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 wealthy reduced access to education and increased economic instability for the average person.
They wanted less taxation, so they made taxation evil. Taxation paid for education and could have been used for more. They also made sure things that would stabilize the middle and lower classes were cut or never materialized - free higher education, unions/pensions, and health care.
When you remove economic stability and reduce average income people need to work more and start working younger just to keep food on the table. No time for higher ed.
They created an environment that pitted people against each other where you “get yours” and fuck everyone else, crabs in a bucket, and also have been painting higher education as a bad thing ideologically. They now claim that it doesn’t work economically even though every metric shows higher education raises average lifetime earnings (assuming you don’t pursue a 6-figure education for a low-paying job and/or with poor advancement to higher wage tiers).