I use the word “propaganda.” Some use the term “Overton Window.” Some older thinkers have called it the “scope of permitted thought.”

These ideas smear together causes and effects, actions and reactions, but are ultimately attempting to discuss the problem of artificially restricted political thought spaces.

People are convinced that a very narrow range of societal choices are possible; that how we live now is just a result of completely unavoidable predetermination, a result and fait accompli of destiny itself. This belief system is what I call “propaganda,” though it is more the result of propaganda, and that spread out over many years, really.

Historically speaking, Western liberal democracy is anomalous, and now in peril. Obama and Clinton and George W. Bush and now Trump number among those who have imperilled it or are imperilling it. People do not like of course when you lump them all together like that; one of the best tricks the neolib devils ever played was to force you believe there was all that much difference between them.

Sure, they’ll get you to fight it out over Supreme Court picks, over if gay people get to marry or not, but meanwhile, profits go ever up as the earth is despoiled, the climate is altered for the worse, the waters are stolen or polluted or both, and the planet’s wildlife and ecosystem is annihilated.

It doesn’t matter if you can get gay married if you are dead, and if your species has no future. It just doesn’t.

Here’s the truth: Obama is a wannabe granny-starvin’ war criminal. In any sane world, he’d be in prison or in exile far away, or preferably locked up with all the families of the people he’s drone-murdered.

That above isn’t in the scope of permitted thought despite it being just obvious; if anyone not a president of the world’s most (militarily) powerful country in the world did the things Obama has done, they’d be condemned and likely dead or in jail.

Back to the arrangement of society, though. It’s all about to change, and probably not for the better. After it does, people will declaim with great confidence not only that it could not have ended up any other way, but that it in fact never had been any other way at all.

I’ve seen it happen enough times in my life (and very recently with the election) that it is completely predictable.

People seem incapable of dealing with ideas that are averse to their conceptions of themselves as good and nice; I have no illusions that I am good or nice, so the idea that I might be wrong or making a terrible choice is always at the forefront of my mind (hence why I am good at trading).

I think also that if people convince themselves that the arrangement of society is inevitable, is foreordained, it removes the responsibility of doing anything to change it. I mean, of course Obama had to be a middling milquetoast liberal who failed at his greatest opportunity. He had no choice!

Of course the nominee had to be Clinton.

Of course the ACA had to be a giveaway to insurance companies.

Etc.

None of those are true, but it certainly does make everyone — or very nearly so — feel better. And that’s what matters, right? Feeling better, feeling like your favorite politician is cool and competent and dresses like he’s in a Matrix movie? Obviously what’s important here.