Thank you for this! You know, ordinary people in the United States today are much less well off than when I was born roughly 60 years ago, and people understand that very clearly, if not always with great specificity.
Working people today are very poor compared to my parents' generation. Dad bought a beautiful little house when I was an infant, paying the equivalent of ones year's salary of his blue-collar job. He was 21 years old.
He was not extraordinary. I grew up surrounded by working-class families who owned their homes, owned multiple automobiles, went away every year on summer trips, and had money leftover for fun treats.
Nobody lives like that anymore except for the wealthy elite. The so-called American Dream is restricted to an ever-shrinking pool of highly educated specialists and wealthy families who can boost their children into wealth.
Working people have seen their labor unions destroyed, their wages systematically decreased, benefits shrink, and then ultimately reduced to contractors, sometimes in the gig economy, struggling to pay rent, put food on the table — and not even knowing what their pay will be from week to week or month to month.
Of course people are angry! They're poor and struggling, and they know it.
What's harder to understand is how right-wing politics and religion have captured them, have convinced them that certain scapegoats are responsible for their pain.
If the Republican Party in the United States consisted only of the people who benefited from Republican policies, it would have no power.
If the women whose rights and equality were being constantly attacked by the Catholic and conservative-Protestant Churches simply left, those Churches would lose their political power.
It's quite a neat right-wing trick to assign blame for people's genuine economic suffering to scapegoats like queer people, who have nothing to do with it.
It's neat and it's common. The same scapegoat tactic worked very well for the Nazis in the mid 20th century, and that's just one of many examples of how it's done.
