California can just keep doing its thing and the rest of the country benefits from their regulations. Prop 65 is to thank for all the Harbor Freight stores no longer reeking of outgassing plastics.
If there's one thing California needs to learn from these past 6 months, it's that you can simply ignore what the courts say. When you're rich and powerful, you can literally just say "I do not consent" when legal consequences are presented to you.
It feels that way, but this legislation is ideologically consistent with reducing regulations which constrain companies and force them to take the externalities of their actions into account.
I still think it's ideologically consistent with insulating companies from externalities. Without official investigations, companies can assert their own interpretations of events. Boeing did this with the NTSB recently:
In a hazard investigation you don’t want the investigators to have teeth. It’s not about finding wrongdoing it’s about determining what happened and how to avoid it in the future. If a company takes negligent actions referring to DOJ should be enough.
The amount of pent up hate and vitriol coming out now is incredible. People hated each other so much and more or less kept it somewhat in check for so many decades?
Bizarre as it sounds, I think a lot of people can hate on demand. Media starts beating the drum, and a proportion of the population go from apathetic to pretty damn frothy surprisingly fast.
I have a background in NLP (pre-LLM) and like to study extremist rhetoric, and, while I don't think you're being reductionist, it's a little more removed than that. I'd replace with "hate" with "problems and stress". Once you can attribute that stress to a group... that's when the hate develops. There are certain global powers who have recognized this and weaponized it. Agreeing with the most extreme of both sides, loudly, is the modern standard for propaganda.
It wasn't socially acceptable to express your hatred, and there are a lot of people who just needed someone to stoke the flames of their biases to the point of hate and violence.
We've watched it become socially acceptable to not keep your biases unchecked and there is a multi-billion dollar media apparatus that pumps 24/7 propaganda into people's minds.
In the past, the stuff we've seen mainstreamed today stayed relatively niche on AM radio and in klan meetings.
First, generally when people lives are good, they tend to blow the small problems out of proportion. This is pretty much how US got to where it is.
Secondly, if you look at the history of politics, conservatives have always been the ones to weaponize politics as a form of moral judgement. So nothing is really new.