We are witnessing a national tantrum---a "hissy fit", if you will.

[Hortensis]

47. Well, I can't argue with your worry for the future when I have no idea what

our future's going to be, but I can't agree with your outlook on who we are or where we are and why.

Hateland, which is on my list but I haven't read yet, is about extremists and radicalization, not about "mediocre white people," and suggests ways in which the majorities who always either control extremism, or fail, can regain control. It's all about extremism, especially among the radical right who are always the planet's big troublemakers, without somehow conflating that with too many mediocre people of any color.

Btw, it's obvious that wherever human beings are, societies must inevitably contain overwhelming numbers of mediocre people, regardless of the prevailing skin color, as well as their shares of hard-right reactionaries. This is a huge problem for democratic republics that our founding fathers wincingly foresaw, and yet our own history is one of irregular but extremely real humanistic advances on all the important fronts, above all equality. Including during this century's anxious troubles.

Many change-driven fears are causing some people to overreact in various negative ways and grab at extreme solutions, peaceful and otherwise. And external enemies are making malignant use of new mass communications to defeat us by nonmilitary means, which include sophisticated new techniques to replace thinking in whole populations with fear-driven rage and despair. In America, they're weaponizing our very real internal problems, helping radical extremism along, including in the Republican Party, helping elect Trump, doing what they can to encourage factional and racist storms to turn as many as possible on each other and cause everyone to lose faith in ourselves and our nation, and to move disorder to chaos and collapse.

The Biden administration is racing to restore stability and widespread confidence in future wellbeing before one of the resultant swings to the brink takes us over. To put it prosaically, when and if more people of all colors are planning guaranteed annual vacations from jobs that provide the kind of stable incomes they were raised to believe are their right, and are assured that climate change is being handled so they're able to foresee stable futures, the anxieties that lead to extremism, including racial extremism, will calm down. Again.

And in spite of serious problems, we'll continue our move forward into the future of unprecedented wellbeing we can have if we will. Not a fairytale. There'll still be all the old problems too.