It’s terrifying. More so because it's mostly unconscious, resisting repentance and reform. Racism is so personally toxic it got institutionalized so ‘good’ people could practice it, the Bible and Constitution suffering reinterpretation in parallel. The bigots rejected both but used them for cover. A couple of generations down the road the inheritors of the tradition are so buried in lies they have no clue, like the point Zwick made to you but with the urgency of denial because the racist material they’d embraced is radioactive.
Mad Men stepped in, the marketing revolution replacing everything productive with, essentially, lies. Republicans rejoiced. They wouldn’t have to live in the leafy shadows of Newport and Greenwich anymore as a political matter and southern voters could be had for the beads and trinkets of racist innuendo. The woke people saw this. The politics were terrible but the perception correct, that the social conservatives were coming after everything, down to the universities, the last real institutional bastion of the left.
Hollywood was about money, always to a degree, though some fought its influence. It wasn’t their fault where the money took them. There are good lies, called art, that they had sold in the past. Anyway, the Confederacy had been conditioned and primed to succumb to lies, a torrent or trickle, and we got both, frontal assaults and subtle manipulations, the frontal assaults predominating lately. Democrats are still on their heels, or asses, knocked so off balance they can’t see what happened, forget mounting an effective defense.
Even now, when the enemy has won and the country will have to be recaptured, Democrats can’t see clearly what has happened. I feel for them but the stupor of suburbanity mostly has them in its grip. Republicans are street fighters. Democrats studied how to run a country, as Lakoff points out, or watched West Wing longingly as it aged into irrelevance. Republicans studied how to win since they had no intention of running the country anywhere but into the ground. They can’t ‘get out of their story.’ They’re enslaved to it.
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