Sorry if the premise is inflammatory, but I’ve been stymied by this for a while. How did we go from something like 1940s era collectivism or 1960s era leftism to the current bizarro political machine that seems to have hypnotized a large portion (if not majority) of the country? I get it - not everything is bad now, and not everything was good then. FDR’s internment camps, etc.
That said - our country seems to be at a low point in intellectualism and accountability. The DHHS head is an antivaxxer, the deputy chief of the DOJ is a far-right podcast nutball, etc. Their supporters seem to have no nuance to their opinion beyond “well, Trump said he’d fix the economy and I don’t like woke.”
Have people always been this unserious and unquestioning, or are we watching the public’s sanity unravel in real time? Or am I just imagining some idealistic version of the past that never existed, where politicians acted in good faith and people cared about the social order?
Anti-intellectualism has a certain tradition in the USA, it’s kind of well-known.
A German perspective: I think Germans have always been this stupid, they’re mostly just more willing to say the quiet part out loud than they were between 1970 and 2014 (rough estimate). The difference is that the far right extremists have a popular platform now, and the mainstream parties refuse to ban either the far right party or all the media (X, Facebook, local tabloid press etc.) that’s pushing them. If this party had been around in 1960, it would definitely have been banned.
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