this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2024
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Michael Moore interviewed a bunch of GOPs of various ages. He separated them and asked the same question. "At what point did America veer off course?"
They all said the same thing; America was fine until they personally hit their 20's. The ones born in the 1950s thought the 1970s were the problem, and the ones born in the Disco Era blamed the Clinton years.
It REALLY veered off course in 2016. I was in my 30s. I already had kids. I used to vote split ticket. Now straight blue. A lot of the negative things about Trump came about before the 2016 election.
The 2000 election and Citizens United were terrible. I remember Palin's nonsense might have cost McCain the election. That was an easy choice considering his age. My thought was, if he dies in office miss "I can see Russia from my house" response to foreign policy platform would be POTUS. No thanks. Now the GOP all seem to support Trump and his obvious fascism. Nope. The GOP needs to die and the Democrats need complete control for a cycle and should institute a popular vote using ranked choice for president.
ETA: After the changes, the Democrats would inevitably split into multiple parties, including a conservative party.
I'd say the us began veering off course before I was even born, starting in 1981 with Reagan. 2001 was another point that escalated the decline of the US with the bush years. 2017 was just the icing on the shit cake for this country.
2025 is looking like it's going to be the nail in the coffin :(
I agree. Nixon was simply a bad president, but Reagan was the start of "the government is bad by definition".
Nixon was simply a bad president, yes, but Nixon's election campaign popularized the "Southern strategy". Republicans at the time weren't particularly popular in the South because--as they'll happily tell you--Lincoln was a Republican; so they started flirting with racism and courting Southern voters by openly hating black people. It allowed Nixon and others to win elections in the South and became a mainstay of Republicanism. It was the Republican party's first major foray into fascism which relies on misinformation and manipulation of people through their worst impulses.
Since that worked, they've only gotten worse. The Southern Strategy, which began before I was born, is where I peg the start of the collapse of progressive politics.
BTW, until that time Democrats were doing it. The parties pretty much traded places on their stances toward race over the course of a couple of decades. So you could also argue that things have gotten neither better nor worse. If so, that doesn't exactly fill me with enthusiasm for our future.
Also, Nixon sabotaged the negotiations to end the Vietnam war so that he could run on ending it. And then, when he won, didn't want to actually end it because he was worried about being known as a president who lost a war.
So first he caused more people to die so he could make a campaign promise. Then even more people died when his ego couldn't handle keeping that promise.
And then Ford was almost as big of a piece of shit for pardoning him.
I was surprised to learn that Nixon carried the electoral college 520 votes to 17. Looking back now, obviously Nixon was a deeply unpopular president, so I was shocked learning that he was elected in one of the biggest landslide victories the US had ever seen.
I'd argue a lot of our current problems are directly descended from Nixon being pardoned and facing 0 consequences for his crimes.
1912, when we elected Woodrow racist ass Wilson, instead of Teddy. Wilson segregated the federal government, wrote Southern revisionism, funded and showed Birth of a Nation at the White House, commissioned the erection of a bunch of statues of traitors, refounded the KKK, oh and directly caused the European theater of WW2, The Cold War, and the spectre of Stalinism. He also let Sykes Picot through uncontested.
https://youtu.be/hLiI6kXZkZI
I think your scenario is very likely to play out, but in my mind the GOP won’t die, they will simply merge the neocons and neolibs into a formal pro-corporate party. Once the people have an actual left-of-center party to vote for that champions workers rights and other populist policies unencumbered, the political dynamics will shift very rapidly. This is why it has taken so long to occur - the dog and pony show of fake opposition prevents us from having that choice entirely.
Well, there's some changes and dates that are independent from personal experience.
The Reagan administration surely turned a lot of things sour for a lot of people, worldwide btw.
When Reagan took office, "middle class" was still defined as one job supporting a family of four. In those days, $1 million was considered a great fortune. By the time Bush Sr. was done, middle class was two jobs to support the household, and $1 million was what a rich guy paid for a party.
This goes along with my initial reaction to OP.
I don't think it was when they stopped being coddled. I think it was when they got an age to start paying attention to politics or reading the newspaper (or when they finally had the tools/faculty to understand what was going on).
When we pick up the paper for the first time with open eyes, we let out a collective "oh god..."
Unlikely they read it and understood it. The average American has a reading of comprehension no higher than 5th grade.
https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy
This limitation leads to anxiety and confusion due to a lack of ability to abstract.
They... Grew up and learned the world sucks so they need toake it worse?
I definitely thought things were fucked when I was in my 20s (Bush 2.0 era). Today I blame Reagan, though.
And every day, I wonder how the timeline looks if John Hinckley Jr. was a better shooter.
Pretty much the same.
Hinkley kills Reagan and Bush Sr. wins his election big the same way LBJ was pushed in by the post-Kennedy wave.
Hell, Bush would have given Nancy a Cabinet post
When Reagan came in , 'middle class' was still one job supporting a family of four. In those days, $1 million was a vast personal fortune.
By the time Bush Sr. was out, middle class was two incomes to run the family, and $1 million was what a rich guy paid for a party.
I was a kid in 2000.
That's when it really veered off course.
You grew up thinking Reagan was normal. He wasn't.
I wasn't around for Reagan, I was a Bush Sr. Baby.
I grew up thinking George W. Bush was fucked up as soon as I was old enough to have some semblance of political consciousness.
When I saw people treating him seriously after playing Fighter Pilot Barbie I knew things were going to go downhill fast.
