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?
Yeah, I’m a hunching it up a bit, but I can’t imagine it’s a good thing (for reasoning) to have your brain full of microplastics.
It’s a bit of an aside, but there’s a large amount of absurdity in expecting scientific rigor in lemmy comments when purportedly scientific bodies are being led by vaccine-denying simpletons.
That ubiquitous expectation of powerless individuals to reason and behave perfectly while ultra-powerful people can behave like spoiled five year olds is foundational in making life fucking miserable for me personally.