Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

And yet, it seems society has never been so much polarized. Seems a bit like the "hipster effect"

The current Turner/Murdoch media in the US is definitely not my understanding of 'traditional' journalism of the likes of Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, Reuters.

Looking from the outside (Europe), I'm sorry, but I just don't see this at all.

A big example: Republicans have repeatedly claimed for over a decade now that the Democrats run an international child sex trafficking network

I am in no way a fan of Hillary Clinton, but the right has spent almost forty years systematically lying about her, claiming she's a criminal, and when the whole "Democrats rape children" thing was invented, they dropped her into that.

Tell me - what claim from the left is comparable to this horrific lie?

And I could go on, and on, and on. Republicans claim that the climate change is a hoax, FFS! (I live in the Netherlands, so this is personal to me.)

Your claim "both sides do it" is false and empty. My guess is that you are in fact an American right-winger - is this true?

They repeated every test

They checked out all the data on their lists

And then, the alien anthropologists

Admitted they were still perplexed

But on eliminating every other reason

For our sad demise

They logged the only explanation left

This species has amused itself to death

Capitalism is almost completely coercive and controlling, but direct violence is mostly reserved for minorities and for war adventures in distant countries.

At home it's coercive through financial violence (especially income restriction and forced debt), extreme economic apartheid, and overt and covert behaviour modification narratives in the various media.

"The crowd" is very much not in charge of any of this, but is persuaded that it is.

Arguably all of this is better than a more overtly dictatorial system where any form of dissent attracts direct violence. But it's not necessarily less coercive - just less obvious. And more efficient.

You can scale that back and have collective systems which rely on a tradition of consensus. It's not even all that unusual on a smaller scale. Teams/groups make decisions, some people disagree, but when consensus is reached everyone works towards the same goals even if they have misgivings.

This works if you allow feedback, goal monitoring, and resets so the system is responsive and self-correcting. But it also requires all participants to be rational, reasonably intelligent, non-sociopathic, and capable of adult decision making.

Which is why it doesn't work at scale. Only about half the population - at best - has those abilities, and as soon as your group includes at least one sociopath they will destroy that dynamic and replace it with a toxic one which relies more on coercion than consensus.