@wdlindsy What you say ties in with Hofstadter's "paranoid style", and how demagogues from Goldwater to Trump have mined fear and social anxiety to sway voters toward their agendas. The faithful refuse to accept society as it is, and so seek to smash the current order under the guise of conspiracy theories about looming threats ("libruls", hippies, Blacks and the "woke", Jews, Muslims, Mexicans, LGBTQ people...)
American conservatives see themselves as permanently under seige.
@wdlindsy Good article. A blue-voting American friend once told me, you can understand a lot more about the USA when you know that half of us are terrified of everything, including each other.
I understand better what he meant today than I did at the time.
@hacks4pancakes Exactly!
Here in the UK we have all these Little Englanders yearning for the halcyon days of Empire, when "Brittania ruled the waves". That life on these isles was a daily struggle for all but the landed gentry seems to have been lost to obscure history books.
Walk around any house built before the Industrial Revolution, and you'll bang your head on door frames 'cos they were designed for severely malnourished people several inches shorter than today's average.
