It's not a "both sides" though. Do you really think state governments in the past weren't just as right wing as the government? Hell, it took the Voting Rights Act to get minorities and the poor the unfettered ability to vote, and still it didn't come easy. In the past, state governors routinely called out the National Guard. Americans got killed and arrested. Blue-collar "Hard Hats" would sail into crowds of protestors beating the shit out of "hippies" and "radicals." Actual brownshirt uniform wearing NAZIS would march openly showing their faces.. In 1984 I got pulled over in Darien Connecticut by a cop wearing a White Aryan Resistance pin on the collar of his shirt.

What's different now is most of the people that fought fascism directly in the Second World War are now dead, and generational amnesia has taken over and so many people have embraced militant reactionary views because of it. My generation, raised on TV, lost the plot when cable TV became the unregulated norm and the right wing fearmongering of the Murdochs and others presented itself as legitimate "news" and snowed almost everyone over 60 into supporting things that they were taught as children to avoid.

Against the historical drift and where we've come from 50 years ago, AND the forward march through the 90's that was breathtaking in many ways, (leading to Barack Obama being elected) yeah, things are backsliding, but that's just the reactionary stupid part of the society. The rest of it is progressing.

I'm at an interesting point watching my Alex Jones listening co-worker come to grips with the fact that his grandson isn't troubled at all by his friends who are the gay and LGBTQ theater kids (the ONLY group in the school to NOT tease him because of his disability) and they've accepted him and he's happy. Watching someone that was spewing racist, sexist bile a few years ago have an epiphany that FEW would have had decades ago says a lot more about what the public really is thinking. Tells me that much of it isn't real, just performative. I friends in high school that got thrown out of their homes and disowned by their parents because they hung out with others whom the folks didn't approve of. That seems to occur a LOT less today. Which is amazing.

The best thing to happen for the progressive movement is these regressive policies and actions that come just as AI torpedoes 100's of thousands of jobs and the climate and energy prices spike along with health and housing (nevermind education) and there is a sitting buffoon in the White House making it all worse.