I go back and forth a lot between thinking people are losing faith in U.S. systems in record time, and thinking that I’m making up libidinal fantasies and overestimating the speed or extent of that loss of faith.
So what do you all think?
There’s already a legitimacy crisis. It’s gonna keep seeping in.
Right now it looks partisan, but it isn’t fully. Look at the vaccination rates. That’s not just partisanship. Hell, Trump told people to get vaccinated and they booed him. That’s a large swath of people who don’t trust a system on both ideological grounds and because they don’t see a system that actually helps their lives and can be trusted. And it includes a decent number of alt medicine boomers that are not particularly chuddy and a disproportionate fraction of black people who have very good reason not to trust the system. Plus, that the system continues to fail, as information about vaccination and its costs are just pushed to certain media apparatuses rather than actually creating a public health program to get everyone vaccinated through home visits and one-on-one conversations.
“Figure it out yourself” has been the name of the game with the pandemic response and it was not a surprise for many.
