I'm not completely convinced we're the problem

[brush]

16. Let's face it, the fault is not that of the center-left/and left. We live in a racist, misogynist majority nation.

After much success with the civil right movement of the late '50s-'60s and the women's rights movement of the '70s and on, the permission structure for the racists/sexists to come to fore again began with the bloviating a-hole trump and his birther bullshit against Pres. O. It culminated perhaps as the orange turd rode down the tacky, fake gold escalator to accept the rethug nod for president in 2016.

Some say it's been all downhill since then, but it actually started much earlier. It's even harder to deal with. It's in the nation's DNA. The founders were white men of their time as it's said, meaning most owned enslaved humans, and their wives were property too, not to mention their enslaved females, and the founding documents they produced where high-minded with words and phrases like liberty and freedom and "when in the course of human events", but they were not "inclusive" of people who were unlike themselves (a concept now that's laughed at by rethugs). All of that was reflected in the founding docs and it took centuries and a brutal Civil War followed by decades of segregation to wrest the gains of the '60s-'80s, only to be rescinded symbolically by trump's elevator descent and the corrupt SCOTUS 6' snatching away of hard-won abortion rights.

What a mess. It's in our DNA.