Since you're flattening and addressing GPs comment with a political false dichotomy... A conspiracy isn't needed to explain the decay of culture, values, material conditions - all it takes is a set of incentives that don't align with broad public well-being, and some time. Move fast and break things!
Feudalism is back, baby! A simple reversion to the mean.
There's definitely a problem with gerontocracy, but the reason you heard about it so much last year is because the fascists use the technique of projection to preempt criticisms of themselves. Biden was passive demented, which probably didn't really matter all that much (group project). But this was used as cover for Trump's active combative micromanaging dementia that we're now all suffering.
Couldn't this backfire pretty badly, though? Raising a national conversation about the dementia of the last President makes it easier to have a conversation about the current one, right? I think the fact that the MSM outright lied to cover up Biden's mental decline is actually the root of the problem, because now they've lost credibility and appear hypocritical if they try to point out Trump's glaring mental deficits. If you're contending that the fascists pushed the issue of Biden's decline because they knew the MSM would cover it up and therefore lose credibility, I think you're giving them too much credit.
"Conversation" ? Do you really feel there is any kind of conversation happening?
I don't think it's possible for the MSM to lose any more credibility at this point. The only credibility left is people giving a pass to their flavor of MSM for articles that confirm their biases - same dynamic as social media posts.
For the timeline, Trump has been rambling word salad well before it was an issue for Biden. The difference is that for republicans/fascists, mental incompetence is an endearing feature ("he sounds like the kind of person I could have a beer with"), and the democrats/conservatives application of used-to-be-societal-values is seen as a weakness whereby they're getting "triggered".
I don't think the whole story arc needed to be planned ahead of time strategically. Rather I think it comes from flooding the zone with shit that might stick, and then the chaos creates opportunities.
I think there's been an ongoing conversation about Trump's sanity. Look at Gavin Newsom's Twitter feed, for instance. It's taking some time for the antibodies to adapt, but they're adapting. The argument around Biden's mental acuity surely opened the door to a lot more skepticism about the gerontocracy in general, which is easily reframed to Trump in particular now that he's President. So if the question of Biden's sanity was a decoy created by the right wing, put out just to cover their future tracks in electing another mentally ill person, it has clearly backfired. I think if the MSM had been transparent earlier in that debate, not only could we have gotten most of America to see the problem with Trump more clearly (by framing our governance problem around old men with mental issues, rather than defending one against the other), we also could've had an open Democratic primary and probably avoided this entire situation.
Trump had clear mental problems the first time around though, and the refrain that Biden was old and demented started well before it became a "real" topic in the election/media.
It feels like I've been hearing the word gerontocracy for years, but the problem is that real criticism lands asymmetrically on the conservatives (democrats), and ends up supporting the fascists as a desire for change - even when the fascist approach is to shamelessly embrace what's being criticized. [0]
So sure, now that the manic-combative demented guy is in office running amok (with his army of enablers who are just eager to see our society burn), the criticism starts landing on the newly incumbent administration. But apart from swaying a few voters, I don't see it developing into a larger shared understanding that maybe the past decade of Presidents and Senators/Reps was a grave mistake.
> we also could've had an open Democratic primary and probably avoided this entire situation
100% agreed on that. What a clusterfuck of shitty occurrences all adding up to one terrible path.
[0] tangentially that's why the fascist movement is a clown car of conflicting "anti-establishment" talking heads. It has united all of the "skeptical questioning" movements under one tent, even though the desired thrusts of those movements directly conflict with each other.
