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And if it wasn’t Reagan, you have pretty good odds it was Nixon.
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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I’m not talking about Wilson entering the war. I’m talking about how he had the showing of Birth of a Nation, giving legitimacy to the Klu Klux Klan leading to their resurgence. He was also president during the Palmer Raids, and refused to join the League of Nations
Wilson was literally the architect of the League of Nations, and by far its greatest champion in America. He, however, was only President in the first place because the Republicans had split their party on the national stage despite having a strong Congressional majority and his hope of drumming up public support for the League was dashed when his failing health lead to a series of strokes he suffered campaigning for its acceptance.
I don’t think you can blame him entirely for the resurgence of the KKK, especially since at its heart it was, and still is, a pyramid scheme first and a terrorist organization second (I’d suggest listening to the Behind the Bastards episode on them for details), but he’s such a weird figure in American history precisely because he combined such disastrous internal policy with an objectively good global legacy, a mirror of his democratic idealism tarnished by personal bigotry.
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
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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.
For sure. Brexit was in large part Cameron’s attempt to court UKIP votes
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.
The GOP has been braindead my entire adult lifetime… So over 30 years AT LEAST. Some would argue it goes further back than that.
I personally think they went through a meaningful shift from being evil but effective in their own way (in advancing their own agenda not in solving actual problems) to transparently stupid, and - genuinely unhinged Jewish space lasers, nuking tornadoes, drinking bleach, buying Greenland, and staring directly into the sun.
They’ve gone from cynically exploiting culture war nonsense to advance class war to believing their propaganda and losing the plot - I think the rise of the tea party was the inflection point.
I get that we are both if a certain age but can you please consider not using terms related to retardation when you mean stupid?
I feel like Americans online throw this word around a lot more than anyone else. It’s absolutely not an acceptable word to use here (UK) and I can’t remember the last time I heard anyone use it.
In 2008 while railing against political correctness Sarah Palin, the dipshit republican vice presidential candidate, popularized the idea that it wasn’t ok to use retarded as an insult.
Do brits still use spaz/spastic?
I haven’t heard anyone use those words for many years, no doubt there’s still people that do though.
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It’s about being respectful. Using someone’s condition they can’t control as a descriptor is (at least in my opinion) disrespectful.
I mean, in a broad sense we can’t really control any aspect of ourselves. We live in a deterministic universe. The real reason to stop using ‘retard’ and related terms is because of how vilely they’ve been used in relatively recent history to denigrate people with genuine mental disabilities.
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…which is made significantly more awkward by you pointing to the other side of the room you’re in
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.
Reagan figured out that if you tell people what they want to hear, you can get away with anything.
Thank you for providing more historical context. It just shows how much worse it was / is.
Fuck… Politics just sucks in the US
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.
Kind of like Nixon starting the EPA, but also being a treasonous, corrupt, criminal piece of shit.
Not a fan of Nixon but how was he treasonous? Opening trade with China?
Edit: In 1968 he contacted South Vietnam prior to being president to push back a peace agreement until he was president. He promised more favorable outcomes for the South Vietnamese. The Paris peace talks that Nixon attempted to influence ended up failing, but it is unknown if Nixon was the catalyst or if they were destined to fail regardless.
He kept the war in Vietnam going so he could be elected https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/nixon-prolonged-vietnam-war-for-political-gainand-johnson-knew-about-it-newly-unclassified-tapes-suggest-3595441/
And Watergate
A man who ran a Tae Kwon Do studio in my hometown was on that plane, going home to visit family.
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.
the goal of Neo-Liberalism is to privatize
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Bro Glass-Steagall was repealed under his watch. These two things are on a whole nother level.
When someone today tells me Trump is the worst President in American history, I instantly write them off in my head as Not A Serious Person. That unfortunately includes like 60% of all human beings I know.
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When someone today tells me Trump is the worst President in American history, I instantly write them off in my head as Not A Serious Person
There is a thing called hyperbole which doesn’t indicate everyone is a moron but you nor does it mean the person saying it doesn’t have a great point. Trump was fucking awful. How can you so neatly quantify how bad they all are? I think it’s pretty goddamned bad that Trump has eroded the concept of democracy and singlehandedly killed unknown tens of thousands of people minimum by downplaying COVID. Oh well guess I’m just a fucking joke for thinking for a moment that those two things could ever be worse than things Reagan did. After all, it’s all so cut and dried.
