History UsefulNotes / CulturalCringe

Right-wing Americans who buy into the cultural cringe, on the other hand, tend to take the tack that America is in a moral or spiritual decay brought on by the spread of godless hedonism through public education, declining religious affiliation, and [[TheNewRockAndRoll Hollywood / rock and roll / video games / the Internet]], or even the way that women and homosexuals and people of non-European ethnicity have been made full citizens with the same rights under the law as the country's male ethnic-European population. (This is the "9/11 was divine retribution for America tolerating homosexuality" line from Moral Majority types.) And damn that Obummer for letting in darkies to steal our jobs![[note]]Though on the bright side The Rapture is happening soon (on account of these being The End Times) so it's not actually necessary to send these people to hell since God will do it himself in short order. Anyhow, these two varieties of the Cringe have a nasty habit of giving each other plenty of 'grist for the mill' (or 'things to argue about'), as Americans like to say. The American philosopher Richard Rorty. called out this dynamic.[[/note]] During the worst parts of the economic crisis, this became so prevalent that people on both sides of the political spectrum started to claim that the country was in [[http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/marchapril_2012/on_political_books/the_rise_of_the_ameropessimist035860.php irreversible decline]] and doomed to go The Way Of Rome (ignoring the thousand-year continuation of the Roman Empire in what we call 'The Byzantine Empire' and various other nations [[Spiritual successor inheriting a bit of Rome's power]], and so on). This has even gotten to the point that many, many Americans fear that their government would gradually erase their freedoms and create a totalitarian nightmare ([[UsefulNotes/PoliticalIdeologies fascist, socialist, or any other strawman here]]) that would make [[CrapsackWorld Oceania]] of ''Literature/NineteenEightyFour'' look like the Boy Scouts. Suffice to say, the election of UsefulNotes/DonaldTrump hasn't done much to assuage these fears for his haters. Many partisans, on both the Democratic and Republican sides, are fully convinced the opposing faction would unleash the DayOfTheJackboot on the other given half a chance.

Right-wing Americans who buy into the cultural cringe, on the other hand, tend to take the tack that America is in a moral or spiritual decay brought on by the spread of godless hedonism through public education, declining religious affiliation, and [[TheNewRockAndRoll Hollywood / rock and roll / video games / the Internet]], or even the way that women and homosexuals and people of non-European ethnicity have been made full citizens with the same rights under the law as the country's male ethnic-European population. (This is the "9/11 was divine retribution for America tolerating homosexuality" line from Moral Majority types.) And damn that Obummer for letting in darkies to steal our jobs![[note]]Though on the bright side The Rapture is happening soon (on account of these being The End Times) so it's not actually necessary to send these people to hell since God will do it himself in short order. Anyhow, these two varieties of the Cringe have a nasty habit of giving each other plenty of 'grist for the mill' (or 'things to argue about'), as Americans like to say. The American philosopher Richard Rorty. called out this dynamic.[[/note]] During the worst parts of the economic crisis, this became so prevalent that people on both sides of the political spectrum started to claim that the country was in [[http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/marchapril_2012/on_political_books/the_rise_of_the_ameropessimist035860.php irreversible decline]] and doomed to go The Way Of Rome (ignoring the thousand-year continuation of the Roman Empire in what we call 'The Byzantine Empire' and various other nations inheriting a bit of Rome's power, and so on). This has even gotten to the point that many, many Americans fear that their government would gradually erase their freedoms and create a totalitarian nightmare ([[UsefulNotes/PoliticalIdeologies fascist, socialist, or any other strawman here]]) that would make [[CrapsackWorld Oceania]] of ''Literature/NineteenEightyFour'' look like the Boy Scouts. Suffice to say, the election of UsefulNotes/DonaldTrump hasn't done much to assuage these fears for his haters. Many partisans, on both the Democratic and Republican sides, are fully convinced the opposing faction would unleash the DayOfTheJackboot on the other given half a chance.

In fact, the Cringe is so exacerbated that it gets its very own word: ''Malinchismo'', which doesn't exist anywhere else in the Spanish speaking world.[[note]]"Malinchismo" refers to UsefulNotes/LaMalinche, an indian female slave who was given as a tribute to conquistador UsefulNotes/HernanCortez by the Mayans, became his mistress, and served as translator for his party with the tribes that they met. Post-colonial governments, though ''at least'' as white-dominated and oppressive of the Indians as the Spanish, vilified her as a "traitor", in what's basically the standard ex-colonial [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romantic_nationalism variation on the story]], with extra misogyny included.[[/note]] Further exacerbating the cringe is the ongoing Drug Wars between {{The Cartel}}s, and the uphill struggle of law enforcement to deal with it.

The Republicans, who [[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_October_1910_revolution finally came to power in 1910]], focused on the Catholic Church and the dominant "rotativist" (Historical and Progressive) political parties as the cause of its decline (which had actually been caused by the Iberian Union, which involved Portugal in the Philippine Dinasty's {{Forever War}}s with most other European powers and resulted in the loss of most of its Asian colonies, and the [[UsefulNotes/NapoleonBonaparte Napolean Invasions]], which laid rest to Continental Portugal and resulted in the loss of UsefulNotes/{{Brazil}} when the King came back as well as the [[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Wars Liberal Wars]] between the pro-constitution Liberals and the Miguelite Absolutists, although the Church's opulence and science-hampering obscurantism, and the parties' corruption and high similitude certainly didn't help matters).

Historically, the UsefulNotes/CulturalRevolution was an extreme manifestation of China's Cultural Cringe. The Revolution saw the country's teenagers being swept up into a grassroots anti-feudal and anti-imperialist movement that targeted the people closest to them - their managers, their teachers, their parents - for their supposedly archaic and anti-societal values. We don't have figures for the numbers of people interrogated, tortured, and beaten to death in the so-called '(Revolutionary) Struggle Sessions' by mobs of angry kids but we do know it was at least a few tens of thousands. Less important but also targeted were symbols of feudal and imperialist society - books, plays, music, art, religious and archaeological sites and artifacts. At one point, out of a potential/'feudal' repertoire of several thousand, precisely ''eight'' plays could be legally performed. In the time since, the Revolution has become a new source of the Cringe in China and it is one of the very few instances in which the Chinese Communist Party admits it made a mistake.