Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do [View all]

[B.See]

Imo, a rather EXCELLENT, spot-on analysis. Puts the BLAME WHERE IT LIES:

Our Mistake Was to Think We Lived in a Better Country Than We Do - The Guardian Americans will be stuck cleaning up after Maga’s destructive streak because men like this never clean up after themselves

(that's if America ever can...)

Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do. Our mistake was to see the joy, the extraordinary balance between idealism and pragmatism, the energy, the generosity, the coalition-building of the Kamala Harris campaign and think that it must triumph over the politics of lies and resentment. Our mistake was to think that racism and misogyny were not as bad as they are, whether it applied to who was willing to vote for a supremely qualified Black woman or who was willing to vote for an adjudicated rapist and convicted criminal who admires Hitler. Our mistake was to think we could row this boat across the acid lake before the acid dissolved it.

We knew what the problems were, and we wanted to fix them. The principal problems that got us to this bleakest moment in American history are intertwined. They are the crisis of masculinity, the failure of the mainstream news media and the rise of Silicon Valley, and in a way they are all the same problem.

When people are more concerned that a trans girl might play on a softball team than that the climate crisis might profoundly devastate the biosphere and much of life on it, human and otherwise, for the next 10,000 years, the media has failed. When people worry about crime when it is low, an economy when it is thriving and immigrants when they do much of the hard work that sustains that economy and commit fewer crimes than the native-born, the media has failed.

When it came to Donald Trump, they went easy on him, and they again and again let him and the far right set the agenda. They constantly treated asymmetrical issues as symmetrical ones – if the Democrats resisted Republican outrages, both sides were “polarized”. In the media everything had two sides, even if one side was the truth and the other was the lie, one side was the human rights or the law and the other side was their violation.