I think you're misidentifying the problem as being about modern technology for speech. It's not. Trump could have done the same exact thing in the day of fireside chats. A lot of what drove Trump's rise isn't Parler (which didn't even exist in 2018) but talk radio.
The problem is that American is a diverse county of 330 million people who hate each other, and we're too idealistic to engage in the sort of social friction-easing that other societies do to reconcile competing factions.
For example: we clearly have a significant fraction of people in this country who want to pump the breaks on immigration. From a sociological standpoint, it doesn't make a difference whether its 47% or 51% of people. It's a lot! And what's the first thing Biden does even before he's inaugurated? https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-politics-legislation-im...
> President-elect Joe Biden’s decision to immediately ask Congress to offer legal status to an estimated 11 million people in the country has surprised advocates given how the issue has long divided Democrats and Republicans, even within their own parties.
Instead of thinking about America, imagine we're talking about some third world country. Better still, take yourself out of the timeline, and imagine we are historians looking back on what happened 50 years ago. How would you analyze the probable outcome of what Biden is doing, in terms of general principles of how people behave and how countries work?
Frankly, what's going on in America right now is utterly obvious and completely unsurprising to me as someone from Asia. I always try to analyze these things by asking "what would Bangladeshis do?" What would Bangladeshis do if the opposing party tried to give legal status (and voting rights) to 11 million illegal aliens? There would be violent riots in the streets. That's just the predictable consequences of that situation.
None of this is the result of Parler or whatever. It's just the ordinary challenges of running a giant country where people have a very shallow shared culture to tie everyone together.
What’s happening in Assam with the NRC is why I’m not surprised about what’s happening in America. People don’t like it when people who are different from them come to their country, especially illegally, and then vote in their elections, take advantage of their public services, etc. The last couple of hundred years of geopolitics has been people fighting each other until they can have a country with just the people they can stand. The global backlash against immigration is just the other side of that coin.
Now I have my thoughts about granting legal status to illegal immigrants who are already here, from a purely intellectual position of cost/benefit etc.
But let’s not kid ourselves and say that the cost/benefit is what people are disagreeing about here. What this is about is 11 million people from a different culture who didn’t come here legally, but will soon be able to vote in US elections. That’s going to piss off a tremendous number of people, for utterly predictable reasons. If Biden goes ahead and does it anyway, that’s fine. (If he can get the votes.) But that’s why we’re in this position today. We as a country disagree about very fundamental stuff, and every time one side gets into power, they govern without regard to what will piss off the other side. (And I’m not just blaming Biden—Republicans just did that with the Supreme Court appointment.)
The problem is that American is a diverse county of 330 million people who hate each other, and we're too idealistic to engage in the sort of social friction-easing that other societies do to reconcile competing factions.
For example: we clearly have a significant fraction of people in this country who want to pump the breaks on immigration. From a sociological standpoint, it doesn't make a difference whether its 47% or 51% of people. It's a lot! And what's the first thing Biden does even before he's inaugurated? https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-politics-legislation-im...
> President-elect Joe Biden’s decision to immediately ask Congress to offer legal status to an estimated 11 million people in the country has surprised advocates given how the issue has long divided Democrats and Republicans, even within their own parties.
Instead of thinking about America, imagine we're talking about some third world country. Better still, take yourself out of the timeline, and imagine we are historians looking back on what happened 50 years ago. How would you analyze the probable outcome of what Biden is doing, in terms of general principles of how people behave and how countries work?
Frankly, what's going on in America right now is utterly obvious and completely unsurprising to me as someone from Asia. I always try to analyze these things by asking "what would Bangladeshis do?" What would Bangladeshis do if the opposing party tried to give legal status (and voting rights) to 11 million illegal aliens? There would be violent riots in the streets. That's just the predictable consequences of that situation.
None of this is the result of Parler or whatever. It's just the ordinary challenges of running a giant country where people have a very shallow shared culture to tie everyone together.