got amplified, consensus-building became impossible.
.. The same tool that united us to topple dictators eventually tore us apart
.. Social media, he noted, “only amplified” the polarization “by facilitating the spread of misinformation, rumors, echo chambers and hate speech. The environment was purely toxic. My online world became a battleground filled with trolls, lies, hate speech.”
.. Here is what he concluded about social media today: “First, we don’t know how to deal with rumors. Rumors that confirm people’s biases are now believed and spread among millions of people.” Second, “We tend to only communicate with people that we agree with, and thanks to social media, we can mute, un-follow and block everybody else. Third, online discussions quickly descend into angry mobs. … It’s as if we forget that the people behind screens are actually real people and not just avatars.
.. Because of the speed and brevity of social media, we are forced to jump to conclusions and write sharp opinions in 140 characters about complex world affairs.
.. today, our social media experiences are designed in a way that favors broadcasting over engagements, posts over discussions, shallow comments over deep conversations. … It’s as if we agreed that we are here to talk at each other instead of talking with each other.”
App Makers Reach Out to the Teenager on Mobile
Teenagers being teenagers, the room was full of angst and contradictions. They love Instagram, the photo-sharing app, but are terrified their posts will be ignored or mocked.
.. “They have immediate social validation or lack of validation at the touch of a button,” said Michael Jones, chief executive of Science Inc., which owns Wishbone. “So if you thought that the immediate gratification generation was two generations ago, you haven’t even seen what immediate gratification looks like until you start spending time with, like, a teen on a phone.”
.. Why the distinction? Because Instagram is special, Leila explained. On Snapchat, where messages disappear, you can be less selective because there is a lower bar for quality. On Instagram, you have to be careful not to clog your friends’ feeds with a barrage of low-quality pictures that might annoy them.
.. Every generation has its thing, and the last two have been marked by digital technology. One of the big dividing lines between Generation X and millennials was that millennials grew up with the Internet. A big difference between millennials and the next group — the postmillennials — has been smartphones.
.. Wishbone sees those anxieties as an opportunity. The app doesn’t ask users to take pictures in which they look “sooo beautiful!!!!,” nor does it require having parents who vacation in Instagram-perfect locales. Users just make funny polls to talk about celebrities, makeup and bands. It is about your tastes, not your identity.
.. “You want to create an environment where it doesn’t feel like only 1 percent of the people win,” said Eric Kuhn, Science’s head of product. “And we’ve heard that with other platforms, like as soon as you’re clearly not in that top 1 percent, you don’t want to use the app anymore.”
.. The hunch was that a polling app would do well. Mr. Jones knew from his AOL days that polling was among the most addictive of online features. And since successful mobile apps reward repetitive behavior, he figured polling would translate well to smartphones.
.. “We talked to them and they’d be like, ‘Why am I not getting notified when people vote on my stuff?’ ” Mr. Jones said. “And we’d be like, ‘Well, we wouldn’t want to do that ’cause we might send you, like, 50 notifications that you got 50 of your friends to vote on your card.’ They’re like, ‘But that’s what I want.’ ”