How did we fall so far?

In answer to Jim Wright’s (Stonekettle Station) cri de coeur on Twitter:

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You know, we could be beyond this thing by June. We could. It could be over. Life could return to normal – whatever the hell THAT is nowadays, anyway, but we're not going to be, it's not going to be over, not for a long, long time. Maybe never. Because these ignorant, backward, foolish, selfish, brainless, stupid, fearful, toothless redneck fucks would rather believe insane baseless conspiracy theories from TV pundits and hysterical internet “experts” instead of actual science and actual doctors. That's why.

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I don't know. I don't know how this country has gone so wrong. I don't know how a people who once led a GLOBAL effort to wipe out diseases like smallpox, who once looked upon a president crippled by polio and upon thousands of their own children confined to iron lungs and said no more, who were once proud of the science and the hard won knowledge that landed human beings on the Moon, I don't know how THAT nation became a bunch of swaggering shouting louts who would deliberately put their neighbors, their own KIDS, at risk in the name of an insane ideology based on hate, fear, and a staggering prideful ignorance. – Tweetstorm

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. Jim Wright is living in Florida, which has become both the literal and metaphoric center of the infection, so he’s reacting to the thing at its worst.

I wish I knew how the country has gone so wrong, too. More importantly, I wish I knew what to do about it

I’ve been seeing this thing building up for 40 years, really, since Reagan was elected. In all that time, all the people who had the power to act against it, didn’t. Perhaps they just didn’t see it. (Never underestimate how much damage the lack of imagination can do.) Perhaps there was always some immediate issue that seemed more pressing. Perhaps one of the reasons was a continuing contempt for the left, a genteel version of owning the libs. But whatever the reasons, it wasn’t done.

I don’t know. But here’s a few bits and pieces.

The USA was on its best behavior in the period 1945-1980. It was not perfect, but it was a time of liberation when much oppression was cast aside and the poor were lifted up. Then, Reagan was elected, and the country started sliding back into the Gilded Age, with its racism, sexism, glistening wealth and brutal poverty, and its hypocrisy.

One reason was the reaction to the fall of the Soviet Union and the reduction in nuclear tensions. A faction of the ruling elites of the USA felt liberated by this and proceeded to return to their old aristocratic ways. Aristocracy is fun to read about in fantasy novels. It’s fun to imagine that, as a member of a ruling elite, one would be a good person. And, indeed, some are. But their decency is far outweighed by the systemic oppression of an aristocratic system, and in an aristocracy, malignant narcissists like Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, are granted vast power to express their narcissistic hatred.

Another reason is threatened privilege. In Jim Wright’s tweetstorm, he slams upper-middle-class people – upper middle-class men – who “spend literally tens of thousands of dollars on guns and ammo and filters to turn their piss into drinking water, on giant monster trucks to 4-wheel their way out of some imagined apocalypse but WON'T wear a mask, distance, or take the vaccine.” The reforms of 1945-1980 took away some of their unearned privilege, they’re angry, and they want it back. Their womenfolk are with them. This is a class disproportionately influential in US elections. They vote, and the majority votes fascist Republican.

Which, I suppose, brings around to the US electoral system. The USA is absolutely rotten at picking chief executives at the national level. For every decent President, every Joe Biden or FDR, or even JFK, there are at least four awful ones like Harding, or Reagan, or Trump. Every Senate Republican is now a hypocrite, incapable of speaking honestly in public, and some, like Ron Johnson, are probably traitors. The biggest beneficiaries of the Citizens United decision have turned out to be foreign powers and the second biggest the corrupt wealthy elites I was writing about two paragraphs above, who own their own damn television network.

Another problem of the US electoral system is, simply, that many people who are eligible to vote do not do so, and disproportionately this group is poor BIPOC people, so the people who might most benefit from reforms have the least voice in them.

And I find that I do know what to do. We have to keep fighting and fight hard. Fight for democracy. Fight for the right to vote. Fight for better leaders and rulers.