Can a US citizen explain what seems to me tobe a dissonance
Americans will, unsurprisingly, pay lip service to the American ideals of democracy because that's what they were taught. The two disconnects I see are: do they actually believe in them? And can the identify a compromise of the ideas as such? Not always, and infrequently.
People are exceptionally good at ignoring ingnorable things that they don't want to deal with, the "someone else's problem" phenomenon.
Political groups that don't frequently recommit to American ideals mean that the political trends sway away from them. Add in some "this time it is different" type of rationalization, and boneheaded "America could never possibly X" attitude that makes them think the groundwork for X is always and forever unambiguously benign.
So different political groups have different levels of commitment to different American ideals. Someone can believe in gun rights as important to maintain like all the other rights that strengthen our democracy. Or they could just like guns and find out the political groups they're already predisposed to disagree with want to take them away. Their commitment to American ideals is repackaged into hatred of the other party -- and as long as this hypothetical person got to keep their gun and a few other pet political issues, they'd welcome a dictator.
Americans will, unsurprisingly, pay lip service to the American ideals of democracy because that's what they were taught. The two disconnects I see are: do they actually believe in them? And can the identify a compromise of the ideas as such? Not always, and infrequently.
People are exceptionally good at ignoring ingnorable things that they don't want to deal with, the "someone else's problem" phenomenon.
Political groups that don't frequently recommit to American ideals mean that the political trends sway away from them. Add in some "this time it is different" type of rationalization, and boneheaded "America could never possibly X" attitude that makes them think the groundwork for X is always and forever unambiguously benign.
So different political groups have different levels of commitment to different American ideals. Someone can believe in gun rights as important to maintain like all the other rights that strengthen our democracy. Or they could just like guns and find out the political groups they're already predisposed to disagree with want to take them away. Their commitment to American ideals is repackaged into hatred of the other party -- and as long as this hypothetical person got to keep their gun and a few other pet political issues, they'd welcome a dictator.