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Ronald Reagan?! The Actor?! (lemmy.world)

submitted 7 months ago by homesweethomeMrL to c/politicalmemes

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[–] WaxiestSteam69 40 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The mid to late 70s were pretty dismal. Stagflation, crazy interest rates, the gas crisis, etc. I was in middle school in 1980 so I didn't have a lot of life experience at the time but I remember how his speeches made people feel hopeful for the first time in a long while.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

It's also very easy to look back and "realize" how bad he was/is.

But at the time, like you said, things weren't so clear, and Reagan won like 90% of the electoral vote, it was a massive landslide. Carter only won like 6 states.

[–] homesweethomeMrL 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I was there and I can tell you two things with absolute truth:

He was a real piece of shit President from the start, no one except the GOP base was fooled, same as today
In the absence of "her emails" or a russian-backed influence and money campaign, the GOP literally asked Iran to hold the hostages from the American embassy until the election was over to hurt Carter. "Nightline" ran every night saying how much Carter sucked. And it did hurt his election tremendously. If that didn't tell you what you needed to know, then the next several decades' worth of slide-into-abject-fascism was not going to be noticed either. (And, as we can plainly see, it wasn't)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

Hey, thanks for your post. I'm not from the US and the bit about the hostages was unknown to me.

Sounds like a parallel to what was going on with the military help for Ukraine just now...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Also as I ubderstand it a lot of the issues with the Reagan administration could be dismissed as just general "things going wrong" and we only saw how bad he was after a lot of shit leaked post presidency.

But I am working off my understanding im 24 Reagan may as well have been dead for my entire lifetime, hell he may have been he died in 2004 but I doubt there was much left of his mind.

[–] homesweethomeMrL 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

No. Not at all. He was clearly bankrupting the American taxpayer and giving that money to the rich and the defense contractors. Like, obviously. He stripped all the environmental money, all the school money, all the health services money, and gave it to the rich. Just like that. He basically ran on that.

"Trickle down" was his. For real, not a single reasonable person thought that was ever going to be a thing. And, forty years later we damned well better be able to say - it wasn't.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Oh that shit was obvious for sure its just people ignored it. I was moreso referring to the insane shit like the astrologer and Nancy being way too influential.