Pulitzer-winning reporter David Cay Johnston: "The evidence suggests Trump is a traitor"

[Hortensis]

56. Actually, I don't agree with the supposed cause and effect.

We're far less "exceptional" than that compared to other peoples, and far far better than suggested. THIS is the rest of what happened to us:

Over the past four decades planetary wealth has quadrupled, and dangerous amounts of it went to creation of centimillionaire and billionaire classes who can buy politicians with their chump change. And they did, working overwhelmingly through conservative politicians who were biased to support their goals.

Think what that means. Government corruption is not a crumbling around some dishonest people, but rather a deliberate hostile reordering of representative government to serve a few. They hired many entities to have laws passed and rewritten to serve them, not us. "That's what they do. That's all they do."

As for us, and this dismal mindset, as far back as the 1970s wealthy conservatives started plotting to move our nation far right and to use new psychological techniques of mass manipulation to achieve it. They started very early with dividing the electorate in order to conquer, taking an important lesson from the New Deal era when a majority united against them.

From then their wealth exploded, and with it their power. And with the advent of information technology and new techniques for manipulation, their ability increased to divide, corrupt and and demoralize the electorate. The most vulnerable to their ultraconservative aims are, of course, are on the right, but they've done their best to destroy everyone's belief in our nation, our political systems, our people, and above all the Democratic Party and its people ever since.

They've now approached pretty close to their goal of taking us over, which we only know because this is the wake-up phase for us.

So wake up. It takes awareness and intellectual independence to see our real world. We can see the lies designed for the right well enough, but it's much, much harder to recognize those designed to corrupt our thinking and to see their influence on ourselves.

Start by looking at the unquestioning acceptance of the OP's dismal but desperately twisted and dishonest word-picture of what we are. And question it and the initial acceptance. Does that really describe YOU? How about most of the people you know personally?

Go take a 10-minute walk anywhere you are and look around you. Their dismal picture kind of leaves out all the good, all the stability, all that is most of what we are. Everything you will see, in fact.

And a huge part of what is very good, btw, is that our democratic systems are much harder to destroy than they realized. They've been inside government tearing away at our national innards with varying strengths since 1980 and before, and even as they succeed in destroying belief in our damaged systems, those are still standing up to the severe stresses of the current Republican government that entered office to finish the job.