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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

Alternative spin being that Americans are at their most informed state in recorded history. Preserving faith in the US institutions requires earnestly trusting to the US institutions opinions of themselves. I'm not seeing the evidence that the institutions themselves have declined - if anything, they are more reliable than normal. Political corruption is really hard to hide these days and the power structures are well traced out. The inability of the US powers that be to keep things like Epstein's Island or the global spying apparatus out of public consciousness is really telling. Names like Wikileaks and OpenSecrets couldn't have existed outside this century.

The real worry I have is that people will break something important chasing an illusory good-old-days that never existed. The proper answer is to reduce the power of government so the corruption doesn't spread as far.

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Let's say the US government is 90% competent and effective, and 10% incompetent and corrupt. And let's say that you're right, that Americans are the most informed they've ever been. That means they see more of that 10% than ever before, even if the 10% hasn't increased. And they can tell that they see more corruption and incompetence than they did before. So it feels like the country's falling apart, even if it's just like it always was.

Then you add in that the news is mostly about the failures. "Things working like they should" doesn't draw many eyeballs.

Then you add in CNN on one side and Fox on the other, each trying very hard to find things to criticize in administrations and politicians that it doesn't like. (We had way-out-there politicians who said really weird stuff before, but we didn't have major networks triumphantly making their craziest statements headline news.)

Then you add in the bungled response to Covid (bungled repeatedly, by two administrations, in ways that set fire to much of the credibility of health care institutions). And then you add in media on both sides, shining a spotlight on the other side's mistakes.

Then you add in the amplification effects of social media.

Then you add in a side helping of Russian agitprop campaigns (and, to a lesser extent, Chinese and Iranian).

Everyone is far more aware of mistakes and incompetence in government. Or at least, they are far more aware of a subset of mistakes and incompetence - the subset that makes the other side look bad.

There were a number of areas where Trump ran a decent, effective administration. There are a number of areas where Biden is running a decent, effective administration. You don't hear much about either one.

> The proper answer is to reduce the power of government so the corruption doesn't spread as far.

Absolutely. But that isn't one of the places where competence shows up. The government is very bad at decreasing the power and scope of government.

The good old days never existed? Of course they existed, as is evident by the better days that followed. You’re simply mismatching things and are affected by the toxic gaslighting and abusive psychopathic lies that have denied the reality and turned the abuser into abusers who say things like “the good old days that never existed”.

Everyone wanted to come to America precisely because the good old days existed and the rest of the world has what it has precisely because America’s good old days existed.

Whether you are doing it on purpose or not, you are spreading the spite and jealousy of abusive toxicity that gaslights America about its achievements, no different than a common abusive person says “I’m the only one that loves you”.

It is precisely because America and the Constitution was such an affront to the abusive psychopathic ruling class that hates having its powers to abuse being restrained for the first and only time in human history, that they’ve leverage every single force they can over centuries now, to dislodge America and the Constitution to set their absolute and tyrannical powers free again.

It will be too late, but when America and the Constitution finally falter, humanity will have to face the reality of what it was tricked into, unless that’s not even possible in the dystopian nightmare the ruling class has in store for humanity that makes 1984 seem like a quaint story.

I actually think "informed-ness" peaked about a decade ago. The rise of fox news, partisanship and "alternative facts" etc has reduced the amount of actual, factual information the average person has since then (maybe before that too).

The golden age of information is behind us.

So 25 years ago Fox News was a legitimate and reasonable news source. It had a slight right editorial bent which distinguished from the other networks and they drew a decent audience, to sone extent because of that.

They later drifted a little further right, I believe as a business strategy. But I think they completely went off the rails when they realized they were competing with Facebook and not CNN and just began full on selling outrage.

People are surprised every Presidential election to learn Fox News' election desk is one of the most reliable. I think 2020 might have been the last where it isn't compromised.

I don't have hard facts, but this feels incorrect. As someone who remembers 9/11 and the run up to the Iraq War, Fox News was already happily selling fear and outrage back then. Perhaps the level of hyperbole has changed, but not the basic strategy.

It’s easy to blame Fox News for everything but it’s really the internet that scaled it all out to where it’s hard to know what to trust

Fox is shitty. But it's just giving people what they want in a system where that is rewarded.

Personally I think we just have to wait out a generation who lack the skills for fake news etc until they gently die out. Then we can go back to facts and expertise 90% of the time.

That’s the optimistic case. I wouldn’t be surprised if everyone lives in their own niche reality in 20 years. With just a few common sets of facts

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