I am going to say something that will earn me a lot of downgrades, but it needs to be said because it is the truth and it is important. Grifting in our society went sky high when Trump started doing it and he was not punished for it but rewarded.
To be fair, Hillary Clinton was also a liar and a grifter but she did kind of get punished and publicly humiliated for many of her lies.
Generally speaking if someone behaves badly in public and is not punished, it creates a great incentive for millions of others to do the same thing. Some people are moral by nature and will behave morally even if evil and amorality is all around them. Those are the heroes and saints. The people that will help slaves escape in slave societies the ones that will help safe victim populations when their own government is openly encouraging genocide. These people are great, but very few.
There are also the almost criminals, people that are always thinking in the backs of their minds of doing something awful, and it is only the possibility of punishment that is keeping them. Well when someone engages in bad behavior openly and publicly, and is not punished, even rewarded, those people will rush into bad behavior themselves.
So there you have it.
P.S.: To be fair Elon Musk deserves honorable mention for openly and publicly engaging in amoral behavior and getting away with it.
The Art of the Deal was published in 1987, before Bill Clinton was even president. Trump has been grifting for a long time at a fairly steady pace.
The reason "grifting went sky high" is because of the profit model of Internet media. Engagements = ad revenue. This strongly incentivizes grifter behavior, from Trump and Alex Jones to Oprah and Rachel Maddow. Also, grifting became a lot more accessible with social media. Anyone can grift, you don't need radio or television deals.
Maddow incessantly spreads loony conspiracy theories about her (editors') political opponents. Maybe not poisoning bodies like Alex Jones (I don't keep track of every product she promotes), but definitely poisoning minds; she is one of the largest individual contributors to our political polarization and dysfunction.
So she's a grifter of...ideas? minds? Not sure how you get "grifter" out of that.
On "poisoning," there's a long and rich tradition of comparing an entire nation to a human body, and labeling enemies or ideas as "poison," "cancer," "disease," or some other infectious or damaging agent. It's not a great analogy, even setting aside who else has used that rhetoric against whom.
That the economics of propaganda are more complicated than hawking supplements does not change that Maddow makes a boatload of money (her income is absolutely shocking) for doing essentially the same thing as Alex Jones.
I read it — possibly misread it — as an instinctive reflex to balance out the negative assessment of Trump so as not to completely lose half the audience.
> Generally speaking if someone behaves badly in public and is not punished, it creates a great incentive for millions of others to do the same thing.
Oh give me a break. People like Trump and Clinton are the creme de la creme of deranged narcissistic sociopaths—part of the reason why they have gotten “so far”. Yet you are worrying about relatively harmless average Joes and Janes looking up to these people? Very weird priorities considering that people like Trump just have very few or no built-in stops. Unlike most people. A normal person can’t just live like a sociopath and also be able to sleep at night.
You see these people ruining everything and you think to yourself: you know the problem here is that hypothetically someone might be inspired to steal my television if I leave the door unlocked.
>> Generally speaking if someone behaves badly in public and is not punished, it creates a great incentive for millions of others to do the same thing.
> Oh give me a break. People like Trump and Clinton are the creme de la creme of deranged narcissistic sociopaths—part of the reason why they have gotten “so far”.
Wait, you can both be right!
The main thing is there's always a ruthless fight to get to the very top of (civilized/hierarchical/capitalist/whatever) society. But when the people doing that fighting can put an honest and democratic face to it, they will cause mid-level folks to behave better and oppositely, when the fighting gets out-of-hand, those on lower levels with aspirations start thinking they can use "bad" behaviors to attain them.
> But when the people doing that fighting can put an honest and democratic face to it, they will cause mid-level folks to behave better and oppositely, when the fighting gets out-of-hand, those on lower levels with aspirations start thinking they can use "bad" behaviors to attain them.
Yeah! Like when pre-Trump the norm was that all powerful and well-known people were magnanimous, self-sacrificing, and good people that the “mid-level” and below looked up to. But after Trump (grunts) that just changed on a dime.
Nah, the system was pretty visibly corrupt pre-Trump.
I mean, the bodies that piled up around Clinton were being noticed at the time. That you had a potential presidential sequence of Bush, Clinton and Bush and Clinton had a pretty 3rd world kind of feeling. Trump ran as "the corrupt guy who take on corruption 'cause he's honest". Still, contrary to your claim, Trump launched the career of a whole new horde of grifters, with the Qanon types as just the most visible examples.
To be fair, Hillary Clinton was also a liar and a grifter but she did kind of get punished and publicly humiliated for many of her lies.
Generally speaking if someone behaves badly in public and is not punished, it creates a great incentive for millions of others to do the same thing. Some people are moral by nature and will behave morally even if evil and amorality is all around them. Those are the heroes and saints. The people that will help slaves escape in slave societies the ones that will help safe victim populations when their own government is openly encouraging genocide. These people are great, but very few.
There are also the almost criminals, people that are always thinking in the backs of their minds of doing something awful, and it is only the possibility of punishment that is keeping them. Well when someone engages in bad behavior openly and publicly, and is not punished, even rewarded, those people will rush into bad behavior themselves.
So there you have it.
P.S.: To be fair Elon Musk deserves honorable mention for openly and publicly engaging in amoral behavior and getting away with it.