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?
America won big both morally and militarily in WWII. For the average poorly informed citizen, that meant our government had permanently earned its position as the Good Guy. Lots of people thought (and still think) that any evidence to the contrary is merely a mistake or anomaly.
Then there’s capitalism. Wartime manufacturing brought us out of the Great Depression, and even the average citizen benefited. Unfortunately, capitalism became much more powerful than we realized, and now we’re beginning to see what a monster we’ve created. We know that the top 1% are literally killing our biosphere to protect their investments, but somehow our Good Guy government is allowing it to continue. The average citizen can’t reconcile those facts, so they decided that the facts must be wrong.
Government and capitalism have always been intertwined, but never to the extent we’re seeing under Trump. A Nazi billionaire is shaping government policy. That was supposed to be impossible. Again, the average citizen can’t reconcile those truths, so many of them decided that the libtards must be exaggerating.
I wouldn’t say that we Americans are stupid. I’d use the word “foolish” instead. “Deceived”, too. A few people saw what was coming and tried to warn the rest of us, but we let it happen anyway, because organizations that we thought we could trust lied to us.
Those of us with at least some awareness of what’s going on are traumatized (whether we think so or not). We’re trying to accept that our own government suddenly hates a lot of us, and that the corporations that have tried so hard to make themselves indispensable are, at best, constantly trying to deceive and monetize everything about us.