When and How Did We Get Here?—Gradually, then Suddenly. Part Two Victor Davis Hanson
https://victorhanson.com/when-and-how-did-we-get-here-gradually-then-suddenly-part-two/
Our nation’s change into something unrecognizable just four years ago had a few precursors and catalysts.
The first was the Obama administration’s redefining of American norms. Before Obama, “racial relations” were largely defined as the historical 12 percent black/88 percent “non-black” dichotomy, in the context of dealing with the sins of southern slavery and Jim Crow and widespread discrimination—and the quest to make race incidental not essential to us all.
Sixty years of serial Civil Rights acts, affirmative action, increased integration and assimilation, interaction, and intermarriage, and “content of your character, not the color of your skin” mentalities were all working toward an ecumenical society, in which soon we would not consider race relevant to who were are and instead focus on the individual not the collective.
“Climate change” took over from “global warming” as Al Gore/John Kerry were unleashed. Suddenly clean burning natural gas was a culprit, a fossil fuel supposedly wrongly disguised as a valuable transition fuel.
Abroad, Iran was redefined as the oppressed Persian, Shiite counterweight to the overdog Gulf monarchies and Zionist Israel. We then would green-light a “Shiite Crescent”—Teheran to Damascus to Beirut to Gaza—that would balance our former pro-Western allies, Israel in particular. We then from time to time, as the rivalry heated up, would adjudicate the ensuing creative tension. America would be the honest broker with no real preference for a democratic Western Israel or pro-American autocratic governments in the Gulf, Jordan, or Egypt.
A second catalyst in the “sudden” transformation of America was the ill-fated Covid-19 lockdowns, the first time in American history that the entire nation went into quarantine. The result, as we can finally see in retrospect, was a disaster in almost every dimension: increased suicides, spousal/familial/substance abuse, economic ruin, increased psycho-social problems, social polarization, unsustainable federal spending and deficits, destruction of a critical two-years of K-12 education for millions of our school-aged children, universities shut down, GDP in freefall, and unemployment up.
Yet in retrospect, the Swedish model of focusing on the vulnerable and elderly while keeping society open and functioning cost no more lives than Covid-19 but saved millions from life-long disastrous consequences of lockdowns.
In the case of the U.S., millions were shut inside their homes, distant from human interaction. They became inert and dependent on their computers, cell phones, Zoom links, and televisions for news, communications, and information. The result was a caged, paranoid society now prone to rumor, hysteria, and fits of passive-aggressive mania. Without human interaction and conversation, a nation of 330 million recluses after a year or two became susceptible to what followed the death of George Floyd.
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