How did America become so conservative

Fox News Propaganda.

Domestic Terrorism, WACO, Ruby Ridge.

The internet.

QAnon and conspiracy theories.

It's a culmination of consistent and prolonged propaganda.

[quote]Can ethnic pluralism actually work

You could ask Clarence Thomas or Mitch McConnell or Nikki Haley or their spouses.

Americans are bombarded with so much false information nowdays, and people latch on to what they want to believe.

I almost think it was better when the information was controlled by the media.

They were more responsible about what they put out. It kept the stupid masses under control.

Now with the internet, YouTube, and all the other false information sources, stupid people feed off of the garbage, and get all riled up. That's how you get MAGATS and the January 6 trash.

The United States has always been a deeply conservative country. It’s never been liberal.

1 = Religion stirring up right-wing talking points.

2 = Poor folks wanting massive tax cuts when they hit the big lotto when their lucky numbers pop up.

3 = Sports shows from wrestling to baseball defining patriotism with cheap cheers of "USA USA".

4 = Folks believing they can live like big rated TV shows = Friends (young white males), SATC (young white women), Will & Grace (Log Cabiners), etc. by adopting republican lifestyles /voting patterns.

5 = Small towns have been voting R for over 40 years now & are still on the chopping block with jobs, population busts, debt, etc.

R4 Wrong. When it was written, The US Constitution was very liberal at the time but it's been too hard to update so it's fallen behind the times.

What does the clip from Cinderella have to do with the question?

Intersectional victim-identifying wokery of the left combined with all of the above on the right.

Money is our only god, so most of us spend our lives taking it from each other, focused on it, worshipping it above human life.

R4 is correct. America has evolved differently than the rest of the Western world. It is much more conservative than Canada, Europe & Scandinavia on a whole series of issues.

R10, I think it's more appropriate to say that American has not evolved with the rest of the Western world.

[quote]If you think about it, you have a whole generation of Gen X and old Millenial white people who were liberals in their 20s and are now staunchly on the right. Who can explain this phenomenon.

The Left became anti-white.

[quote][R10], I think it's more appropriate to say that American has not evolved with the rest of the Western world.

Please, Europeans look like they haven't physically evolved with their gross uncut pricks.

Like a frog who hasn't shed its tadpole tail.

[quote]If you think about it, you have a whole generation of Gen X and old Millenial white people who were liberals in their 20s and are now staunchly on the right.

If you REALLY think about, you realize that, no, not a WHOLE generation is now staunchly on the right and that our ability to unquestioningly spew stupid hyperbole is also part of the problem.

Many of the “silent” cultural conservatives came out of the closet once the social contract (ie economic contract) went away. Obviously this was in the midst of Trump, so it was overshadowed by the craziness. But it’s an obvious trend in the age of diminishing economic returns. If people don’t feel like they can work and raise a family, they won’t give two shits about burning down the system and everyone in it.

Like almost of humanity’s problems, we know the simple, fair solution, but will never implement it. So we fight about other stuff to pass the time until we’re ready to grow up.

*almost all of humanity’s…

Was Gen-X ever really liberal? Watch any John Hughes film, and meanness and a host of ‘isms’ seemed to permeate their coming of age.

R16 Great answer. With the cost of housing/rents skyrocketing and stagnant compensation people are looking for something to blame. The obvious choice is the hyper greed that holds this nation in a headlock. Instead they go for minorities as their typical scapegoat.

September 11th attacks. I witnessed perfectly non-racist people start becoming suspicious and slightly, sometimes outright racist in the blink of an eye. Then the rise of pornography made the sexism/pressure to be hyper sexual yet virginal (cf. Mormons and their workarounds) skyrocket. With Bush openly being an Evangelical the stage was set. Start the Iraq War to start hella profiteering, Sprinkle in some Fox News, et voila. The cocktail. Shaken AND stirred. Look at what happened with music - from Pearl Jam to Justin Fucking Either of Them. Duck Dynasty and other Republicunt leaning shows started flooding reality tv and gun culture SKYROCKETED (no clue why maybe glamorization of the military). Media conglomerating and companies moving off shore, Citizens United and it was sloooowly taken over by straight up fascists. They really went berserk when Obama won.

