Indebted to @DavidJoffe64 for this share. While we flail and wail with hysterical concepts like fascism, and…

Indebted to @DavidJoffe64 for this share. While we flail and wail with hysterical concepts like fascism, and the tired old Left and Right rubbish, the specific thing going on gets missed. And here it is. ‘Competitive authoritarianism’. Team sports. /1 https://t.co/0B0vJDn83t

I much prefer team sports as a simpler term, because that’s what the article is talking about. The transformation of democratic institutions, into team sports. With the institutions now being hijacked by the teams, to progress their team sports. /2

You’d have to be blind not to see this as Trump’s entire agenda. All about revenge, in fake fantasy team sport battles, sometimes called ‘culture wars’, but it goes beyond that. He’s using the Presidency and now the institutions of democracy to bolster his team’s position. /3

Of course traditional politics always had parties, in our lifetimes, which look a bit like teams. But they didn’t begin as that. They derived from the Westminster idea of having contestation between opposing positions. Left and Right of the Speaker, in the chamber. /4

Or a prosecution and a defence, in law. A sound and interesting way of testing ideas. But humans turned it into team sports, and now people think the Left and Right for example are actual existential realities. /5

The (Western) world that looks crazy today is the one I describe lots. A world that was running as peacefully as at any time in history, with shared prosperity and widespread health. Because it was running on the institutions it set up post-WW2. To rebuild societies. /6

Only that shift, to pragmatic and practical institutional rebuilding focused on collective good (the ‘we’) halted the teams sports. The status games of social position. By the 1970s that interruption was over. The status games were back. Societies became ‘economies’. /7

Really just a Trojan Horse, a pseudo-objective sounding thing invented out of thin air using economic gobbledygook, to hide the return of status as the driving force of societies. That’s all a ‘free market’ is, societies stripped of checks and balances on status. /8

And now we’re reaching a short of endgame, where the team sports is taking over those collective institutions from the inside. That’s all Trumpism really is. Competitive authoritarianism. Team sports, uncontrolled status games. Prosecuted mostly through social media. /end