One of the starkest shocks I had during the initial trump candidacy and pandemic was the veil being lifted on so many people I worked with or knew.
People I thought of as intelligent, level-headed, and reasonable suddenly appeared hateful, mulish, and willfully ignorant.
They didn’t care about the environment. They didn’t care if they got people sick or killed them with covid. They didn’t care about the open overtures to authoritarianism or fascism - if anything they directly welcomed this. The wild and rampant stupidity behind the conspiracies and Q-anon. The concerted attacks on women’s or lgbtq rights, the denial of equality or justice for people killed by police. The complete willingness to throw their fellow humans under the bus for any reason at all to spare themselves the inconvenience of not being able to eat at Applebees without a mask.
And they manufactured whatever slights they could think of to justify their actions regarding the above. It was retaliation for loss of perceived status as White People In Charge.
It completely killed discourse because you can’t have a discussion with someone who isn’t willing to argue in good faith. Who Gish Gallops and buthwhatabouts. Who exhausts their opponent with conspiracies that are so full of shit that you don’t even know where to start rebutting because they have no place in reality.
The trump election sharply split America in two. The country and the world are a far less stable place than a decade ago.