I'm not talking about any specific issue-level fight-du-jour. I'm talking about long-term trends that predate the rise of Trumpism by decades. Starting in the 60s, probably as a result of Vietnam and that fuckhead Texan and liberal wet-dream LBJ, America realized that collective sacrifice was bullshit, that their government would easily and without consequence lie to them to keep the gears of an unpopular and inane war turning. Thusly, the Boomers decided that the only answer to all the questions of the time was "me, me me." The left and right each decided that one's ability to express oneself is the most important, most sacrosanct, and possibly only value that society should uphold. So there's left and right, and rich and poor, and if you draw a matrix with those two axes (wealth and political affiliation), you could easily pencil in the boxes how the fulfillment of self-expression has manifested itself in each group.

Let me be clear: I don't think this is all bad. The world before the 60s was stifling, hypocritical, and served one group of people (us, white males) well and everyone else like garbage. It needed to be torn down, and the individual rights revolution was what precipitated the change. The downside of the right revolution is that we got "shareholder value" as the central tenet of the economy, a complete dissolution of families and community institutions, and more guns that citizens.

We got rid of the Church as a unifying force in the community, but we replaced it with nothing. We made an all volunteer army, but never asked for any other type of service from anyone. These are problematic, because I don't think that we feel we have any unity or national identity, which sounds silly when you say it, but also is the invisible glue that holds the country together. But actually I think what's in process, and what we may be in the birth pangs of, is the rebirth of civic life (which is why I'm much more of an optimist than most). The internet has given u sways to reorganize life that were never possible before, and despite the fact that we've made a terrible mess of it over the last 15 years, I think this is the dark before the dawn.

I would never bothsides Trumpism. But I absolutely will bothsides the Gordon Gekkoism that has accelerated the razing of everything good in our society.