A sampling of comments I've received on the Supreme Court's betrayal of women and the nation.
I am appalled and saddened that today's young women will have it harder than my generation did — Anne
I have been pregnant three times and each time I made a different decision. If there's one thing that pisses me off, is when right wingers glibly declare that a woman can simply give up a baby for adoption. It is a heartbreaking and traumatic experience and even in the happiest reunions (like mine with my now 35 year old baby girl), can bring back all the pain from the experience. Maybe I was naive to think it could ever be this way. How foolish — addendum. above
I'm having a hard time understanding how we came to have so many totally stupid our nation. I mean really...how did this happen? When did we stop seeing the value of teaching critical thinking? Is it when we became so totally materialistic and driven by the quest for money and things? Was it in the 70s when everything was about "me, me, me"? — Kathy
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The sociological question of how this happened would seem to be a statistical matter. Roughly a third of the American electorate has always been of an authoritarian bent. Then Trump made authoritarianism mainstream and "respectable." And authoritarians prefer not to think. They favor simple answers to immensely complex issues and problems. Plus "the state" they despise they also prefer to rule with an iron, undemocratic fist.
President Eisenhower wrote to his brother Edgar in 1954 that the far right is both "negligible" in numbers and "stupid." He was of course mistaken about its sustained fringiness, but he was spot on about its stupidity, or ignorance. Yet that is what has chiefly facilitated its rise to the mainstream. Ignorance is as ignorance does, and no American politician has ever been been more ignorant, and forcefully ignorant, then Donald Trump. So ignoramuses promptly joined him en masse in extolling ignorance as a virtue.
I have argued in both my academic work and political columns that the genesis of today's sprawling authoritarianism lay, particularly, in the demagoguery of 1964's Goldwaterism. That led to the 1970's New Right (which Sen. Goldwater came to detest, partly because of its religious fundament, but mostly because the New Right opposed compromise), then to Reaganism — which now seems nearly angelic — Gingrichism, Bushism and ultimately Trumpism. It's been a long slide. Now, it appears, we have bottomed out.