Two really good books: Dark Money and How the South Won the Civil War.

Govt. dictating private sector and vice versa = fascism.

TL, DR , just my two cents

Agree with everything here. Also, I’m GenX and I’m more liberal than ever, as are my friends. We are appalled at our generational brethren voting for Trump.

Many good points, but I'd also add the decline of the middle class. Due to health care costs and any number of factors, it's increasingly impossible these days for a person to have a blue collar job and make a decent living. So I think a lot of what poses for being conservative is class resentment. I see this in my own family: I think m relatives love me, but they also resent me for having a white collar job that doesn't require me to constantly scramble the way they do. Hence, they have these attitudes that manifest themselves in multiple ways that they are "better Americans" (whatever that means) than I am

Sure, R6. You mean the document that defines the Electoral College?

When you have kids, it can make you more conservative. Maybe you dont care about HUD policy when youre young and single but once it impacts the neighborhood your kids live in your politics can change

How did America become so conservative?

You need to learn about American history. Read about the '80s, the '50s, etc. Small pockets of experimenting with liberalism here and there, surrounded by a sea of conservatism.

Religion, poor education and propaganda.

The Prussian School System that our own public schools are based on. It creates good soldiers and factory workers, but not critical thinkers or empathy

Blame Australia.

Two words: RUPERT MURDOCH.

Fucking right-wing Australian asshole who turned this country to shit.

America was founded by Calvinists - an extreme religious cult who believed that you worship god through suffering in labor. So American peasant ideology was basically centered around bootlicking from the start. The US is a rogue colony that has no cultural heritage besides the greed, slave trade, and wacky cult ideas it was founded on.

R28 the revolution in marketing in the 1920s that really took off post-ww2 gave oligarchs enormous new influence over the electorate. They have pushed the state of American culture so far to the right that arch-conservatives of the past like Nixon would look like Bernie Sanders today. Conservative right wing capitalists like Hillary Clinton are considered racial left wing marxists. etc.

Politics is no longer about policies. It’s about identity. Especially on the right.

The uneducated whites who mostly live in rural areas and outer suburbs are the base of the Republican Party now. Being a Republican is a badge of identity. They call themselves Christians, but that, too, is a badge, not an actual set of beliefs, except for abortion, which is not even mentioned in the Bible it’s easy to get emotional over dead babies..

The elites who ride them to power make sure they stand for cutting taxes and regulations by wrapping these issues in the name of “freedom” and letting the base decide the rest of what the party says it stands for. Repubicans see Blacks as dangerous and inferior, diversity as a bad thing and want rigid, traditional gender roles. Democrats are evil because they oppose these “traditional “ values.

They don’t really think about policy anymore beyond tax cuts and deregulation which the powerful demand. They just stand in opposition to whatever the Democrats want to do.

The Democrats are college-educated and mostly in cities and inner suburbs. They believe in science and government as an engine for progress. They celebrate diversity as a source of strength, and they include most Blacks and Jews which makes the Republicans instinctively distrust them.

[quote] Politics is no longer about policies. It’s about identity. Especially on the right.

I agree that it’s about identity, although it’s more on the left, especially with young people. They see their political label as a major definer of who they are. That’s also true of a lot of people on DL, as you can see everyday with people explicitly referring to their self-labeling, but DL is an older crowd.

Young people are subject to the same identity divide as everyone else. Educated youth are Democrats. Uneducated, white youth are MAGAs.

There's an interesting interpretation I've seen- me stay from foreign/ European historians and scholars of systems if government. Although in it's foundation, America was established on the ideas of Independence and Liberty, the latter had a great influence in our development. Although many drafters and signers of the Constitution, were well versed by European "Enlightenment" thinkers, the inherent drive for public "Liberty" was Religious. And those forbears were particularly Conservative: the Puritans.

