I think America has a Dale Earnhart problem. Earnhart died in 2001 because of his rejection of reality, his stubbornness, his cultural entrapment. The story of his demise begins at about the 38-minute mark of this YouTube video.
Sportswriter Ed Hinton summarized the prevailing attitude of NASCAR drivers toward the device that would soon become one of racing's most important life savers. Watch at the 40-minute mark. “Here's some egghead from some Yankee university coming down here telling us how to do things.... And Earnhart was pretty much the ringleader against it (the HANS device).”
Earnhart was a brilliant man not a moron, but he suffered from being deeply immersed in the culture that adored him. “If a scientist said it, it must be wrong” has been their prevailing cultural dictum to this day.
We see this same rejection of science in the red states, especially, and the red counties in particular. The fatality rate from COVID since vaccinations became available in counties that went for Trump in 2020 is twice the rate of counties that went for Biden.
The leadership of the Republican party has been satisfied to lose large numbers of their supporters to a pandemic because the desire on the part of their constituents to live in an alternate reality is so great that they ignore what is plain to the rest of us. This head-in-the-sand mentality is what drives their train.
If Republican voters believe that Donald Trump is anything but a charlatan and a doofus, the Republican politicians are not about to smarten up the chumps. “So a few thousand of them die. So what?” Republican politicians tell themselves. “The rest of them will still be selling each other their Amway products, voting Republican, and watching Fox News and NASCAR or whatever it's called these days.”
The best analysis of our current dystopia comes from Paul Rosenberg in Salon. The mythology of the Lost Cause drives American conservative politics and will continue to do so. Rosenberg quotes political scientist Angie Maxwell's words from five years earlier,
“Southern whiteness expands beyond racial identity and supremacy, encapsulating rigid stances on religion, education, the role of government, the view of art, an opposition to science and expertise … and any other topic that comes under attack.”
Earnhart's death was a tribute to the mindset of the Lost Cause. The logic of restraining the head along with the torso to prevent unsurvivable stress to the upper spine and neck had to be set aside so that “them smart-ass northerners” wouldn't be allowed to win. Significantly, the less Southern-oriented racing circuits didn't seem to have trouble with adopting the HANS device.
So, if enough people vote in November and the ballots are counted, a Lost Cause fascist future for the US can be avoided. The North will have won the war - for the time being at least.
But if Moscow Mitch gets his mojo back and if the Republicans take the House with Kevin McCarthy as Speaker, the US is over.