A lot of qanon came from flat earth and now have moved on to vaccines and other conspiracies. I wonder what they'll be doing next year but I am sure they will find something. There is a significant part of the population who are deeply uncomfortable with the state of the world and look for an explanation that comforts them. This used to be mainly religion but it's spreading out into things like qanon. Extreme partisanship probably has the same origin because it explains that the world is bad because of "others".
There is a significant part of the population who are deeply uncomfortable with the state of the world and look for an explanation that comforts them.
Yes. A real problem is that the US has no consensus on how society should work. It did, in, say, the 1950s. People were expected to get jobs, and work, and the spectrum of available jobs was matched, roughly, to the range of human capabilities. That was a generally stable situation. That's the US from 1945 to 1975 or so.
That's changed, leaving behind a huge number of unemployed and under-employed people. More education doesn't help; about half of US college graduates are doing jobs that don't need a college education.
Nobody really has a good answer to this. Which is why conservative populism looks to the past.
