I’ve (36m) asked my mother and grandfather if I’m overreacting.

My grandfather (104 when he died. He was so “dust bowl” he mother died of the dust in the dust bowl. Dust pneumonia. Yeah can’t get more depression era than that without also being a shoe shine boy at a carnival ): I killed the nazis once. I can kill them again

My mother (80f I asked here again just now. Right now face to face): I’ve never seen this cult behavior before. Never in my life. People will bury their trump flags in the ground and deny they ever supported him. Like the nazis did.

Yes this bad. It’s historically significant how bad it is. People will read about this moment in history and think “I hope my grandfather wasn’t a trumpet” as the look up their ancestors. Grandfathers will lie to their families about what they were doing right now. They will even shame me because all I did was comment online.

It’s specifically bad right now.

liberals and republicans

The chickens came home to roost again ✈️🏢

Yep.

It’s very important to remember that between 1991 and 2001, the US saw 10 years of a world that was the epilogue of the End of History. We had won the Cold War, and while there were problems, they were largely distant, the politics fairly civil, things like the internet changing life quickly, and even the moments of hard times gave us great music. It took 2-3 years for the effects of Columbine and 9/11 to really change the country and world.

25 years is also not nothing. 25 years before 2001 was 1976. Star Wars was new. Ford was president. Disco was HOT. Apple and Microsoft were founded. Things can change a lot.

I think the answer is “yes” and “it depends on what you mean.” What is better or worse? For whom is it better or worse? Are we talking about the causes or the results?

If we are talking about results and how they affect the majority of people, yes, it is worse. Wealth concentration has increased. The environment has gotten worse. There is more war now than there was pre-2000, etc. All of these were problems in the past, but the course of history has naturally intensified them over time.

But a lot of what you’re talking about are causes: What politics leads to these things? Was it better back then and it getting worse now is why things are worse? And to that I say: Not really. America has been this cruel and greedy for a long time and that past greed and cruelty directly contributed to how things are today. Perhaps some of this feeling is you just becoming more aware of things, but part of it is that the politicians of that day cared more about keeping up the mask. They weren’t any less cruel, but they were better at hiding it behind a facade of respectability.

So what’s changed and what has stayed the same? The core feature running through all of this history is capitalism. Capitalists have immense power by virtue of their control over wealth and production and therefore the state primarily represents their interests. They might have different strategies for accomplishing that, different personalities, or different secondary priorities, but regardless of which politician is in office, support for capitalists is the primary concern.

This support for capital has to contend with various forces of history. Technology, labor power, geopolitics, etc all affect capitalism and the government must respond accordingly.

The period between the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and 9/11 2001 was considered to be a period in which the US became the unrivaled power in the world. It may have appeared more peaceful, but that was due to a lack of meaningful geopolitical rivals to fight against. But it’s not like it stopped developing the military industrial complex during that time. It was still prepared to exert it’s power over the world, violently if necessary. This changed post 2001 because they finally got push back for their imperialism and had someone to openly fight. And with a new foreign enemy, the US once again had something to direct people’s fear and anger away from capitalism.

Some combination of globalization and advances in automation broke what little power workers had managed to earn during the mid-20th century. This meant that the government and capitalists didn’t have to give as many concessions to workers as they used to and the resulting economic losses created an angry and desperate population. This anger COULD have been directed towards the root of the problem if there were better class consciousness in the US, but instead racists were able to capitalize on it to direct people to their causes.

The last major development to talk about here is the rise of the internet. On one had, this enabled people to see things and communicate with people they never would have been able to in the past. The potential for this to open people’s minds and connect people was tremendous and obviously a potential threat to capitalism as it wasn’t as easy to control the flow of information anymore. Unfortunately the dark side is that algorithmic social media has managed to bring out the worst in people. Some of that is due to deliberate manipulations by platform owners, but some of it is just the unfortunate consequences of how mass human psychology interacts with an algorithm designed to optimize the amount of time people spend looking at ads and getting others to spend time looking at ads. Certain kinds of content, usually ones that elicit strong emotions, are more likely to get people’s attention than others. So in the absence of that class consciousness, it’s pretty easy for hatemongers to get their messages to spread.

