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It was imposed by law. You haven't seen photos of 101st Airborne escorting blacks into a white school ?
The US constitution was replaced by the Civil Rights Act, and over the next fifty years, activists were busily using state power to browbeat anyone opposed into compliance.
The government decided people can't segregate themselves by law, so they're now doing it financially. Federal government is disappointed, and has now resorted to mandating better loan conditions for people with worse credit scores.
You think these changes have been very positive.
Ask whites in London or Paris how happy they're about these 'changes'.
The 'elites' in Europe are so braindead and so feckless in face of 'human rights activists' the continent is no doubt going to be taking in expected Bantu immigration waves by tens of millions, and within thirty years, the benefits of black bodies is going to be felt in every city from Madrid to Moscow.
The Civil Rights Act was passed by democratically elected legislature, the 101st was deployed by a democratically elected president. People have had fifty years to organize a majority to overturn the civil rights act and it remains broadly popular. It was legally imposed by the majority of the country on the South for sure, but why did the rest of the country support it?
It's interesting we've switched from 'politics is downstream of culture' to 'culture is downstream of politics' and politics is just whatever elites decide.
Maybe, but from my perspective this is little more than the logical outcome of letting the Left-wing/Rousseauean mindset run unchecked. If your whole model of society is predicated on the idea that all social conventions and contracts are "imposed" upon an unwilling populace by "the elite" how could you arrive at another conclusion?
I think the causality flows the other way, when you're losing the idea that the whole game is rigged is really attractive. People see their values/aesthetic preferences losing popularity and their group losing status and want to find reasons to declare this illegitimate. The elite conspiracy position then becomes appealing. Fixation on elite-imposed values and manufactured consent as proof the game is rigged and there's no point in playing it is naturally the domain of the fringes who need to rationalize not moderating to gain popularity.
I think it's mistaken to conflate the broad idea of an external locus of control with elite control. There are lots of external forces that you can point to that influence individual or group behavior that aren't completely subject to elite control, market forces, and technological progress for example. You're setting up an internal vs. external locus of control axis, but there's also a separate tendency (cough cough The Paranoid Tendency) to view this external influence as the highly coordinated outcome of decisions made by a small set of human agents rather than as an uncoordinated cross-product of technological, environmental, and economic forces with some human agency acting at pivot points where path dependency is influential.
I have to disagree. external loci of control really is a hell of a drug, and it makes the notion of elite control obviously correct.
But it also falls apart the moment you introduce a potential alternative. After all what is "elite"?
As uncharitable as it may seem the old "NPC" meme has a certain amount of merit because the sort of Londoner or New Yorker who goes on about the BBC or NYT being "arbiters of credibility" genuinely seems to lack ability to not believe what they read in the newspaper. As 0 HP Lovecraft observes, the possibility that they may be lied to (or that they might not immediately detect an obvious lie) just doesn't occur to the average rationalist.
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