The philosophy of "Puritan ethics" and it's influence on our national character and interpretation of Religious doctrine, can not be understated. Although, they indeed fled the strictures of England for their own freedoms, they were inherently deeply conservative and established a deep-ingrained culture of Religious dogmatism. This differed greatly to European intellectual development which would eventually lead to Revolutions for governmental change, whereby Monarchies were replaced by more democratic forms of government - minus the the more severe constrictions of the Puritan and similar religions in the U.S.

This sector of society was in direct contrast to the free-thought and political liberalism of many of the founders and what was embedded in the Constitution. And to this day, this marked relationship has in many ways remained the same: a Government based on Individual Rights and Liberties, vs. a Religious and Societal movement set on dogmatic beliefs and behaviors. The two co-exist poorly.

And oh yeah- Reagan's promotion of the "Religious Right" and it's influence on American government, didn't help much either.

Puritans? Are you kidding? They never existed outside of New England. You don’t need to refer back to 17th Century Boston to find a conservative impulse wrapped up in religious clothing.

The South is much more influenced by Southern Baptism a religion that owes its existence to the defense of slavery, and the tradition of religion as an freelance entertainment business that tells people what they want to hear to suck money out of them.

Back in the 60's when we had the Civil Rights demonstrations and then the Anti War demonstrations, it rattled a lot of cages. As I was reading a few histories of those times, in 1964, at the Republican Convention, Barry Goldwater became the nominee. He was a Conservative. Not like today, but he was a conservative. By nominating him they were rejecting Liberals from their own party like Rockefeller and Lindsay. I think Ronald Reagan was lurking in the background but my memory is faulty on that. Anyway one of the things Goldwater noticed was the millions of small donations he was getting from ordinary people, housewives, pensioners, etc. and that seemed unusual..

Nixon and his gang tapped into that sort of grassroots unease. He campaigned for the "silent majority" in 1968. The good people who love their country and don't demonstrate or riot." We had some civil disturbances back then, beginning in 1964-65 in places like Cleveland, Watts, and I think Indiana. Maybe parts of Harlem, too. Then in 1967 a bunch more cities like Detroit exploded too. THings got so bad LBJ set up a special commission to analyze what happened and why. The KErner Commission.) So there was a lot of social upheaval coming from the Left, and the Voting Rights and Civil Rights legislation passed Congress and was signed into law. We also had assassinations during that period. JFK, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr. Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy, etc.

So it seems the COnservative movement in the U.S. was revitalized by the turbulence of the 60's. Now we have always had fringe, extremists active here ever since the Civil War ended badly for the South. If you look at the John Birch Society that was very active in the 50's and 60's it sounds like the Tea Part or the other extremists who have now been mainstreamed. There was a lot of Extreme Right activity going on here during WW 2 as well. We even had a priest with his own radio show, Father Coughlin, who was a real screamer, predating Rush Limbaugh.

Then Ronald Regan and his Republican buddies deregulated the airwaves, so the TV and radio stations didn't have to adhere to standards anymore and could do WTF they wanted. Now for guys like Roger Ailes, who worked in the Nixon White House and was a buddy of Roger Stone's this was great. This was when he gave birth to Fox NEws. And Rush Limbaugh became the go to guy. . So you have to political and the mass media intersecting and giving voice, weight, credibility and legitimacy to the Fringe people and extremists. The White Christian Nationalists have always been around. Now they are mainstream. But this is not really new. In the 1950's, members of the KKK openly ran for seats on the Detroit City Council. for example.

What has really changed things even more is the Internet, and social media, the gutting of the voting rights act, and most of all the Supreme Court , John Roberts wrote the opinion legitimizing dark money through his Citizens United opinion. So t hat's my take on the whole thing. BAsically it has always been there, but it has been nurtured and grown through a series of events and public policies.

