I think that's just the Overton window having shifted over time. I believe the "cultural melting pot" used to be perceived as more politically neutral in the 1

I think that's just the Overton window having shifted over time. I believe the "cultural melting pot" used to be perceived as more politically neutral in the 1990s but it always came with a lot of asterisks. There's even that famous Superman poster about diversity from 1949[0] - despite the obvious incongruity with the Japanese internment camps and overall anti-Asian sentiments (although the Magnuson Act in 1943 had at least partially repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act by then because China became an ally to the US during WW2), racist sentiments towards Hispanic/Latin Americans and of course the ongoing racial segregation at the time. I don't think we'll see "wokeness" be rolled back all the way to perceiving Irish immigrants as subhuman again, but most of these cultural points exist on a sliding scale rather than being fixed in time permanently. Case in point, that infamous 1981 Atwater interview about the Southern Strategy[1], which was a Republican strategy built primarily on appealing to racist sentiments in the Southern US states. We're not quite at the point where it's acceptable to explicitly target segments of the population by name so you'll instead hear politicians talk about "illegals" when talking about an overall reduction in immigration (including "legal" migration) and "criminals" when talking about the need for deportations (without trials or convictions) because to those who agree it is clear that these are shorthands the same way "welfare queens" and "urban crime" were shorthands in the Southern Strategy, whereas for those who disagree you can always fall back to the literal definition to defend your politics. As an aside, I think this is one of two big problems with the article's appeal to theory of mind - the other being that most people don't have a coherent political framework and thus hold mutually contradictory political positions in different contexts: politicians and pundits can and do lie. While nearly every human assumes they are the good guy of their narrative and wants to do the right thing relative to their views of good and bad, sometimes that can include just blatantly lying. And sometimes people whose job it is to talk politics not only lie, they assume everyone else alongside of them is also lying, not presenting their own deeply held convictions. I'm sure this isn't the case but sometimes it feels like debate culture plays into this because the way competitive debates are held removes any sense of actual conviction from the points being argued by focussing entirely on the technique, not truth value or ideological consistency or moral frameworks. You could personally oppose the death penalty but still find yourself having to argue for it if that's the position you're assigned - and sure, in theory this can help better understanding the other side but at the same time it feels like this arbitrariness and moral flexibility also rewards a level of detachment from the concrete issues that seems deeply troubling. [0]: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/superman-1950-poster-diversity/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/superman-1950-poster-diver... [1]: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/ https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwa...