Also Reagan.
Reconciliation was Lincoln’s blunder, but we can’t pin all the blame on him. The fact of the matter is the vast majority of the electorate has been purposefully dumbed down and lulled into a state of learned helplessness, while those who do manage to stay engaged are drawn into endless political culture wars that keep us divided down predictable party lines.
There are issues out there that 80-90% of Americans agree on, it’s just that no candidate can ever make a platform out of those popular ideas without getting dragged down into the mud of divisive rhetoric so that people can easily place them into a neat little box that predetermines if they hate them or not without thinking too much.
Reconciliation was Lincoln’s blunder, but we can’t pin all the blame on him.
Hardly Lincoln’s blunder. Reconstruction was sabotaged by Andrew Johnson
What bothers me most about this state of affairs is that almost everyone who looks at it immediately lays the blame at the feet of “the voters”, ignoring the fact that we’ve all been the victims of relentless and insidious propaganda for decades now.
Not only that, but we’ve also been the victims of constant, well-funded attacks against the core institutions that were meant to shield us against this sort of thing. Journalism is a joke now. Education is in shambles. Community engagement is the lowest it’s ever been.
But don’t think about that… Don’t ask why the voters are angry and ignorant and fearful and hateful. Pay no attention to the men behind the curtain.
1000% agree. We didn’t just end up this way by accident. We are all victims of a system that has been slowly and deliberately eroded to ensure maximum apathy. It’s not the voter’s fault that education, journalism, and social safeguards are hollowed out husks of what they used to be.
The frustrating part is that I don’t see a way out of it. There’s no easy or obvious solution to the problem. You can expose the man behind the curtain as many times as you like, but partisan politicians will always be playing defense for their team and all the many scandals and earth-shattering revelations will be reduced to a political disagreement, where for every narrative there must be a counter narrative that explains why the other people are wrong, even if it must fly in the face of observable truth.
That’s too many words with too many syllables, I’ve branded you as a conservative and my vote for Gavin Newsom has become even further entrenched. You heard me right, I know who I will be voting for next president 3-ish years ahead of schedule.
I am joking.
🤣
More emotionally satisfying to blame others than take responsibility plus we all get to keyboard warriors.
No. Failure to act now. Blaming history is not acknowledging the now. It’s how we got here but the failure is in the now.
There is a weird division among populations who have a hard time distinguishing between historical analysis and understanding cause and effect, and thinking that it’s attributing blame and walking away.
We understand the past to prevent such problems in the future. (Ideally.)
250 years of First-past-the-post voting system
It sucks how 100% correct this is, honestly
Even after J6 only the mob was punished. In a country like Spain or most European countries Trump and co would’ve been in prison immediately, awaiting their trial.
The division of the proletariat by Lost Cause lunacy at a time (and at a junction) where a greater commitment to unity was possible and labor radicalism was just gaining strength may have been terminal.
also giving rural states too much representation, because they feared they get less.
“become a cesspool”
As if it wasn’t a settler colonial monstrosity built on genocide, slavery and massive violence from it’s very inception right through to the modern day (from “manifest destiny” to modern imperialism).
I’d love to see the timeline where native Americans were left alone.
Orson Scott Card wrote a very satisfying book called Pastwatch that deals with the alternate timeline.
Just you know, death the author and all that.
Death of the author indeed. What a POS he turned out to be. 😒
There’s some deep psychology at play for a person who writes books dealing with bigotry, xenophobia and the worst human attitudes, but then reflects all of those traits himself. I don’t have the energy anymore to try to dissect it, at least he’s not a highly vocal billionaire trying to advocate for shit.
Ummm and not the offshoring of blue collar jobs? Crushing unions? Regan tearing up political norms? Destruction of media fairness and killing of local news (News papers)?
This wasn’t an overnight transition, this is nearly 50 years of slow fracture of our society. Mostly led from the shadows by various religious groups that have a death cult mindset.
Anna Bocca on Youtube has some really good research on US economics through 20th Century.
