Once again, the prediction has come true. Mostly. On more than one occasion these missives have reacted to some Left Wing Pansy bleating "This is not the America we've always been!!! We're so much better than this, and always have been!!". And I called bullshit on this fantasy. The USofA has always been driven by economic/religious hegemony of the few 'chosen' over the hoi polloi. In order to pull off this stunt, the 'chosen' have to flummox enough of the hoi polloi into believing that the problem is some 'other' in the country. A great line from "The Usual Suspects":
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist. And like that... he is gone.
One might date the turning of the tide, if only temporarily, to either
Brown vs. Board of Education (1954) (good luck getting the same decision from the Kurrent Kohort of Klowns) or, only shortly earlier (1948), Truman's
desegregation of the military. IOW, Alzheimer's Ronnie was just gaslighting the numbskulls (and winking at the KKK crowd) with the "Shining City on a Hill" speech.
Either way, about half-a-century isn't the history of the USofA. Many's the time I've referenced the socio-economic desert of 19th century USofA, a time the reactionary crowd wants for good - MARF
™(party like it's 1829): 1% well off, and 99% lving subsistence. And, of course, being preached to that there's Pie in Sky when you're dead and that, as awful as your life is here on Mother Earth, you're superior to the Black and Red folks. Always nice to know that there's some lower on the totem pole (he he).
Well,
todays NYT has an essay, from a professional historian (I'm not), which fleshes out the story.
What they have failed to grasp is that American illiberalism is deeply rooted in our past and fed by practices, relationships and sensibilities that have been close to the surface, even when they haven't exploded into view.
The Orange Jesus isn't sui generis, but just the latest in a long line of obsessed egomaniacs gaslighting the 99% so the 1% can live well. And doing so with rhetoric based on tribalism and religiosity.
The lab where Josef Mengele worked received support from the Rockefeller Foundation. White Protestant fundamentalism reigned in towns and the countryside. And the Immigration Act of 1924 set limits on the number of newcomers, especially those from Southern and Eastern Europe, who were thought to be politically and culturally unassimilable.
And you might have thought the 'shithole country' problem was invented by
wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024? There was some time when even fishbelly White Irish were from a shithole country.
In sum:
"What I find most repulsive in America is not the extreme freedom reigning there," Tocqueville wrote, "but the shortage of guarantees against tyranny." He pointed to communities "taking justice into their own hands," and warned that "associations of plain citizens can compose very rich, influential, and powerful bodies, in other words, aristocratic bodies."
It's long been my view that the short respite from tyranny after WWII until the mid-70s (when OPEC's embargo re-opened the schism) was due to the fact that much of American leadership, both public and private, still lived in the "we're all in this together" mindset of the War they had recently fought in. As these leaders fell away, the cancer of despotism grew in their place. Will the cancer consume the USofA? Only The Shadow knows.
