alt Hacker NewsThe retrogression perception is correct; but the specific timeframe is so incorrect that the back of my head blew out like a pinata.
The goal is - and I am not picking on the reactionary wing alone, this impulse has broad support across our ideologies - de-industrialization. The complexity of post-Enlightenment civilization is being rejected, in favor of some hypothetical state. This puts the past timeframe as far back as the 17th century.
But not a "real" past. No one can recreate the past. Only their idea of the past.
And of course, when you "create" anything, too much and too quickly, you risk systemic collapse. Not a problem if you imagine you will be Immortan Joeing around in your Death Wagon, but odds are, I'm sorry to say, against it.
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Trump is a populist doing populist things, including attacking the intellectuals.
Conservatives have been basically purged from academia over the last 30 years, which frankly was a pretty dumb "victory" to celebrate, because now they voted in a dumb gorilla that is just smashing things as revenge.
The piñata bit is a bit hyperbolic, but largely I agree that it’s a movement built against the principles of the enlightenment, and the movements of modernism and post-modernism that grew out of it.
It’s like: what if we took all of the principles of the enlightenment, and forced them through a sieve that served our racist, xenophobic, chauvinist world view? Rediscovering eugenics and pseudoscience, especially for christofascist ambitions and exploitative grifting.