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?
the same % of Americans have always been stupid. but for a long time it was honest ignorance that made them pliable, in small communities, to conmen… who quickly worked their con and moved on to the next town.
But thanks to the internet connecting disparate crazies, and elevating crazy to a mainstream voice, and then hostile foreign powers elevating that further on social media thanks to the internet, giving it a heavy dose of false legitimacy… its devolved into a unique bouillabaisse of cromagnum hyper-idiocy the likes the world probably has never seen before.
and thank to isolated media bubbles like Fox News and OANN, it will only continue to get worse and worse.