This essay marries some interesting stats from polls with some less interesting thoughts about loneliness and “a new economic dogma which permits the individual to once again seek in others the positive connectivity necessary to sustain a healthy demos for our generation and those yet to come”, whatever that might mean.
Here are the stats I found interesting:
- 81% of millennials expressed support for the legitimacy of a military coup in a democratic nation if the government is not tyrannical, but merely incompetent. Interesting.
- A comprehensive review of the durability of western democracies published in the July, 2016 issue of the Journal of Democracy found a dangerous and accelerating disintegration in the support of bedrock democratic values across the established democracies of North America and Western Europe, with the greatest disdain found in millennials. A shocking 24 percent of U.S. millennials in the study considered democracy either a “bad” or “very bad” way of running a country. WOW!!
- A Washington Post survey from October, 2016 found 46% of respondents agreeing with either “I never had faith in American democracy” or “I have lost faith in American democracy.” (By the way — these are two completely different statements aren’t they?)
Here is what I found uninteresting — your jump to stats on the number of people living alone as some kind of thesis for loneliness and disconnectedness actually being the reason, for example, so many millenials (let’s just call these young people, shall we?) have answered a question about when coups might be cool quite undemocratically. Wouldn’t you say that most young people have lived most of their lives with other people and not alone?
I don’t find your analysis or thoughts on radicalization to be well thought out either nor your summary of the alt-right as being “ a rejection of liberal democracy in favor of a whitewashed version of patriarchal civilization requiring neofascistic supermen to save it from feminists, liberals, and foreigners.” as accurate.
Speaking of “radicalization”, what do you make of this letter about how the FERC (the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) is an “enemy of the people”? Do you think that is an extreme statement or a radical thing to say? PS — It isn’t a statement made by someone who is alt-right but an anti-fracking pipeline resistor. http://levittown-tribune.com/2016/08/07/ferc-enemy-of-the-people/