And if it wasn't Reagan, you have pretty good odds it was Nixon.
this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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And if it wasn't Nixon just choose literally any other (former) Republican president.
* Former in parentheses for future reference
Any post-Nixon one, anyway. The list before him is fairly non-objectionable. Lincoln. Grant. Roosevelt. Hoover. Eisenhower. I guess Taft through Coolidge were fairly forgettable, by today's standards.
I don't know about that. Woodrow Wilson was a major factor in the regression after reconstruction. It's important to remember that democrats before the 1930s were the conservative party.
While it wasn't popular at the time, Wilson's decision to enter WW1 was actually the best thing for American interests in particular and worldwide democratic reform in general.
People really don't understand exactly how fucked in the head Kaiser Wilhelm and his allies were. Absolute monarchies could very well still be the world wide norm without the decisive, undeniable loss of the Central Powers to the liberal nations.
Does that decision undo all the harm he did? Who knows?
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btwn the two of them (correct me if I'm wrong, just going from memory): raised housing costs, stopped social benefits, criminalized drugs, were against worker's rights & minimum wage, against universal healthcare, overall made life harder for everyone except the upper class
Casual reminder that Nixon set his federal minimum wage at something he considered unreasonably, insultingly low, and that was $12 per hour adjusted for inflation.
Also Thatcher if you're from the UK
Or, now Boris (Maybe Cameron)
Thatcher : Reagan :: Boris : Trump
But Cameron should not escape blame
Yeah, I actually think the lasting impact of Cameron's Brexit will be more damaging than Boris's tenure.
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My father was kind of a low level fixer in California politics.
He tended to vote Republican but regarded Reagan as a marginally literate moron.
After Reagantard reached the presidency in 1980, part of his obscene transfer of wealth to the rich brought on taxation of some of social security income.
One day I was talking to my father and kind out of nowhere he said, "Fuck Ronald Reagan."
I don't think anyone in the family voted RepubliKKKlan after that. For a lot of reasons. One of those reasons was his refusal to treat the rise of AIDS seriously.
Smart family. If only more in this country were capable of seeing the slow-motion disaster happening in front of our eyes.
I miss those kind of conservatives. The ones with brains and principals.
That's the problem with the modern GOP - it's not compatible with having brains or principles.
...but if you like perpetually terrified dumb, bigoted culture war nonsense, have I got a bridge to sell you.
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At least under Reagan, many of these policies had never been tested.
Republicans of today are several orders of magnitude worse. We've now witnessed the damage of trickle-down economics, of vilifying "pinko commies", of ignoring a global pandemic... And yet they do it anyway.
It may be tempting to think that, but those policies all had precedent. Trickle-down just used to be called 'Horse-and-sparrow' economics. We had red scares before, and each of them were just as stupid, if not moreso (the one time we actually should have been wary, in the early-mid 40s, we were blithely complacent - go figure). And prior influenza epidemics and the spread of longer-term diseases had shown the danger of taking a lackadaisical approach to public health.
Reagan wasn't the birth of these policies - he was just the one most successful in lodging them long-term into the rotting craw of American politics.
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Only good thing Reagan did (just because I believe in credit where due) was to speed GPS availability for civilian use in response to Korean Air Lines Flight 007 being shot down by the Soviets after it went off course. Everything else he did was complete shit.
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And the majority of the times you'd be wrong is because it was Nixon.
Agree, but I'll say that Clinton and Bush had their fair share of fucking up the US.
Clinton's Neo-liberal politics weakened public support in favor of privatization and bush accelerated that while helping to advance christian nationalism and eroding personal freedoms.
We've, no joke, not had a great president since Jimmy Carter and he was canned because of economic circumstances outside of his control.
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I'd take it a step further than Reagan, and point the finger directly at Jerry Falwell. A lot of his money paid Reagan.
Wrong with society: Regan
Wrong with me: Mum and Dad
More importantly.... one political party in this country continues to try to push those awful polices onto us no matter how much Reaganomics has hurt this nation. And yet election after election people decide to just sit it out because they can't be bothered.
"The Republicans are good for the economy. I'm an independent thinker." - words I never want to hear from American voters again, but am certain that I will.
To be fair you can't blame them. (let me explain)
Republicans repeat that time and time and time again. They stick to that messaging all the time. Republicans are good for business. They are good for jobs. They support American workers. They repeat these slogans all the time. It is all a lie, but they repeat them so much that people do indeed believe them.
On the flip side Democrats have no idea how to communicate with the general public and tell them otherwise. Right after I posted in this thread, I read another story posted on Lemmy about how the economy is doing great, but Americans don't believe it. That's a Democrat problem because they are never able to explain to the American people WHY they are better than Republicans. For most of the last 50 years, a Democrat in the White House has meant a stronger economy. They are better for the workers, the environment, consumers. Yet they are terrible at sending a positive message to those groups and get them excited.
No, I live in a right-wing area. I know these people. I grew up with these people. I know how they think. I know how they process arguments.
I can blame them.
But yes, Democrats fucking suck at messaging.
You can do both. Blame them, but goddamn it is infuriating seeing Democrats miss one opportunity after another at connecting with workers and average folks.
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And a major case of fuckyouigotmineitis.
Trump was a big dumb animal.
Reagan knew how to fuck shit up. Competent malice.
Reagan was a dumb animal too. He just was less hostile towards his handlers.
I'd argue that incompetent malice has been pretty effective at fucking shit up too.
Trump made the culture worse with his rhetoric, but was thankfully a legislative failure. He passed all of 1 piece of meaningful legislation, a hand out to the rich. His SCOTUS appointments were McConnell's achievement.
Reagan got his grotesque agenda passed, and succeeded in getting his "opposition" party to take the corporate bribe money, abandon unions in all but rhetoric, and go full neoliberal into today.
We haven't had an anti reaganomics, trickle down, rigged capitalist economic President from either party since. Now our 2 party's largely align on the economic issues that exacerbate the social issues and fight over those.
That is Reagans legacy, setting the table for the owner class to siphon every last crumb from the peasants in perpetuity, both in legislative framework, and cultural acceptance.
Because in "turning the bull loose," you just became a temporarily embarrassed millionaire, amirite?
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To name another specific problem, "closing mental institutions and turning the afflicted out onto the streets" was a neat one-two punch perpetrated by both Kennedy and Reagan. Kennedy's last major thing before taking the plane to Dallas was to sign CMHA and step towards deinstitutionalization. Reagan further exacerbated the problem by closing some of the local facilities that supposedly replaced the system closed by Kennedy.
90% of the current homelessness crisis in major cities is attributable to these policies. The result was generations of mentally ill and addicts traipsing the streets instead of being corralled towards mental healthcare away from general populace.
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Or Milton Friedman. And if not him, then the guy who put lead into gasoline.
RIP fairness doctrine.
Hank's Law
What is Hank’s law, no charcoal bbq-ing?
Hank's law is when you die in the middle of nowhere by Nazis because you got pranked by your brother-in-law.
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Reagan and Bush Jr. If it wasn't for Bush Jr. then we'd have started on climate change, and stem cells would be much farther along in research
Also, a certain multi-trillion dollar war that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and incredible damage to US moral authority.
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Climate change inaction is actually pretty firmly in the laps of corporations. ExxonMobil knew climate change was being caused by human use of fossil fuels, but instead of continuing their research on biofuels during the oil crisis, they fired all the researchers and hid their scientific research.
Yes but their propaganda campaign worked a lot better when the VP was an oil executive and the President was spreading it for them.
Don't know why you got down voted though. You're right.
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