Get off your fucking high horse.
No. Trump is categorically not even close to Bush or Clinton or Reagan—but that’s just my opinion. I think it’s rather you that needs to get off your high horse for behaving like a perfect hypocrite.
Try to be less combative next time and it might result in an actual adult conversation instead of the aftermath of an adolescent hormone spike
Not looking to have a conversation. Just calling you on being an idiot, like someone needed to.
but that’s just my opinion
Yeah well if you’d just wrote that no one would be calling you an idiot. Even in that same sentence you present it as a fact. No, it is not clear how one would actually determine the worst president ever but it should be pretty acceptable to say it about a president that did thousands of horrible actions, without having some dweeb pretend they’re superior about the topic.
As a democrat, Clinton was lucky with a lot of economical stuff going his way, which overshadowed the absolute piece of shit he was, and how much he hurt the middle class. He was an absolute corporate hack.
Sadly, with the 2 party system… He was the progressive choice, because as per usual the GOP was fielding full on religious lunatics.
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I’m failing to understand why you list “no fault divorce” with the rest of those. Why do you think that’s a bad thing?
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W: hold my beer
starts illegal war, tortures people, shatters privacy, collapses economy
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
If not Reagan, then probably Newt Gingrich
Or fucking Woodrow Wilson
What kind of name is Woodrow anyway
Even by 1800s standards its lame, ive got a bunch of ancestors named Shadrak one of them even killed a bear.
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Laffer and Atwater = Reagan in my mind. As do Gingrich with Bush 2 and McConnell.
If they’d be co defendants in an imaginary Rico case, they get lumped together.
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.
Yeah, if your message isn’t packaged with a heavy dose of hate, it’s literally never gonna resonate with the Republican base.
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And just like that, you washed away decades of increasingly highly concentrated xenophobia
Besides their ignorance, why do you think that they think and process arguments as you have observed?
I don’t think it’s ignorance at all. In general, I’ve found them quite capable of reasonable discussion and grasping the corrected concepts and facts which would undermine their worldview.
It’s just that none of it matters.
Conversations a day or two later will be indistinguishable from conversations before the discussion. They return to tired old tropes because they’re repeated in their social circles, and because they’re comfortable to embrace. It’s not a matter of intellectual rigor or even ideological devotion. It’s just attachment to the familiar.
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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?
I would argue all the judges nominated and confirmed will have implications lasting multiple lifetimes.
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.
One good thing. Was recently homeless for several years, lost everything, off meds, suicidal, etc. Since then, been grateful for the programs, help meant for people like me. When you 5150 into psych ward, homeless, I got connected with case manager, helped me get on ssi, Medicare, free psych care, free meds. Most all the shelters in my area work in concert with mental health agencies. They’re aware that untreated mental health issues can result in addiction, abuse, and it’s a long slow road, you have to put the work in. But generally they know providing temp income, meds, and safe housing is 1st step to help their clients get back on feet. It’s a flawed system, not enough money or resources. But the people who’ve been helping me really are amazing at navigating complex system. Maybe things changed, or I just got lucky with where I live.
was a neat one-two punch perpetrated by both Kennedy and Reagan
Could you elaborate more on the connection between with what Kennedy did and what Reagan did?
I had always thought it was just a Reagan thing.
CMHA apparently means the Community Mental Health Act of 1963, which apparently was an attempt to remove many patients from long term psychiatric hospitals, and have them taken care of in community centers.
From a little checking, looks like it didn’t provide enough funding, and kicked the responsibility to states, which largely didn’t bother to create the community centers, so it seems like it was essentially the first half of what Reagan finished, and just dumped all the crazies on the streets with no actual support.
So basically Kennedy made the States (instead of the Fed) have to pay for the mental support services, and then Reagan removed the programs all together?
So… when are we going to start building the guillotines?
Right about the time they start cutting social security. Mass impoverishment tends to have mass reactions.
Or Milton Friedman. And if not him, then the guy who put lead into gasoline.