At risk of being downvoted, I am a conservative. I am a conservative for moral/social reasons. I consider our going off-course was a consequence of WW2 as those who fought would go home and seek a different way forward. That different way took a few years to brew but really came to light in the 1960's. Religiously, we had Vatican II council and the modern-rite Mass that gave the appearance the Church was throwing out her traditions and moral teachings. Socially, we had the introduction of "the pill" quickly followed by no-fault divorce and widespread legal abortion. Like these changes or hate them, there is no denying that these would have a HUGE effect on average family dynamics. Then Nixon opened China to the world and began the process of exporting industry to China. It started slow but continued to pick-up steam, hitting maximum industrial transfer during the Clinton administration. I was born after all these things. The effect is children being raised by only one parent, fewer children, men who cannot provide for their families without having a working spouse, and a whole host of trickle-down-effects like the fact that we now need 2x the housing to accommodate families of divorce.
Smart phones, AI, 9-11, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and everything else people my age cite ... these are peanuts compared to the destruction of the family unit that happened by destruction of our religion, promotion of anti-natalism, dividing families, destroying jobs that are key to young people starting families, and creating an artificial housing crisis by doubling the number of houses needed per family.
Nixon and Reagan sending jobs overseas? Both those guys were staunch conservatives. By the time center Left Clinton came in it was a done deal.
The reason 'no fault divorce' broke up so many families was that there were a lot of women getting beaten by their husbands.
And it was conservative polices that destroyed the one breadwinner family. When Nixon came in 'middle class' was one Union job supporting a family of four. Nixon knew the Vietnam War was unwinnable, but he didn't want to be the one to lose it either. His solution was to keep printing money to pay for the war, while not raising taxes to pay for it. This caused inflation. Jimmy Carter was the one who cooled the inflation spiral down by hiring a man named Paul Volker. After Carter lost in 1980, Reagan kept Volker.
So from 1968 to 1992 you had four years of a Democratic President and twenty years of GOP Conservatives. That's when we went from one income being enough to support a family of four to needing two incomes. That's also the time when $1 million went from being a vast personal fortune to what a rich guy paid for a party.
Finally, one big reason a lot of people turned away from religion was hucksters like Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority. Many if the so-called religious schools in the south sprang up after the Supreme Court made school segregation illegal. Instead of sending their kids to school with 'those people' the so-called religious folks opened private schools that got around the law.
Maybe if the religious leadership of this country had actually followed Christ's teaching we wouldn't be here. We'll never know.
You may not have noticed but, other than Nixon opening China and the presidents since him accelerating the export of jobs, everything else I mentioned was non-political or on the margins of politics. People need to stop thinking of politics like a religion. There's a whole lot that happens outside the question of who the president is or what party is more popular. This stuff was going to happen no matter who was the president and no matter who ran congress. Virtually all these problems happened at the same time outside of the United States too, especially the western world. The problems opened-up because the effects of Vatican II and the modern-rite Mass. These were the restraints on moral relativism and modernism that had been pushing for a new way since the 1880's. Once the restraint was gone, the people acted without regard to an authority that no longer existed in their minds.
Back at the time of Vatican 2 being LGBT was illegal in most of the Western world. Hypocrites in the Church shielded predator priests and moved them from parish to parish when they got caught. People got sick of the two-faced moralists and walked away.
Also, you didn't respond to my point that a lot of marriages broke up because women were tired of getting beaten up.
Vatican II and the modern rite were pushed by the same people who raped little boys. I do not see any evidence that there were a significant number of marriages that broke-up because of physical abuse.
And the cause is capitalism, but you want to blame checks notes women getting rights
Wow you'll come up with anything, no matter how ridiculous, to avoid the obvious actual problem at hand. Fascinating
We didn't suddenly become capitalist in 1962.
No shit?
Everything was fine until 1962, then? Couldn't possibly be the evolution of capitalism under the deregulation of the very shit stain you mentioned before: Reagan. Or, maybe, was capitalism bad then, too?
Great deflection though, really helps you not think about the actual issue at hand and keep blaming civil fucking rights for the downfall of civilization, really outing yourself as a terrible person
Vatican II and the modern rite Mass did not do anything to civil rights. My country had long been capitalist. I see no reason why 1962 would be a breaking point for capitalism to cause all these changes.
First of all, thanks for showing a different perspective.
But that's just the way capitalism works. It not only destroys families, but everything in the way of profit maximization for the few chosen ones at the top. What conservative politics are striving to restore is merely narratives: of "good old days," of "a honest buck." But that's really only lip service. The system is fundamentally flawed. The selling out of the working class will continue until there's a violent revolution.
In the same vein, all this public kowtowing to our axiomatic corporate overlords as "job creators" is fundamentally flawed, because a) workers could organize all aspects of work themselves, but are being suppressed by an artificial notion of "competition" designed to divide the working class, and b) the jobs being created in the current system are often of the bullshit kind anyway. What a pointless exercise.
I'm a self-employed independent contractor because I don't like employer-employee relationships, so I agree with you concerning aspects of our current system. A better world is where workers are self-employed and own their own operations and everything that can work on a smaller scale does operate on a smaller scale. I'm not opposed to larger operations having democratic processes and would be happy to see labor unions buy up enough shares of the companies the workers work for to own the board of directors and make decisions for themselves.
I also agree that the commodification of everything is a problem. Take abortion, for example. There's an entire industry around promoting and earning revenue from commodifying the lives of these unborn children. We also need to stop defining success by career aspiration or income or other metrics that create a cultural desire for abortion of "inconvenient" babies.
That said, the big changes in family life did not happen because of capitalism. Families survived capitalism. It was some other change that happened. It was a change in the underlying religious and philosophical values of our society. The change was Vatican II and the modern rite Mass.