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?
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The Vietnam War draft was very unpopular and that War coincided with MLK’s push for equal rights. There were a lot of vocal protests. Also, you had the hippies and ‘Woodstock Nation.’ Those weren’t overtly political, but they were counterculture, which the Right took as an attack on them and their values.
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The counterculture was the first wave of America becoming left and it was brutally supressed in the Reagan counterrevolution. We’re arguably more left per capita today but it’s entirety extraparlimentary
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People weirdly think everyone was a hippie. Truth is most people were squares and those people still are