The Seven Reasons We Are in Such a Mess

Some consider the U.S. in a Constitutional crisis because Donald Trump is our elected, yet illegitimate, President.  Others consider that the U.S. is in a Constitutional crisis because progressives continue to abandon Constitution protections in the 1st, 2nd, and other Amendments, and indeed refer to the constitution as “that little book you carry," as Kamala Harris derogatorily referred to Kavanaugh's copy.

How did we get here?  Here are the seven reasons.

1. Social media and the internet make it far too easy to create and maintain bubbles. Without trying very hard, you can find crazies who think crazy just like you think crazy.
1. And in bubbles, more extreme positions win out over less extreme positions over time. People geek themselves up over perceived slights or injustices, and become more intolerant and blinded by their own anger.
2. The creation of bubbles enables deep divides that are nearly impossible to cross constructively. Media break down and take sides into "us vs. them". Media clicks win when they include character hits or ridicule the other side.
3. People become unaware even that they are in a bubble. The idea that liberals are idiots, or that conservatives are evil, is never refuted and becomes ingrained. 
4. Main-stream media latches onto and rides the bubbles.  The idea that the NYTimes is a progressive mouth-piece is denied, or justified for some of its writers. And the analog exists for Fox.
   
   
5. The ideological divide is perceived to widen from inside bubble crucibles.  Hence, compromise with the enemy is forbidden. Win at all costs becomes the motto, and the ends begin to justify the means.  Fake news leaks into "legit" news output (left and right). Cheating at polling places is ignored.  Elections are deemed illegitimate.  The Electoral College is questioned. Baseless character assassination is justified and defended.
2. Politicized social media has an outsized influence on corporate and personal behavior. A group of highly political, highly motivated people can self-organize and protest, either via social media or using it to plan in-person attacks, and create extreme discomfort for individuals or companies. These organized mobs of protesters have vastly more power than their numbers indicate. They are fringe voices who drive policy and behavior that most Americans wouldn't fight for.
3. Education has been conquered by the progressive Left.
1. Elementary school: Teachers are predominantly liberals who consciously or unconsciously beat their students with progressive points of view. Home-schooling is scorned. The NEA is unapologetically leftist
2. High school: top students get more training in social skills - especially reading their teacher and responding appropriately - than they do in critical thinking. They arrive at college as emotional infants, needing safe spaces and remedial education.  Of course this is a huge generalization, and not uniformly true. But it's more true all the time.
3. University: Social sciences and liberal arts are highly politicized war zones against any Western tradition.  Politicized educators created educational environments that are politicized battlegrounds, shouting down all but the most progressive voices and trampling free speech. 100% or University of Oregon administrators and 99.95% of University of Oregon faculty donate to Democrats.
4. Radicalized non-thinking robot-citizens are graduated to work at Google, where they hunt down and excoriate anyone who dares think differently (in the name of "inclusion").
4. "Productivity increases" enabled basics (foodstuffs and goods) to be produced vastly more efficiently within the U.S, or more likely, outsourced entirely. This enabled the modern urban "knowledge worker" employment segment to grow - Economy 2.0 was born, but existed essentially near government, educational and financial hubs on the coasts and university towns. Knowledge workers could exist in their cities their whole life, and know no-one who was a factory or farm producer. Blue collar work was no longer honorable. Cows and pigs and farmers became romantic, antiquated memories for large segments of the population. Many urban and suburban dwellers lost the concept of self-reliance. Their reliance on various city-state governments became deeply ingrained, and so it is easier for them to see government action in an urban setting as the first solution, and have little understanding of or concern for the plight of non-urban dwellers. Suburban elites hire Mexican immigrants to raise chickens and bees to feed their families, while denigrating the farmer in Iowa.  "Smart" business people were coastal, and the term "fly-over state" was born.
5. Economy 2.0, and the concomitant bloating of the administrative state, abandoned swaths of blue-collar-ish Americans while employing swaths of coastal hourly and high-school-educated non-STEM workers.  
1. The latter latched onto a web of employment supporting bloat. That bloat votes, and they vote big government to protect their jobs. 
2. The former were unprepared to transform their manufacturing way of life, and did not join the administrative state, which was concentrated near education and government centers. Those suffering in the heartland instead see administrative state jobs as wasteful.  Hence: "Drain the swamp."
6. The main-stream media abandoned their commitment to objectivity. Everything has become colored, and 99% of the time, it is colored blue. The deplorables see that and hate it viscerally.
1. Opinion pieces have become more popular than news. News aggregators (see your iPhone's "news" feature) insert politically slanted editorial pieces into "news" categories unapologetically. Editors allow news pieces to contain editorializing.
7. And most important: the Left has chosen to reject Western civilization (natural law, the Judeo-Christian God, equality, opportunity and hard work, the rule of law, capitalism, private property, western ideas of good and beauty, western art, western science).  The Left's disgust with, and rejection of, Western civilization has been combined with Identity Politics to create a potent brew of hatred that is fed to people of color and and anyone who will listen. The stated goal of these Leftists to tear down Western democratic institutions, and capitalism in particular, is starkly at odds with the patriotism felt by those who participated as "the greatest generation" in the heartland after WWII, and who have seen their way of life destroyed, their families ruined with drugs, their culture called backwards, and their plight ignored. Identity vs. character. "Fairness " vs. hard work.  Liberals hate the idea of the United States as a great nation, and MAGAs hate liberals' continual efforts to destroy it.

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