alt Hacker News> Let's not act like this attitude emerged out of thin air. Trump also had an opportunity to bring Americans together against a common threat, and he (and his lookalikes abroad) decided to turn it into the cultural catastrophe that you're now supposing was inevitable.
This kind of depends on the "great man" view of history where these figures have the kind of influence needed to move entire cultures. I don't put much stock in this. No matter how much togetherness rhetoric one threw at the problem the mistakes made in handling the pandemic, while understandable, emboldened and enabled forces that would result in an eventual backlash.
Witness Canada, where we had a government that constantly emphasized togetherness against a common threat, and yet we also got the trucker convoy. Some of this was probably cultural contagion from the US, but not all of it.
> This kind of depends on the "great man" view of history where these figures have the kind of influence needed to move entire cultures.
No it doesn't it just depends on the "words the most important person in the world says matters in times of crisis" view of history.
> Some of this was probably cultural contagion from the US, but not all of it.
I don't think "all of it" is the alternative. There has clearly been a groundswell of similar sentiments across the western world, but to suppose that the question of who is the US President is literally immaterial is frankly insane.