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?
There was a post on some Lemmy community or other yesterday which stated that most Americnas support ideas like universal healthcare (55%) and getting rid of guns from private ownership (mid 60% IIRC).
In that thread someone said it was awful that even amongst progressives the support for universal healthcare was so low and the very few responses to that were basically - :shrug: we’ve been lied to what are we gonna do about it?
The responses to the gun ownership stat were numerous and declared support for ‘second amendment rights’.
When even US progressives are passionately defending the biggest cause of child death in the USA in 2022 but are apathetic about universal healthcare, that’s a uniquely US problem that speaks very much to the level of thinking power available.
I think I saw that post, and IIRC it was something like 60% of people own guns, and 90% of people support more gun control - there was no mention of getting rid of guns. But, fair enough.
Yes, America has been sliding into a hypercapitalist hellhole because the right breaks the rules and wins no matter what and then throws wrench after wrench in the works, while the left has no positive vision for the future and has abandoned the working class, so yeah, it’s not surprising that there’s been little to now resistance and lots of appeasement and collaboration with this bullshit. It’s infuriating. But it’s not, as I said, uniquely American; we’re just further along than everyone else.