Yeah R18 right you dope. Minorities are becoming more conservative. Shut with your unthinking liberal platitudes. Extreme leftism with its very loud vocal stupidity is not helping things. And you've got enough trolls on DL that support it.

Bob Woodward said Trump is far worse than Nixon ever was. And minorities are very angry the way the extreme verbally banal Kamala fucked up the border situation so that funds that should be going to them are going to the illegal immigrants is making them angry. They don't care about Trump paying off a pornstar or even an assault on the Capitol. They are concerned about their own lives and making do.

not evolved with the rest of the Western world.

And yet wasn't the US the first big country that approved gay marriage? And we have Cannabis everywhere, I think it's not so conservative, just not your kind of conservatism. Go fuck your American hating self and die.

The population at large isn't as conservative as all that. It's that the flawed system we have in place (electoral college and Senate giving more power to conservative rural states in relation to their populations) puts conservatives (now AKA right wing radicals) into power so they can select who's on the Supreme Court etc. We're being subjected to laws dictated by the ultra-conservative religious views of a small minority of the population and it will get worse. The Supreme Court is now stacked with zealots who rule based on their archaic and bizarre beliefs, not established law or the will of the majority. On the red state level gerrymandering has given power to extremists, though the populations in those states lean more conservative to begin with.

R21, the lower middle class resents the educated middle class because those are the only "well-off" people that they interact with. They have no concept of how the truly wealthy live. They don't understand what robbers they are.

Americans have always been gatekeepers. They settled here and have been fighting everyone who’s “not them” off their territory since it began.

And not even talking about chattel slavery or segregation (because Africans were forcibly brought to the US) but the policies that were created to discriminate against Mexicans, Asians, Jews, and European immigrants. All of the main illegal drugs came from gatekeeping and discrimination - Asians and opium, Mexicans and marijuana, freed Blacks and cocaine, and alcohol with European immigrants.

I don’t know if this can be described as conservatism but the US has always been radically “right wing”. I mean radical rights today are not the definition of conservatism, that’s just the label they claim at this point.

And also, the capitalism on religion. You can be a multi-millionaire pastor in the US. I don’t think that’s super common elsewhere.

Also, way too much emphasis on religion in the entire country. The faster people realize the Bible is as much of a myth as anything in Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the better off we’ll be. The desperate need to always be productive and have the Protestant work ethic and justify your existence is killing the whole country. Really smart people don’t give that much of a shit about money. Only stupid money grubbing tools care about having more and more and more. Most people just want to earn enough to be secure and comfortable in their old age.

I believe wholeheartedly in capitalism, but hyper capitalism and no contribution to the nation via tax cuts is a bunch of shit. They should pick up Bezos and Muskox and shake them till their pockets are empty.

[quote]The faster people realize the Bible is as much of a myth as anything in Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the better off we’ll be.

You don't get to decide that.

The USA is not a conservative country and it never will be.

The right wingers are working hard to sell their division and hatred of ‘others’ , it’s the same old perverted tactic for power and money.

I blame it all starting with the original 1970s syndicated “Gong Show,” when the nascent modern Republican “deplorables” started getting nationwide primetime airwaves exposure making jackasses of themselves. :)

R41 I’m an atheist but I believe religion is absolutely necessary.

It’s a tool to govern, especially idiots. Religious people typically believe without God, people would become more dangerous and go crazy and create murder and chaos. But that’s a reflection of themselves, which is why they need God.

I mean the way these radical evangelists behave thinking they’re getting into heaven, imagine how they’d behave if they didn’t believe it existed.

America will never be Sweden.

New England is the least religious area in the country. It actually makes a lot of sense because these areas were dominated by Catholicism, which is dying out. The whole Catholic Church scandal that started in Boston probably helped decline it.

I'd say that in my town there has been a revival of religion.

The influx of Hispanic immigrants have seen to that.

They fill the Catholic Churches here. 10 years ago those churches were on the verge of closing.

