In the simplest terms possible?
Yes, we have been moving forward on social issues. Yes, the larger majority of Americans lean to the more liberal side, and yes, that percentage has been steadily growing. Yes, you are absolutely right- but also missing a couple overwhelmingly important things.
The first is that while we’ve been making social gains, we’ve suffered incredible economic losses. We can talk about the rising cost of living, stagnant wages, and the failure of trickle down economics, but such polite terms don’t do justice to the hard truth of it: Find me one example, anywhere in the course of recorded history, just one example, of a society that reached even close to this level of wealth disparity and didn’t quickly suffer a revolution, civil war, or collapse. Because I haven’t found one. Once in a great while, you get an FDR New Deal or Renaissance kind of revolution, but more often it’s the bloody kind.
The second thing is that while the portion of citizens who aren’t down with social progress have been growing fewer in number, they have also been radicalizing. The important thing to consider with that is that radicalizing doesn’t just mean cults and suicide bombers. It the Senate majority leader openly declaring his sole goal is to stop anything the opposition supports. It’s creating an ecosystem where a person can meet all their media needs by reading exclusively Christian authors, listening to Christian music, watching Christian broadcasting. It’s increasingly vitriolic rhetoric, and the escalation of small absurdities into large atrocities. It’s moving from Limbaugh to Glen Beck to Q Anon.
And most importantly, it’s the deliberate use of the first part to facilitate the second part.
“Hate” is a convenient scapegoat for self interest and apathy, and the economics of it are far more relevant than people ever admit. The overwhelming majority of Germans didn’t care enough about the Jews to hate them. They just wanted Hitler to lower taxes and bring the jobs back. There are a whole lot of Trump voters out there who don’t hate black people, they just care less about them than they care about the immediate problem of paying rent this month. Blacks collecting welfare while they work two jobs just to keep food on the table; Jews running the banks while Germans struggle to pay back war debts. We’ve seen exactly how this plays out when someone is pushed beyond their limits and then given somebody to blame for it. All it takes at that point is for someone to promise them a solution.
I terrifies me how few people saw this happening.
