kaffando
Talking to my sister and a neighbour of hers commented that in the ten years since his arrival in Australia, he has noticed a significant fall in societal values and behaviours. People not caring for each other, anti-social behaviours etc. I suggested that for most of that time we had a federal Liberal National govt, which could be the cause of much of this.
We both said "of course, the #Albaneses #Labor govt has done nothing to reverse any of it" (both life-long Labor voters).
Of course.
Nov 25, 2023 at 11:26pmWeb
Show threadvolkrisNov 25, 2023

@kaffando I tend to think governments don’t actually have that much control over how people act towards each other.

Kind of the opposite, governments these days seem to reflect their people, not the other way around.

Unfortunately it is a much simpler story to blame government for how people act. People are messy, so looking at bottom up causes are more complicated.

But more accurate.

Show threadkaffandoNov 25, 2023
@volkris
Thanks for your comments.
I do appreciate what you're saying...however (you knew that was coming, right? 😂 ) governments set the tone of a country. Right wing govts have always encouraged right wing behaviours. Not saying that all RW people are bad, not at all, but it encourages bad behaviours in susceptible people. Also see:
Trump
MAGA
Show threadvolkrisNov 25, 2023

@kaffando but I would use Trump and MAGA as perfect examples to make my case!

The MAGA crowd existed before Trump. Trump just saw them, saw an opportunity to use them to enrich himself, and so he was a reflection of them, not the other way around.

I think a lot of people had been kind of sitting in echo chambers where they hadn’t seen the MAGA type people growing in numbers and frustration for a decade, but I watched it. I saw it and I tried to warn other people about it.

If you watch unedited videos of Trump in friendly interviews and even on the campaign trail, often enough you’ll see that he doesn’t know what to do until he takes cues from the audience. Often he will make the most generic policy statement until the audience tells him what he is supposed to say, or he will sit kind of neutrally until the audience basically prompts him to do something stupid.

But yeah, Trump and MAGA is a great example of exactly what I’m saying: governments these days seem to often reflect the mood of people, not the other way around, which is why it’s especially important to focus on people.

Even if you change the government, that doesn’t mean it changes the people, see for example today with Trump and MAGA going strong even after the US changed its government :-)