A Troubling Trend in American Society

We must all and always remember that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Instead, a certain complacency has invaded the national body that has made us susceptible to the creeping infection of Right Wing extremism. As we have made progress with such events as the two-time election of President Barack Obama to the defeat of Donald Trump by President Joe Biden, the infection has persisted - and has festered for decades. We can trace it back to at least the candidacy of Barry Goldwater for President in 1964. It can be traced in years of media dominance by demagogues such as Rush Limbaugh on talk radio and Tucker Carlson on TV's Fox News. Today, it is expressed in the widely held notion that America is "a Christian nation" that should be governed by overtly "Christian values" even if - and even preferably if - that assertion denies rights to those of other faiths or none at all.

The "Far Right" has never been so vocal and so active in American life as it is today. The examples are troublingly numerous. Republican lawmakers at both national and many state levels have become so radically Rightist as to make their party nearly unrecognizable as the party of Dwight D. Eisenhower or even Richard M. Nixon. From their assaults on women's reproductive rights to their assaults on the curricula of American schools to their interference in the rights of transgender and other LBTQ Americans to their attacks on other Americans who do not share their "values," Republican leaders, from Congress to the Supreme Court, have waged war on large swaths of the American public. Meanwhile, voters have been driven to the extremes of the political divide with little space left to what used to be considered "the middle ground."

From FaceBook to Twitter, the growth in web sites where we can all vent our respective spleens has strengthened these divisions in a manner that would have been inconceivable in previous eras. Even apart from ways in which algorithms play with who gets to see whose posts, unwritten norms have developed among users of these sites that discourage any response that expresses disagreement, no matter how reasonably expressed.

This has resulted in silos where the only people who need bother to talk to each other on these sites are those who share the perspectives expressed in original posts. Hearty agreement serves to reinforce any bias in the original, not just in the mind that posted it in the first place, but also in the minds of those who agree with it.

As a result of this hardening, it's difficult to find common ground on an issue like (as one example) who gets to buy what kind of gun. Any effort to restrict firepower that can eject multiple rounds in a manner of seconds is regarded as the first step in an assault on the right to own a hunting rifle. Those who insist on their rights as gun-owners have increasingly become the owners of arsenals while those disturbed by that tendency may be tempted to say all guns should be heavily regulated if not banned outright. Once again, common ground has become the no-man's land between warring factions increasingly impervious to rational dialogue.

It has long been noted that US opposition to despotic governments hasn't prevented the US from collaborating with these regimes on mutually beneficial activities. While this should cause all of us some measure of spiritual nausea, whether or not we agree that it may be a necessary evil, high-profile American politicians have upped the ante. We are now living in an era where a former President can express overt admiration for despots in other countries such as Russia's Vladimir Putin and North Korea's Kim Jong Un yet still get supported by enough American voters to make him a threat for re-election.

What's to be done about this slide of US political life into the deepening slough of international despotism? Richard Nixon one coined a phrase to describe most American voters: The Silent Majority. Back then, the "Silent Majority" was inferred to be Americans we would today call "conservative." Today, it's time for the Silent Majority to publicly oppose the slide from conservatism to despotism in the halls of American government.

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