I suppose my point is, when you get these kinds of feelings, it helps to try to learn some more and take an analytical approach to understand better and hopefully find a way forward. Just feeling like things are generically worse is an oversimplification that misses the underlying forces responsible for that feeling. We wouldn’t be where we are now if things were different in the past, so just thinking of the past as being better misses the role it plays in the present.

In the 90s, as a kid in Quebec, I thought racism, sexism, homophobia were all things of the past. Boy was I naive.

When I was younger it seemed politics were more rational and cruelty never seemed to be the point of doing nothing.

The cruelty was outside our borders. The rational, reasonable debate was for domestic issues. Foreigners got the bullet.

As the empire collapses the cruelty turns inwards i.e. fascism.

Yes. The contradictions of capitalism are only getting worse. Workers, care givers, nature, social institutions, racialized people and countries, all can only be exploited and expropriated so much. But capitalism demands more and more. So it will continue getting worse until successful revolutions. But you don’t have to feel detached about it. You can try to understand it, tell others about it, look around for awesome people struggling against it, maybe even find ways to help them. I started reading Nancy Fraser’s new book “Cannibal Capitalism” it’s short, tries to be accessible and it explains how all those areas of struggle I mentioned above are connected.

The era of Pax Americana is over. There is a global realignment underway. The future is more uncertain than any of us have known in our lifetime.

For a while there was an idea that globalization would elevate the world. This post war era was the first part of our lives. It turns out America and Europe decided it isn’t acceptable when the world actually started having it good. So now we have to burn it all down and enter a phase of heightened global conflict. We’ll kill each other until we’re tired of that. Then maybe there will be another period of relative peace. Seems to be the nature of humanity.

I’m around your age and feel the same, it’s not just you

Twenty-five years ago many slurs now rightly shunned were still part of common speech.

Twenty-five years ago marriage equality was not even on the table.

A lot of things are worse now, but a lot of things are better, too. I’d say right now things are worse than ten years ago but you can’t go much farther back without it getting murky.

In terms of politics, yes. But we are better in almost every other aspect.

Person born in the late 70’s here

Although birth of social media took a gigant shit on peoples general mindset and world feels more divided, right wing and missing “street level” empathy, world is still better.

For example in the 80’s autistic people were just mentally retarded, dyslexic people were just stupid, bullying in schools was normal behaviour and part of being young, violence among teenagers was more commonplace, attitude that animals were just biological machines with instinctual reactions and just appearance of some cognition was more commonplace. 80’s yuppie culture made it fashionable to be a wealthy asshole.

In the 90’s home computers became common. Recession had bankrupted many high rolling yuppies. Nerds were no longer beaten for knowing how tech works. Gamer culture was no longer niche phenomenon. Cold war was over and nuclear armageddon was distant thing. Youth culture still had this doom and gloom attitude. Everyone was a flannel wearing tortured skater boy/girl. 90’s was the “tomboy era”, where girls were allowed to dress and act like boys without being socially ostracised. More attention was focused on mental health and colorful spectrum of human mind.

Late 90s and early 00 internet really started rolling, smarphones started to appear, social media was born. World became very small and everyone who wanted was a content creator. Suddenly large portion of population communicated with people outside their country on a daily basis.

This was the best time in the Internet. Search engines started to actually work and new webpages were sometimes an actual joy. Algorithms weren’t corrupting things and polarizing everything. Autogenerated content was yet to come. Internet and social media was infused as essential part of our lives.

2010’s the enshittification started and commercialization was on full gear. 2020 has become the era of stupid. AI, autogenerated content, polarization and dead internet.

But even with all this, I still think it’s now better for the average person than the cold war paranoia world of the 70-80’s.

We are however on a downward spiral and I’m hoping for a counter reaction in coming decades. Hoping that ignorances of past world are just making noise and attracting attention before they vanish for good.

Grew up watching news of Palestinians and Israelis killing each other. Good thing that was 40 years ago.

It can be both. This is also very specific to the western world and america in general, as other parts of the world have very different experiences, both good and bad