>>9916we may also reintroduce class here: So the average American has been staring down stagnant living standards since the 1970s, what of it? the average politician feels and knows that
his life is getting better, and in a very human way he generalizes that the country must be getting better. the same of the well paid media professionals and so on - for them things
have never been better! the dismal destitution of daily life for the average person is completely outside their range of experience, as distant from you or i as we in the first world are from the people of Haiti.
So if you ask them: have the policies of the last 40 years, the policies that have so transparently dismantled what little quality of life the American people could expect to enjoy as citizens of a developed nation, have those policies been a success? have they made America better? of course they're going to say yes! and in a culture of "fake it 'till you make it" delusion borne of denying the existence of a class system*, of course the aspirational will repeat it! No conspiracy, no party line passed on from on-high, just people relying on their honest day to day experience and (in the most American of ways) declining to look at the data that doesn't align with their worldview.
*the upside of a nation like Britain, with a literal class of feudal lords, is that people are far more aware about how their position in life is determined not by what they do, but by what their father has done. cultural cross contamination with America has dampened this quite a bit, but it is still a very helpful inheritance. Well, helpful for being in contact with reality - it's also a reason British people are miserable fuckers.
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