we often actively oppress efforts to argue or demonstrate that this is working out poorly for us
This kind of "social pride" seems really fundamental to pretty much any polity, but I wonder if there hasn't always been an equally strong counter-current, particularly in America. At some point what was "working out for us" one way or the other changed. Racial integration, overall secularity, and the form of gender egalitarianism we see now are not historically American norms. One might argue that liberalism itself is a seed that inevitably flowers into what we see now in terms of "neutral", but I think one of the things that makes America peculiar is that there has always been an incredible ambivalence about how "liberalism" is going to be played out.
A lot of this is simply because liberalism itself is a weird Frankenstein of a political ideology that erupts out of the dis-integration of Christendom, and so we keep seeing grabs for different kind of power emphasizing different kinds of Christian virtue as absolute (mercy, self-sacrifice, autonomy, kindness etc.) But the point is that what is ideologically homogenous now is and always has been implicitly understood as extremely volatile and prone to fragmentation.
It really does feel like we've seen a kind of "natural progression" of liberalism from, say, the 60s up until now with certain kinds of emphasis on civil liberties, but so long as one "virtue" is emphasized to the exclusion of others, there will always be be a counter-current attempting the homeostasis of something like the high Middle Ages. It's like an involuntary immune system response, and it won't change so long as liberalism is our fundamental ideology.
All this to say, it might be that the undercurrent of what the right is feeling right now is that aforementioned autoimmune response to de-homogenize, or to even point out that such homogeneity isn't even real in the first place (ie, fake news, Psy-ops, mainstream media etc.).
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This kind of "social pride" seems really fundamental to pretty much any polity, but I wonder if there hasn't always been an equally strong counter-current, particularly in America. At some point what was "working out for us" one way or the other changed. Racial integration, overall secularity, and the form of gender egalitarianism we see now are not historically American norms. One might argue that liberalism itself is a seed that inevitably flowers into what we see now in terms of "neutral", but I think one of the things that makes America peculiar is that there has always been an incredible ambivalence about how "liberalism" is going to be played out.
A lot of this is simply because liberalism itself is a weird Frankenstein of a political ideology that erupts out of the dis-integration of Christendom, and so we keep seeing grabs for different kind of power emphasizing different kinds of Christian virtue as absolute (mercy, self-sacrifice, autonomy, kindness etc.) But the point is that what is ideologically homogenous now is and always has been implicitly understood as extremely volatile and prone to fragmentation.
It really does feel like we've seen a kind of "natural progression" of liberalism from, say, the 60s up until now with certain kinds of emphasis on civil liberties, but so long as one "virtue" is emphasized to the exclusion of others, there will always be be a counter-current attempting the homeostasis of something like the high Middle Ages. It's like an involuntary immune system response, and it won't change so long as liberalism is our fundamental ideology.
All this to say, it might be that the undercurrent of what the right is feeling right now is that aforementioned autoimmune response to de-homogenize, or to even point out that such homogeneity isn't even real in the first place (ie, fake news, Psy-ops, mainstream media etc.).
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