Again, Black people are an exception here, as basically anyone who stayed in the Jim Crow South has a living memory of living under what amounted to fascism, including the “always walking on eggshells/lack of social trust/long periods of boring endurance/randomized terrifying violence”
Pretty much. What it mostly boils down to is that most Americans really don’t have the faintest idea what living under modern authoritarian regimes actually looks like, and how it’s often at the same time way more boring and way more scary than they’d imagined.
It feels like folks view American history through the lens of some prestige Oscar bait drama. All the progress and struggle, condensed into a tidy 3 acts.
100 fuckin years between the end of the civil war and the civil rights act. The ebbing and flowing and grinding reality isn’t Hollywood enough
