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It seems to me that there may have been some sort of a strange, unrealized cultural change in Americans over the last few decades. I seem to recall that the ab
by mistermann 3y ago
It seems to me that there may have been some sort of a strange, unrealized cultural change in Americans over the last few decades. I seem to recall that the abstract notion of freedom of speech/assembly/etc was considered a VERY big deal by all or at least most Americans. However, this seems to have morphed into people now holding most of their ideological beliefs at specific concrete, object level issue level.
Assuming there is some truth to this, the rise of the internet and a daily deluge of culture war content seems like it could easily explain the transformation.
- watwut 3y agoPeople used to be literally killed or beaten for their expressed believes, so that hiatoeical abstract notion has quite a lot of asterisks in it. It is waaaay too easy to idealized past while ignoring what was actually happening.
- ajmurmann 3y agoIMO it's because everyone is in a panic about the other side. One side believes that the other side is "grooming and sterilizing children" while the other side believes that they are working to "replace democracy with fascism". In turn both sides get more extreme and work each other more into a frenzy as extremists on each side will in fact say outrageous shit. Abstract values like "free speech" get lost in the war. Edit: even on here we have a comment openly calling for fascism (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35950813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35950813) and I'm sure others attacking the Christian roots of US society in comments here makes people on the other side who see that as the core of their value system feel equally threatened.