Decades-long economic decline of a hegemonic power, mostly ravaging the standard of living for what was once the world's largest middle class, while shamefully enriching the top 1%.
Plus demographic changes making the grade school platitudes about being a nation of immigrants ever more real, right before our eyes.
Add to this a long tradition as an anti-intellectual political culture and we have an army of angry white men, amplified by the Fox News echo chamber to scream like brownshirts driven by misdirected resentment and distorted nostalgia...
The fact that much of the anger is understandable (since the economic and decline are real) makes the voices only more rabid in their confidence that they are correct. That they are the victims.
So, we have a rich white man fanning these flames with anti-pc, anti-immigrant, anti-women, anti-minority sound bites designed as applause lines.
Each instance both reflects and reinforces the incivility of our political discourse and the fact that this incivility further disempowers the already power-poor by distracting and distorting their voices.
Each instance mobilizes these angry white men to embrace their own incivility and reinforces their already deluded tendency to see the insults they love to casually toss around in place of analysis as 'just common sense,' under assault by some nameless pc police.
Most of them are criminals, or terrorists, or feminazis after all. Despite the fact that the facts do not support these claims, as Mother Jones noted "everyone is uncomfortable being told something they are used to doing is now considered insulting."
It is uncomfortable and Trump Mania promises to remove that discomfort, freeing us all to insult at will...without regard to data or, more importantly, with no effort to even try to find ways to respect fellow citizens also struggling with the consequences of an unequally distributed economic and political decline.
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