Comment on Americans have no one else to blame but themselves
stopdropandprole@lemmy.world 5 days agopolitics is downstream from culture. and American culture (if such a thing even exists)is deeply flawed.
some of it, perhaps, is because America never fully reconciled its brutal origins or path to becoming a so-called ‘superpower’. nor have the people acknowledged the ongoing systemic violence enacted in America’s name.
progress is possible. America has made intermittent advances in civil rights and select areas where the public benefited. it isn’t all shit though it does feel that way at times.
Passerby6497@lemmy.world 4 days ago
The problems in American culture directly flow from conservatives, so the problems in our culture are also downstream of politics. Conservatives ended reconstruction, whipped up the populous into an anti-communism fervor, and helped push evangelicalism into the mainstream, all of which have real and massive impacts to this day.
The failure to follow through with the reconstruction allowed racism to cement it’s hold on the south, and the lost cause myth has helped spread that rot across the country. The push for anti-communism rotted the American psyche and helped push us to the hyper-capitalist consoomer mindset where everyone is encouraged to get that badly however possible. Evangelicalism has been the vehicle used over the last half to full century to steer the culture; look at how they turned abortion into a culture war from nothing in under a decade. That same playbook is in active use today against transgender people, and it’s the exact same one they used against the gays a few decades ago.