LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY ![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
kalibex)
"What I see in America, on the religious right, is a paradox I've
never observed before, at least on a mass level, in the US.
"For the first time I can recall in US history, a sizeable number of
otherwise rational people have divorced themselves from the American
dream---in a very specific way, but a conscious divorce nonetheless.
"Millions of people now believe God, not themselves, is the prime
mover of will and event in their lives.
"This strikes me as unprecedented, not least because the voices of the
centre and centre-left---you have no social democratic consensus in
the US as we know it in Canada or Europe---have little grounding to
identify the reasons for this.
"As a lapsed Catholic from a very conservative Irish immigrant family,
I think what I see is what I see, if you know what I mean. The
irrational is in the ascendance, just as it was in the late 1920s in
both the US and, far more evilly, in Germany, having been well set
loose in Russia
"The implications are huge: the rugged American individualist
philosophy of pragmatism and utilitarianism and the Horatio Alger
myth no longer seem to apply. The notion of social mobility itself
may well be in peril in this culture of 'inshallah'---'God wills it'."
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Intriguing Analysis
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