From my Millennial son:
There has been an orchestrated, directed, effort to undo the success of the New Deal Coalition; fomented in the early days of the Cold War, whose faction was elevated in the GOP during the McCarthy era and pronounced to unmake the post WWII American political consensus in Barry Goldwater’s 1964 Republican run at presidency.
This would be mainstreamed in every contentious GOP victory for the next fifty years, with its current incarnation astroturfed as the Tea Party post Obama victory, which has since mutated into a very publicly armed, nebulous, populous-branded, authoritarian-nationalist surge.
The same players in Nixon and Reagan’s administrations, and their same backers in the evangelical, Radical Free Marketeer, and Southern Strategy camps, are at the center of this power-at-any-cost American Oligarchy.
Attempts to appease and work through this peacefully have been met with the most egregious threats to our Union since the period of the Compromise of 1877.
With facets that have now appeared as ideologically-driven violent street gangs, the armed storming of state government houses by insurrectionary militias, and false narratives designed to undermine the elections... right now is historically of extremely heavy and dangerous gravity, that has, and will, fundamentally alter norms in society in reactionary, not wholly backwards, ways.
This is intentionally subtle, and riddled with the inherent strangeness of the New. The suffering and terror will be as quiet as a whimper, if not a stunned shock, and will be even more foreign to those same people who today perpetrate it.
It won’t look like the horrors we’ve seen, but its shadow will rhyme with the faraway stories of hard fought struggles won.
The ones you and I come from.
The ones we’re in now.