Circling Back

My first real post for this blog was about a small group of protestors that, for several years, held court at the corner of Bothell Way and Ballinger Way in Lake Forest Park, Washington. Their fear, that their really quite small and innocuous protest would somehow lead to them being targeted for retaliation by the government, struck me as paranoid.

I'm not sure that I've changed my opinion on that in the decade and a half or so since then. But I do note that it's not that uncommon a feeling about the world. I suspect that it has a lot to do with people seeing themselves as good in an evil world, and, on top of that, a threat to the status quo.

It's an odd paradox, when people see themselves as targeted by a power greater than themselves because they are a credible threat to that power. While I can't imagine the paranoia to be pleasant, I do think that many people take a certain amount of pride in the idea that they're somehow capable of sparking a revolution that would literally reshape their world.

Right now, in the United States, the major energy in this sense is on the political Right. Whether that's Donald Trump's insistence that the "deep state" is out to get him to prevent him from making life better for "real Americans," the idea that the global SARS-2-CoV pandemic was a global hoax designed to allow "élites" to solidify power or the weird, cult-like Illuminati of the Q-Anon movement, for the time being, "conspiracy theorist" and "right wing" go together in the minds of many in the United States.

But that isn't going to be the case for long. After all, the Lake Forest Part protestors, who were so spooked by my camera back in the day, we all left-leaning. The idea that government and big business (again with the "élites") are hatching hateful conspiracies to subjugate "the people" in the name of helping the rich become even more wealthy is a time-worn stereotype. Eventually, something will take hold, and become an animating force of the American Left. If for no other reason than people understand the power that a shared belief, especially when it pits "us versus them," than create and direct.

For all that there is a vision of the United States as being a pluralistic, multicultural, multi-ethnic society, it's not particularly difficult to break it down into a number of competing groups. And some of those groups have interests that are mutually exclusive with other groups' interests. Their shifting coalitions and alliances have shaped, and introduced conflict into, American history for even longer than there has been a United States of America. For all that politicians (and would-be politicians) and other forms of leaders have spoken passionately about unifying the nation, they've never really had the resources to do so for more than sort periods.

And so the conflict continues. And for as long as it does, those people who see themselves both as losing, and situated to one day win, will see the powerful as afraid enough of them to send out the goon squad.