> A decade from now we have no idea what the political climate will be.
When I was young, due to my family's business, I lived in multiple cultures outside of the US. I have personally experienced precisely the kind of political shift you mention in your post as a teenager, living in Argentina. I am referring to the military take-over.
Imagine a world where the police or military thugs can kick down your front door in the middle of the night and take some or all of your family, never to be seen again. Imagine a world where, rock and roll was declared illegal and you could be arrested, tortured or worse if found "guilty" --not by a jury, by a single thug-- of anything remotely associated with it. Or how about being in a bus going somewhere, the bus gets pulled over and they beat the shit out of a bunch of people, just because they can (and justify it in some form).
If you were known to not be in alignment with the prevailing ideology your life was worth nothing. Thousands died. Thousands disappeared.
I had the personal experience one evening of getting pulled over by a couple of police cars while just walking home with friends after going to the movies. They threw us (and I do mean threw us, violently) up against the wall, harassed the shit out of us, slapped a couple of us around, took whatever money we had and sent us on our way. We were LUCKY that it didn't go beyond that.
Americans are alarmingly ignorant of history outside their own borders. Our system of education is so one-sided, in an ideological sense, that kids leaving high school, and, in particular, college, become adults with truly distorted and troubling ideological programming.
You talk to ANY immigrant who came from anywhere where the ideologies promoted by our universities and mass media are the "law of the land" and you are far more likely to get a treatise on how horrific this is rather than enthusiastic support for it. This ideology has proven to be a generational disaster across the world and across time. And yet, we, collectively, have allowed this to happen.
> So many people are okay with unconstitutional things as long as it supports their side and beliefs.
This is a major point that, once again, isn't taught in schools. The consequences will not be favorable over the long term. The idea that you should protect the rights of those you do not agree with is so fundamentally unique that it is rare, very rare, around the world. The US, in that sense, was unique. I say "was" because, today, I believe this is history. The fact that university students will riot when someone their puppeteers do not agree with comes to give a presentation at their school is evidence enough of the intolerant society we have manage to "educate" ourselves into.
In this twisted world, the reality is that those espousing such things as tolerance, equity, freedoms, etc. actually, through their actions, actually do the opposite and represent the opposite: intolerance, non-equity, a desire and willingness to curtail freedoms, etc.
We have managed to create an entire generation of adults full of hatred and intolerance.
This is not a good outcome. This is the kind of thing that, in the chess game of a globally competitive world, your enemies absolutely rejoice about. While the US is busy polarizing its own population --alarmingly, through education-- actors around the world spend ever day placing one foot in front of the other. The result of this massive lack of foresight will not be pretty.
> It is genuinely unsettling.
Yes. I'll add, scary, disappointing, unproductive and dangerous. I do realize that a good percentage of the HN college-educated audience is in the grips of ideology that was pounded into their heads. It's Plato's Allegory of the Cave. All you can do is try to lead them out of the shadows. Yet, they have to be the ones open to viewing the world with their own eyes, rather than the shadows they were presented with.
I would highly recommend watching a series on Netflix:
"BREAK IT ALL: The History of Rock in Latin America"
https://www.netflix.com/title/81006953
One of the very interesting things about this series is that they actually explore the political shifts you hinted at in your comment. They, of course, cover this in the context of Rock, but also provide a generalized view. This kind of thing has happened in nearly every Latin American country. It is disturbing that Americans don't know this history well. If they did, many of the political actors and most of the militant academics in this country would be laughed off the stage. There is HISTORY to prove that these people are not only demented, they are actually dangerous to society.