@quinn The broader world is as foreign to many Americans as California is to Florida or Utah is to New York.

Its an important part of understanding and facing our challenges.

Most folks aren't so different but the belief that they are makes them coil up into tiny worlds and tiny lives, fearful of every possible source of joy and thus angry at every possible theft of joy that's within that tiny worldview.

@PepperTheVixen
@quinn

i'll never forget the time my mother (who grew up in a poor farming community in argentina) told me about traveling in the deep south with my father. she was absolutely shocked at the poverty she saw

@PepperTheVixen @quinn

Inside America's "Third World" States (It's Not What You Think)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzTJexwoCYc

@quinn Nowhere is, but it’s still fucked in different ways.

You have enlightened me.

@quinn @floe Great points on this thread, but I think there sort of was such a moment. In the 70s you get a lof of thinktanks worried about the "democratic surge" and "democratic distemper". For example:

Al Smith once remarked that "the only cure for the evils
of democracy is more democracy." Our analysis suggests that
applying that cure at the present time could well be adding
fuel to the flames. Instead, some of the problems of
governance in the United States today stem from an excess of
democracy— an "excess of democracy" in much the same
sense in which David Donald used the term to refer to the
consequences of the Jacksonian revolution which helped to
precipitate the Civil War. Needed, instead, is a greater degree
of moderation in democracy.
In practice, this moderation has two major areas of
application. First, democracy is only one way of constituting
authority, and it is not necessarily a universally applicable
one. In many situations the claims of expertise, seniority,
experience, and special talents may override the claims of
democracy as a way of constituting authority. During the
surge of the 1960s, however, the democratic principle was
extended to many institutions where it can, in the long run,
only frustrate the purposes of those institutions. A university
where teaching appointments are subject to approval by
students may be a more democratic university but it is not
likely to be a better university. In similar fashion, armies in
which the commands of officers have been subject to veto by
the collective wisdom of their subordinates have almost invariably
come to disaster on the battlefield. The arenas where
democratic procedures are appropriate are, in short, limited.
Second, the effective operation of a democratic political
system usually requires some measure of apathy and
noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and groups.
In the past, every democratic society has had a marginal
population, of greater or lesser size, which has not actively
participated in politics. In itself, this marginality on the part
of some groups is inherently undemocratic, but it has also
been one of the factors which has enabled democracy to
function effectively. Marginal social groups, as in the case of
the blacks, are now becoming full participants in the political
system. Yet the danger of overloading the political system
with demands which extend its functions and undermine its
authority still remains. Less marginality on the part of some
groups thus needs to be replaced by more self-restraint on the
part of all groups.

https://ia801308.us.archive.org/23/items/TheCrisisOfDemocracy-TrilateralCommission-1975/crisis_of_democracy_text.pdf