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?
I think it just comes down to racism. Once the Civil Rights Movement happened all that collectivism disappeared because it had always been white supremacy masquerading as collectivism. Once all the diverse peoples of the USA were to benefit from that collectivism, the whites very quickly changed their minds about the socialist policies they’d put in place. Obviously I don’t mean the whites as if they’re a monolith, but it was enough of them to get the system to go in a different direction.
That’s certainly part of it. I think another part of it is that political theories are nice and sanitary in a vacuum, but once nation states co-opt them and use them to further their interests things get a whole lot messier.