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?
Every country suffers from what? Mass stupidity?
Maybe that’s true but it certainly seems like we are more individualistic and stupid than most…and I don’t think those two things are entirely unrelated.
Are you familiar with the elders of zion, which was believed by a huge number of people all over the globe, even though it was totally ridiculous. The average person is not smart, though I may be a tad pessimistic I suppose.
At one point, it seemed like we were getting smarter, and then we very didn’t.