The American right is not conservative. THey are not trying to "conserve" anything. They want power in order to dominate, control, and kill.

As to why Americans are willing to let them despite not believing in automatic weapons, no health care, no good government, and the constant drumbeat of hate: That's because of anomie. They feel disconnected from society with the collapse of joiner culture, so the right makes them think - falsely - that they can be part of a mutual aid situation wheh in truth they are just cannon fodder.

Because corporations are GOD in America, and corporations per definition want to keep things as they are, as that's good for their bottom line.

America has always been the most conservative country in the Western world. It was literally founded by religious fanatics and nothing much has evolved since then. Margaret Atwood didn't set The Handmaid's Tale in France, the UK, Spain or even her native Canada for a reason.

[quote]The US Constitution was very liberal at the time

You mean back when slaves were 3/5th of a person, R6?

Oh and the gd fing freak Mormons! They are not sane people. The Christian nationalists and Mormons are a match made in hell.

I know everyone has a right to believe what they want but would it kill them to be a hair less fanatical? This goes for ALL religions. I find it difficult to understand the types wherein church rules every part of their lives, like AA people and mega church cliques and Scientol0llos etc. Don’t they have any ability to lead lives not being dicks without someone having to tell them regularly?

Weak minded! That’s what! (Imagine this in a Rachel Lynde voice)

[quote]you have a whole generation of Gen X and old Millennial white people who were liberals in their 20s and are now staunchly on the right.

Damn -- it's as if none of you took a Poli Sci class, or if you did, you didn't learn anything.

It's common knowledge among political scientists that people grow more conservative as they age. Things change over time, and the older you get, the more averse you become to change. Older people simply want to "conserve" the way things used to be, or at least, the way they remember them being. I mean, it's just like DL: always better last year, and the years before that.

From the journal abstract attached below, "...we also find support for folk wisdom: on those occasions when political attitudes do shift across the life span, liberals are more likely to become conservatives than conservatives are to become liberals."

OTOH, this maxim, as with all others in academia, is constantly challenged in the literature so academics who need to publish can do so. Sometime when you're bored, prowl around the interwebs and check it our for yourself.

Sorry -- check it [bold]out[/bold].

It’s because the left have LOST THEIR FUCKING MINDS. Transphobia and Islamophobia are not real problems.

The day I saw people accusing me, and others, of being "far-right bigots" for saying there are only two genders and biological sex is a reality was the day I officially stopped caring about what it means to be liberal or conservative. The political landscape is all over the place, now, and I am no longer interested in playing the game. Feel free to continue riding in the clown car, if you so choose, OP.

R14 all you have to is look at the data. Most white people born before 1984 are conservative as fuck and half of them are Magas. Many of these people were libs in the late 90s, early aughts.

There is not a place for them on the left anymore. The left has gone extreme, the right propaganda wouldn’t matter if the left weren’t so insane.

They didn’t leave the democrats, the democrats left them. Woke agenda telling them to hate themselves and Tranz their kids is not doing any favors.

Americans are so conservative we elected a black president for two terms. There are gay weddings, openly gay churches. Women are in every field and are often in charge.

R58 Did you awake from the coma that you have been in since 1978?

R2 I’m afraid you don’t know what ethnic pluralism actually means.

R59 I'm in my 60s. I grew up in a world where a black president was not even considered seriously and a lot of gay people got married and had children--not to/with each other. Almost all the doctors were men. Most of the high schools had a male principal. Most politicians were men. There was a creche on the Town Hall lawn at Christmas. It was considered radical for Catholics to marry Protestants, never mind whites marrying blacks.

OP, 1968 represented a cultural shift with the Civil Rights movement, Women's Liberation, and Gay Liberation. There has been a conservative backlash in reaction to it. We're living through that backlash.

