I'd like to think that as Americans we're in the same tribe, Lon, but I'm pretty discouraged these days about the American tribe. If you were my neighbor and you needed help, I'd give it gladly, but it's an altered reality online, who knows
how much of it is bot-driven, how much is armchair bluster and how much is genuine. What I'm reading from the far right is disturbingly delusional but how is it different from the past? How much by kind, how much by degree?
In the psychology of groups, the best indicator of two warring factions finding common ground is when they have to unite to fight an enemy greater than them, who's a threat to them both. In the micro, that's why domestic violence calls can be so dangerous - the chance that the abused partner will join with the abuser against the responding cop. In the macro, that's why right and left (in general) came together behind Bush after 9/11. It didn't last long, but it was there for a time. Before the Iraq invasion, before the Patriot Act, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib.
What I see from conservatives now is (to me) so much worse than the conservatism I left. But then maybe it's because I'm naive, being relatively recently separated from conservatism I can't clearly see yet how much the underpinnings of today were in the conservatism I grew up in and lived in for so many years. How much the racism was there, the xenophobia, the nativism, the drive for religion-based political power, the disregard for the nation's underprivileged, the money poured into the military-industrial complex that could've been used for education, infrastructure, social safety nets. And the fear-based, relentless propaganda that if you didn't vote Republican the commies were going to come take your religion and your guns away from you and put you in reeducation camps. Of course it happened it other countries, I don't want to play that down in any way, I despise totalitarianism. I grew up in that time hearing the horrors of Cambodia and Viet Nam and Romania, China, USSR. I was surrounded by the idea that marxism would take away everything that was beautiful and everything that was traditional, without the awareness that the promise of what would bring that "back" was a fascist promise.