On a dispassionate level there is a sense that the country is still in its eternal war on terrorism, and sacrifices must be made. By powerless, generally poor a

On a dispassionate level there is a sense that the country is still in its eternal war on terrorism, and sacrifices must be made. By powerless, generally poor and marginal people of course. Poor kids need to enlist and die in a dessert, poor people need submit to indignities and abuse from police, airport security, and prisons. It’s the same playbook from the war on drugs, and every other American “war” for a very long time. A lot of the country is also poorly educated, very religious, and has strong ideas about what proper patriotism entails, and overbearing security theater is a good thing in that regime. Half of the US falls into the crowd that wants more prisons, tougher laws, kill dem turrurists, and fuck the socialists. It is an ironic truth that a majority of those people are adversely affected by their own positions. If you go back in back and study their history, the US has been divided this way as a means to control poor whites by pitting them against (primarily) blacks, and more recently non-whites in general. Not much has changed except the window dressing. Wealthy people need to keep people distracted and at each other’s throats, because otherwise those people tend to work together for better conditions and that hurts the bottom line. Racism exists elsewhere of course, but in the US it’s woven into the culture in a very specific way, and even after the racism itself departs, the poisonous politics remain ossified. Where racism fails, wars are used. Wars on drugs, wars on terror, gang wars, etc. anyone who’s against getting groped for freedom obviously hates the troops, blah blah. You get the idea. As a result you get liberals calling for reforms and regulations to an extreme, and libertarians calling for dismantling the government to a massive degree. Since both ideas are fundamentally half-baked and unlikely to succeed in the unnuanced and ideologically loaded forms they take, they’re ignored by centrists just trying to hold on to some vision of the middle class. The result is social and political gridlock, which is acceptable when there’s so much money to be made by the relatively small group in power. Any time people look like cooperating it’s just a matter of a new war on something or actual war, and then it’s business as usual. People are struggling, but business is good.