Nuance is absent.
That. Right there. I remember arriving in Texas from Denmark for college in 1981, and one of the very first comments I heard was "So, are you some kind of COMMUNIST?"
The ignorance... it BURNS.
So yeah, it has been around since... well, a long time. But the middle does seem to have been erased during the last few decades, a bit the the (illusion?) that there's actually a middle class between the "haves" and the "have nots."