24/7 Cable news has exasperated it. So has social media. CNN, MSNBC, and Fox all contribute to demonization of other viewpoints all for ratings. People now look to them and through social media for validation of their viewpoints

I would also point to the decline of religious institutions and religion in general. People look to politics to provide a community of shared values.

Growing economic disparities contribute as well. The average working class white guy has more in common with the average working class black guy, but it is in the interest of political figures to stoke fires away from shared problems to grievances about race.

A lot of people use the term "Conservative" very promiscuously without really understanding the genesis of the term as a political term. I'm reading a lot of bullshit on this thread.

'I would also point to the decline of religious institutions and religion in general. People look to politics to provide a community of shared values."

Sometimes some of the Dataloungers who you suspect might not be very bright, or ones whom you thoroughly disagree with all the time, say something that's smarter than your own contribution to the topic. The above is something I hadn't thought of, but now think has the absolute ring of truth.

Trump IS America. The rudeness, anger, narcissism, and stupidity. This is what America is. This is why he's winning.

R64, thanks are in order, but your was a left-handed compliment!!

Our government was founded on checks and balances. Things swing politically AND socially left then right and left and right. One side keeps the other side “in check” from going over the deep end.

R63 first I’m seeing the use of the word promiscuously as a synonym for liberally.

It's always been conservative, with liberal bubbles here and there, mostly in the cities.

[quote]Cable news has exasperated it.

Oh, dear, BPC @R62!

And I used to think you were smart...

White kids leave their homes in suburbia and go to college. They meet up with different types of people from back home and become radicalized to a certain degree. When they leave academia, get jobs, raise kids, and grow older, their priorities change and they become more conservative. With more people getting degrees online or simply eschewing the college experience altogether, that early 20’s communal spirit has been lost. When you’re out for yourself in the real world, liberal causes become less important. I think that’s been the case for the last sixty years.

Seriously r63, give us a good definition. I'm sure there is a lot of ignorance on this thread, myself included, but I don't think it is willful BS.

There are Americans who believe women wouldn’t be able to handle being President. That it’s unrealistic and far fetched. Meanwhile, female leaders around the world have been around for thousands of years.

One major philosophical difference between liberals and conservatives has to do with beliefs of how much control people have on their own lives. To liberals, as a person goes through life, things happen to them and that largely determines the outcome of their situation.. To conservatives, there’s still a belief in misfortune and other people impacting one’s own life, but they add to it a belief that people have the ability to affect their own lives to a great degree. Even when people are dealt a bad hand, the conservatives believe that people can choose how well they play it. Their belief of being able in any way to pull one’s self up by their bootstraps, so to speak, is complete anathema to the liberals’ philosophy.

This difference in philosophy affects a lot of issues, like affirmative action, law enforcement, illegal immigration, government financial assistance, abortion, education, etc., so I think that’s why it’s a major difference.

That is absolutely untrue R74. Conservatives are by far the "victim here" pople in our society, and have been as long as I've been alive.

R54 and R55 are disinformation specialists. Trans is funded by the right and started with rich white anti-gay men like Jennifer Pritzker and Kaitlyn Jenner and REnee Richards and Jan Morris. Of course what we have learned through the years that many FTM transgender work great! It's only the FTM that are generally failures. And who are the unethical doctors pushing this stuff? That's where the case should have begun and ended. It should not have become POLITICAL at all. It only became political because the right wanted something shocking to blame on the left. Ditto with immigration (George W. Bush was the biggest whore for immigrants and he had a Labor Secretary who encouraged millions of jobs to leave because American workers were "lazy."). But conservatives can do and say anything they want an d blame it on the "Woke" left crowd, and James Dumbshit in suburban America will fall for it every time.

It is only the MTF that fail.

Conservatives don't believe any of what R74 says. Do you know that states with republican governors over the last fifty years have consistently shown a greater growth in bureaucracy than states with Democratic governors? Have you noticed that is always conservatives who decry competition and never met a monopoly they didn't like? Have you noticed that conservatives have consistently attacked "entitlements" by insisting that they not be NEEDS based bvecuase god knows billionaires need that social security check!

