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Trump is less the cause as he is the symptom. America has allowed politics to dominate the concept of identity to the point that no one can argue for anything without effectively attacking someone's idea of self.

This is incredibly dangerous and at this point I don't know what it takes to diffuse it. I thought Biden winning the US election would help and admittedly it has but by much less than I envisioned.

Unfortunately US politics spill over into the rest of the world through media syndication, doesn't help Murdoch owning almost all conservative media in US/UK/Australia... This means this extreme politicisation while birthed in America is spreading around the world.

I strongly believe this is the real threat. The pandemic just showed us how dangerous it can be.

I’ve had thoughts on what’s been causing this, and turns out there’s a hot-take that’s well articulated by a professor under the concept of ‘Mass formation’.

Decent summary, you can find him discussing it on YouTube:

https://medium.com/@dina.osman/what-is-mass-formation-d2ac63...

The gist of it is what I’ve mostly concluded over the last few years. There’s a pathological level of frustration/anxiety/apathy that is leading to all of this at a mass scale (which makes sense considering we are virtualizing lives at scale, and I use the word virtual in it’s most abstract sense, not necessarily digital). We all have a very abstract identity that is unfulfilling because at the levels of abstraction we are at virtually is not relatable or realistic. I know, it’s a serious hot-take, but this is roughly where my line of thinking is at now days. The outcome of all of this is, well, people now bask in the cacophony of whatever life even is at this point (especially because there’s not a chance in hell any of us will be able de-scale the world (tech/vanity/capitalism/etc)).

Quoting the most important part:

… if ANY narrative is distributed through the mass media identifying an Object of the anxiety and providing a strategy to deal with that Object, mass formation can thrive. Since it provides the masses a sudden connection to a heroic struggle allowing them to meet their needs and provides them with a release — giving them a new social bond and meaning that has been lacking.

There you have it, people are literally bonding via this constant hysterical back and forth.

My view of this for the last decade or so is that it's the result of First Past the Post political systems. They converge to a binary choice in every question and the identity building starts from there. Every political question is a gray scale, but the system does not allow that to be represented.

I wish this was the case but as an Australian citizen with one of the worlds best designed voting systems we still fall prey to mostly binary politics.

There are more powerful factors at work here. Some combination of exploitation of mass hysteria by politics, some amplification of that by modern technology/social media and some slow degradation of respect for custom and tradition that prevented such behaviour by politicians in the past.

The culmination of this is modern politics in US/UK/Australia, all of which are frankly embarrassing for intellectual citizens of all three but somehow staggeringly effective in elections.

Australia still is First Past the Post in essence for the lower house, a bit better in the senate. Just see the number of seats the greens have compared to their vote, 10.23% of the vote led to 0.66% of the seats in 2019.

The system does help intent to be shown by the first vote, but also shows that it does not lead to power.

This is why all discussions about STV, instant runoff, multiple rounds are essentially irrelevant. They may help show intent, but does not change the status quo.

You are confusing First Past the Post with Single Member Electorates.

At the most recent House election, 12 electorates were won by the candidate that was in second-place based on the first preferences (ie, the result differed from that under FPTP). Interestingly the Greens' seat was not one of these - Bandt lead on the first preferences and would have won under FPTP.

Single Member Electorates will often lead to overall non-proportional outcomes.

Emphasizing the person of "Trump" just seems to feed into this. It's possible that any officeholder would have inspired similar political responses when confronted by a disease for which plausible responses include "shut down most commerce" and "provide health care to more citizens than currently receive it". It might be fun to limit our blame to one particular odious politician, but if the institutions that amplify political hysteria are left unexamined then it's not really instructive.

If Trump was a "mainstream" politician, then identifying him by name for a crisis which started under his watch wouldn't send everyone into a flurry. Bush, Clinton, Bush Jr, Obama - they are all referred to by name for things which happened under their administrations, and which they said during them. As is Biden. That's normal.

> This all happened because Trump dubbed it the China virus at the beginning and brought up specific treatments like Hydroxychloroquine.

I think that is revisionist. Trump surely didn't help, but Hydroxychloroquine treatment was only ever promoted in special circles, while COVID-19 ravaged communities that would never even consider voting for Trump or consuming horse dewormer.

The actual failure is the CDC denying that transmission was mainly airborne and even later refusing to eat humble pie and publicly recant. WHO is even worse. (Google "situationally airborne" to read some of the mental gymnastics that they used to insinuate that they were right all along) Many regions to this day treat it as droplet based infectious disease, because there was never a clear and loud change of direction, it was mostly silent.

If CDC had taken measures against airborne diseases like mask mandates which helped Asia early on, there would have been a much different pandemic in the US.

Edit as this is being downvoted: the WHO's and national health bodies' resistance against labeling COVID-19 airborne is well documented. https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/6-126

Only in May 2021, the CDC updated their guidance to state that there is airborne transmission (but without using the word "airborne", go figure).

Trump didn't dub it the China virus, the mainstream media did, as was the fashion of the time, that is to name it after where it originated. Trump didn't really start playing it up, until China blamed the USA for the virus. While I think we could have done a better job in protecting our elders, instead of shutting everything down, I'm not sure you can really blame Trump for extra days as USA is basically right along with the rest of the world. Reality was, there wasn't much we could have done. And blaming the president for making this political seems odd. The mainstream media pushed the narrative that it could NOT have been a lab leak after a republican suggested it was. And scientists were afraid to suggest a different possibility