How do we fix the wounds in America?

[LSLGuy]

@asahi

One problem is, white supremacist leanings are not always easy to quantify. I would submit, though, that there’s a very serious problem when hundreds of young white men who are seemingly part of mainstream middle class society, presumably with personal and professional reputations, are comfortable enough to march around unmasked in public participating in a rally in which Nazi and Confederate symbols are displayed with chants of “Jews will not replace us.” I am in my 40s now and as long as I’ve been alive, there have always been extremist movements, extremist groups, confederate marches and so on - probably always will be. But I haven’t always seen college Republicans at these types of rallies - that’s different. Not that I’ve ever been comfortable with these parades of bigotry, but in the few events that I’ve seen on TV (and one or two I happened to observe in person rather by accident), the people rallying always struck me as just down-and-out types from rural America who were having a mid-life crisis of some type. But there’s something terribly wrong when presumably middle class or even upper middle class people aren’t afraid of being identified and associated in public with this sort of ideology. It suggests a degree of normalization has taken shape. And this is something that all stable democracies would do well to stamp out as quickly as possible. Because if it’s not, then today it’s college republicans who are comfortable joining this movement. Tomorrow it might be city councilmen and mayors. It might be police officers and sheriffs after that. Pretty soon you have a movement beyond just chanting and slogans, but one with real power. And that’s very, very dangerous.
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Exactly. Here’s a post of mine from this morning in a thread about Bannon. The “they” I’m referring to is white supremecist activists.

@LSLGuy

Within the part of the country where they’re at least a non-trivial minority they’ll certainly be able to frame at least part of the agenda for state level legislation and for local-level enforcement. That is very powerful. All the more so if they can keep it up for 2, 4, or 10 years.

As well, IMO the US contains a lot of people who are closet fellow travelers. In the privacy of their own mind they’re thinking along the lines of “Those ultra-racists are crudely overdoing it, but thank goodness somebody is finally standing up for us fundies / whiteys.”

To the degree the fellow travelers can be coaxed into making even vaguely approving noises in public, suddenly the tide of white supremacy could blossom from WAG 2% rabid adherents to – big WAG – 30% rabid + semi-adherents.

There are lots of ways the “unthinkable” is actually the “unsayable-in-public”. Once those things do become sayable in public the zeitgeist can shift a very long way in a very short time.
IMO the big news with this will be the vastly lopsided geographical distribution. This will throw into very stark focus the reality that we have 2 USAs with very different ideas of how to run the country: the non-deep South urban/suburban, and the rural and/or Deep South.

The fact the former demographic is a hefty majority of the people but the latter is a hefty majority of the land area and statehouses and federal legislators will lead to lots of controversy about voting arrangements, just as it did in 2016.