To be Republican in the US today is not to be a conservative in the classic sense of wanting things to be like in childhood. It is to be a radical revolutionary where corruption is not a crime and stealing the entire and only point of life.

And they hav eproved it over and over.

They told us bureaucrats were evil because the government could criminalize the people to maintain its budget. When Ferguson, MO got caught doing just that, they defended it because they criminalized black people. Conservative principles meant nothing. Only the power of the majority race to oppress others had any value to them, however it was achieved.

My dad (WWII vet) was an extremely liberal factory foreman and believed in universal heath care, strong unions, was against the death penalty, was for civil rights and voting rights. He often talked about how California used to have free public college. He liked and agreed with Jesse Jackson. He hated Nixon, Reagan, George W. Bush. He liked the arts, he and my mom would go to plays, museums. But he would sometimes refer to black people as chocolate drops. It was weird. It was a superficial remnant of his cultural upbringing. (He never used any worse term than that.) Today, he would be cancelled for that, despite how he actually thought and felt, overall. I think that's one of the symptoms of what's wrong with us, today. It's this incredible pettiness that seems to infest everything.

I think that once upon a time we tended to see the big picture, and now we focus on trivialities. People seem to be almost pointed towards and led towards these cultural markers that divide us. Strong leadership is needed that focuses not on dividing us, but uniting us, who makes that a priority and whose speeches emphasize that (and who is popular enough to make people listen).

The incorporation of "TIQA ++" into the LGB collective has stained us all.

[quote] Strong leadership is needed that focuses not on dividing us, but uniting us, who makes that a priority and whose speeches emphasize that (and who is popular enough to make people listen).

Unity would require massive de-otherizing. It’s part of the national fabric to see people one disagrees with as being not just someone with different views but part of the “other”, distinctly different and not part of “us”. To de-otherize, people would have to see people with opposing views as being similar to themselves, and certainly not worse, who just happen to hold different political views.

The trans-hating loons blame trans ppl for literally anything.

No, what's really happened is a mostly white generation (the Baby Boomers) are looking around at a country they used to dominate and find it full of younger, not-white people who have contempt for them and their "achievements."

In their narcissistic rage, they latch on to any cultural figure who promises them continued dominance and who will deliver comeuppance to those snotty kids.

Add to that the success of the women's movement decoupling marriage from economics. Women don't have to get married to feed themselves now (for the most part). This means that men have to actually be attractive to women in order to have a relationship in life. The standards women have are ludicrously low but enough men are so infuriated they have to actually put in effort that they too seek out and cling to cultural figures who promise them dominance.

R83 That seems more of less like the world I grew up in, in the 60s and 70s. I know that there was the 1950s witch hunts before that. Not saying it was a perfect manifestation of anything. But I remember distinctly that the extreme partisanship of the Newt Gingrich years seemed crazy, to me. The Watergate hearing showed Dems and GOP working together in a pretty cooperative manner. I think when the two parties ceased to be about labor vs capital, when Clinton-Gore and their cohorts changed the direction of the party from 30's-oriented worker-friendly to something else, and less leftist, the Republicans started to become even more conservative, in a need to move farther right of center, and had to find other things to glom onto, like the Religious movement.

Isn't there a theory that the big capitalist movements wanted women in the work force and pushed the Women's Movement quietly from behind the scenes? So that the country could collect far more taxes, and so that a family with two parents working would break up the family and make people more psychologically dependent on their jobs? That's also true of businesses being open on Sundays and holidays. You keep people working more, they don't recreate together as a group, they don't eat together, or exist as much as a family. They're far less likely to question their lot or protest it if they're divided and kept toiling.

* My mom went back to work when I was a young teen, because she had to. The world I'd been a kid in was one where moms mostly didn't work, where we could live on one paycheck. Then the economy was such that, around the early '70s, women had to enter the workforce more because wages weren't rising while there was inflation.