From a non US outsiders perspective I do have to say that it looks like the US civil war never really ended. The country is still largely divided along the same lines (with maybe California as a third entity) and I don't really see it reconciling any time soon.

Kind of like Belgium over here in Europe, which is usually say is not so much a country as it is a cold civil war :)

The geographic lines of division today have changed tremendously since the Civil War. The divide is now more rural versus urban rather than north versus south. In the last presidential election rural California was mostly "red" while southern cities were mostly "blue".

https://brilliantmaps.com/2020-county-election-map/

California's /land/ was mostly red...in terms of actual people it was 2:1 voting blue:red. Land doesn't vote.

Land does vote in the senate though.

I thought this too until I looked at US presidential electoral maps for the past century, and then ran across a study of political division in the US that showed a dramatic increase beginning around 1980. (Don't have a link handy unfortunately.) It seems the degree and nature of division in the US really has changed in a fundamental way.

I'm totally unfamiliar with Belgium. Can you point me to something illustrative? That sounds quite interesting.

In 2021 you'll lose your job for saying a specific word, in the context of discussing the word, definitely not using it as a slur, while openly being materially anti racist and deploring the use of the word as a slur.

Even the fools on Capitol Hill on Jan 6, if you were to poll them, I suggest >95% of them would consider it inappropriate to use that word as a slur.

So that's the furthest thing from what you are imagining.

I think this kind of fear-mongering is tantamount to a kind of bigotry because it mostly misunderstands the nature of the Capitol Hill rioting, and all those other kinds of 'scary' activities. And FYI that was scary, just for other reasons then you are suggesting.

Words do have power, surely, but the conflation of 'someone said something' into a giant national war is just hyperbolic.

We're confusing 'someone said something dumb, maybe because they were angry and shooting their mouths off' - with 'the return of slavery!'.

Ta-Nehisi Coates tells this tale of a very minor confrontation between he, his child in an elevator, it was the most inconsequential encounter, but he elevated to the status of ultimate importance. In his deluded view, it wasn't even a 'symbol' of racism, rather an act of deep rooted power that a white person could actually 'lay hands' on a black person as if they 'owned their bodies'. God forbid someone who might step on someone's toes as brutal act of racism?

The paradox is that the legitimate observation of 'Critical Theory' as applied to the propagandist narratives that we've told ourselves in the past, could just as easily be used against those who want to elevate every action towards some ideological importance.

Most people I speak to in person are actually kind of reasonable, I think we are all getting sick of this, maybe over the next few years we'll start to be desensitized to elite huffery on Twitter.

> Ta-Nehisi Coates tells this tale of a very minor confrontation between he, his child in an elevator, it was the most inconsequential encounter, but he elevated to the status of ultimate importance. In his deluded view, it wasn't even a 'symbol' of racism, rather an act of deep rooted power that a white person could actually 'lay hands' on a black person as if they 'owned their bodies'. God forbid someone who might step on someone's toes as brutal act of racism?

Can you point me to the book & page number (or chapter)? I recently lost a lifelong friend to just this sort of delusion and am trying to understand it. However I'm already bad at managing my time and believe reading through an entire Coates book will have diminishing returns.

Maybe it wouldn't be so bad-- the church has way better music.

> I won't be entirely shocked if we see a return to right-wing Christian conservatism in my lifetime that will make the 50's seem like a liberal utopia.

This is my prediction, although I’m not completely sure about the lifetime part. If it does come to that, I’m not completely unopposed to the crazy prepper life though.

>My read of history is that religion is only ever overturned by a stronger religion

There's gotta be a valve somewhere. If that were true, how is our current culture (or at least the culture of '85 to '05) more liberal than the right-wing Christianity of the 50s?