Honestly, America just seems in a death spiral across so many different factors, and the only solution to basically any of them is having faith in government, but the government has repeatedly failed them so many times that people don’t.

Like lack of fixing lead and pollution problems creates dumber people, less able to hold their government to account.

Lack of strong public education makes people think that governments can’t run schools, so they pull their kids and money into private schools which makes public schools worse. It also makes people dumber and less able to hold their government to account.

Lack of public healthcare means that people don’t understand that the government can really effectively and efficiently run a utility that helps them at the lowest points of their lives.

Like, American GDP per capita, is ~$90,000, Canada’s is roughly ~$55,000. We should not be able to provide comparable government services, and yet every time I went down to the states I’d notice notably worse infrastructure, on top of all the services and safety nets that I knew they weren’t getting.

Not even WWII history, US history, again not Texas schoolbook approved.

Grew up in the South: “Remember the Alamo”, “It’s heritage, not hate!”, “War of Northern Aggression”, “States Rights”, “The South will rise again!”

All angrily yelled about a war 160 years ago, all angers that have been left to fester because a group has lied about them and was never dealt with. These are not statements of olden days. These are things you’ll see commonplace in the south today.

The Alamo: Fought because a bunch of slavers invaded a sovereign nation (Mexico) for the purposes of trying to peel it off and get it into the Union to have more slave owning states to control the government. Mexico was a non-slave nation.

War of Northern Aggression: The South shot first. And they’ll blame other situations, like federal control (that’ll be discussed in next point), or John Brown with bleeding Kansas… who John Brown did go on a merry murder spree, but against slavers specifically moving up to Kansas to… again… try to outnumber the non-slave states so they’d have control over the federal government.

States Rights: The Constitution of the Confederate States of America specifically prevents states from outlawing slavery… so no fucking states rights. And on southern aggression when it comes to states rights, the South kept putting bills pre-Civil War to force northern states to allow their bounty hunters in to chase fugitive slaves. There were non-fugitive blacks that were kidnapped and taken back to the south to be enslaved.

The South Will Rise Again: These statues that were all over that’s upsetting people getting knocked down weren’t put up post Civil War, they were put up by the Daughters of Confederacy which became a group in 1890, and got most of them put up between 1900-1910, all the way up to the 50s, the eras of Jim Crow segregation. They’re in 31 states. There were 11 states that seceded. The flag that most people call the Confederate flag is in fact the Virginia Battle Standard, the actual Confederate flag was determined to look too much like a flag of surrender ironically months before they surrendered. Virginia keeps asking/demanding Minnesota for their flag back, claiming heritage… thankfully Minnesota keeps telling them it’s their heritage that they took it.

Most of this is not known by people living in the country. The lies are repeated far more than the truths. If you visited the South and didn’t know anything about the US Civil War you’d be convinced the South won.

2025 at this point, I’m convinced they got their victory.