…for white Americans or folks who pass as white Americans. For many others, inside and outside America, the 50s were shit, and the problem with saying, “yeah but gas was twelve cents and cars were five hundred dollars” is that it was true for a specific segment of the population.
I wonder what difference in pay between men and women in similar jobs was, then? How common was it for women to hold political office back then? What was the upward mobility of anyone not-white or male?
I’d posit that while it may not “be about” hating minorities and keeping women barefoot/pregnant, the culture and the policies of those times certainly implied it. Beyond that, I’m sure some Iranians might have more to say about how great America was in the 50s, among others…
Don’t forget our corporate masters, our political puppets, and our media manipulators all spend a lot of time abusing and rigging the system, all the while blaming our problems on common people just trying to have a happy life.
I would say that fear is what drives them, and that could be economic insecurity. Undoubtedly many of them have racist tendencies too (either subconsciously or willfully), but I think a lot of the Trump crowd is the Fox News/conservative-talk-radio demographic, who are told over and over again how the country is going to hell and it’s all Obama’s fault. The fact that so many of the Trumpanistas I’ve talked with keep bringing up how “Obama divided this country” and “Obama defended murderers in Black Lives matter”-- this is the stuff you hear on talk-radio all day and night, and I know people who listen all day while they work. So a large part of their impetus is “hypnotism”-- without the constant reinforcement of their paranoid beliefs they would probably be a lot more calm and rational.
Sorry, my Americanness bled in a little. That’s what we called it in my grade school in the US. While it was a 60s design, I thought it wasn’t running in service until the '70s, though as that definite article proves, I’m certainly no Concorde expert.
Side note: Since I grew up in California, I call all highways/freeways “the [highway/freeway number]” even though the locals in Texas (and apparently the rest of the US) think that’s weird. I am the definite article’s #1 fan.
The Southern Poverty Law Center monitors trends in U.S. hate groups. You’d probably be most interested in their annual report, as well as their dynamic ‘Hate Map’ of active hate groups in the U.S.
I cannot speak with any real authority on Congress or the Senate. I do believe that the potential for hate, and even genocide is just as high for left or right wing people. Historically, if you build separate pyramids of the skulls of victims of both right and left wing excess, I think the left wing pile might be slightly bigger. But both piles would be unimaginably huge, and number at least in the tens of millions. That is likely a huge understatement.
The death toll of political movements appears to be very regional. In the US and Europe the body count seems to have been mostly on the right. We have not had large bloody Communist uprisings like in Russia and China. But it can be argued that those were cooptations of leftist ideology by authoritarians who tricked the public into doing their dirty work. The only deaths of a leftist movement in the Americas I can think of now is the uprising in Chiapas, which is unfortunate but much smaller than the damage by the KKK.
I am primarily worried about the potential for future events. It is not a valid argument to say that it cannot happen here, because it has not happened here before. I am repeating myself here, but a big part of my thesis involved interviewing people who were victims, perpetrators, and witnesses of WW2 in Europe and the Pacific. My academic subject was Industrial Archaeology, primarily focusing on technological change due to wartime shortages and innovations. But besides details about bunker construction or preplastic material manufacture, everyone had a personal story. One thing I certainly learned is that most people continue to believe that “it can never happen here”, right up until it happens.
I hope you are not going in the direction of “pure Marxism has never been tried”. Even Marx himself supported the concept of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” as a natural step towards a pure Marxist state. Elimination of class enemies is intended to be a feature of Marxism, not a bug.