I was surprised to learn that socialist ideas were popular in 30s due to Great Depression, with most pastors preaching mutual help, support, social support. Then the churches who preach individualism and chase for wealth got funding and newspaper space. Mfs literally redesigned American Christianity.
“become” implies it was something else to begin with. it started as a cess pool when it allowed slavery to persist past the declaration of independence.
Why do you think they wanted independence?
It was the rich wanting to get more rich from the get go. Everything else was a smoke screen.
Agreed, but the reformation of the south was one of many chances our country had to turn things around and start actually practicing equality and democracy properly, and instead the country bent to the racists who wanted stable business. Some ideas just kept repeating for the following century and a half.
“We hold these truths to be self evident - that all men are created equal. But when I meet Thomas Jefferson, I’ma compel him to include women in the sequel, work!”.
Man that lyric slapped hard and I’m just now realizing that if it were the N-word, it’d slap hard but be horribly historically inaccurate, as Angelica Schuyler kept many slaves. As did Thomas Jefferson.
Now, Hercules Mulligan, on the other hand…also had slaves. Despite being a founding member of the New York Manumission Society, he also had a slave named Cato who would help him to gather intelligence.
Yes in a weird way, I take heart in knowing that America’s politics have been super fucked up for most of its history. I know that sounds odd but most people I know seem to think things have just suddenly turned bad recently. I think maybe they were born during a brief respite is all. And I do think that with the fuller context, the arc of history bends in the right direction, yes, albeit with famous latency.
Sherman do it again
but in seriousness the failure of reconstruction destroyed america at its foundationOr maybe: Systematically disassembling of our education system by reducing funding, paying teachers less and removing programs that would otherwise teach our children to think.
When the only source of education is the tv and now internet, you can choose what you want to learn.
#eattherich
NEARLY right, but not quite:
the problem was that “technical” “surrender” is what the confederates did, & now they’ve earned a reverse-takeover, & once the dictatorship is activated, vengeance begins, wholesale.
It wasn’t punishing being a confederate that was required, it was systematically dismantling confederate-nationalism, through dispersion, through not allowing citizenship for anybody who wouldn’t vow loyalty to the union, etc.
Unfortunately, since human-animals are ideological 1st, rational distant-2nd, then it is the imprinting-mind, the lower-forebrain which has to be broken from its programming, & that requires systematic imprinting.
It is the same with mere-animals, & with ideologues.
There was an article on KyivIndependent, about a prison for Russia-collaborators, & one of the women there knows that it was Russia which was doing the bombing, but she blames Ukraina & is loyal to Russia.
You simply can’t allow that kind of ideological-programming to have citizenship in one’s country, XOR the consequences are going to be nationally-fatal.
Exactly as the US’s highjacking by Trump-cult is demonstrating.
EITHER viability XOR ideological-nationalism.
At this point, I’d require that all young-adults experience living in at-least 4 culturally-different regions of North America, or Europe, before they can have voting-rights: they have to experience cultural-diversity, THEMSELVES, in order to understand what it actually means.
None of this “I’m born here: I’m entitled, & if all others need eradicating, that’s my religion!” ideological garbage.
EITHER be a proper, upright, culturally-cosmopolitan citizen, XOR be managed, as a person who WON’T KNOW other’s validity, & that’s fine: every person ought choose their way.
That the christofascists hold that they have the right to enforce their religion on all the lives they can, & so do the zionists, & the islamists…
there isn’t any point in pretending that ideological-totalitarianism can “coexist” with civilrights.
That’s intentional-delusion, as the evidence shows.
Only competent citizens ought have voting-authority.
& that includes critical-thinking.
Exactly the same as only competent pilots ought be piloting aircraft, over our heads.
It has to be requirement, not “if political-will wills it” bullshit.
& that includes sufficient cultural-perspective to actually-understand what other perspectives means, in civil society.
Etc.
Anyways, the ideologues will never tolerate responsibility-archy to rule, so this won’t happen, but humankind’s facing extinguishment, this century, & maybe some, decades from now, will value humankind’s life enough to orient to objective-requirements, instead of ideological-dogma.
Not my problem: I intend to be gone from your world well before it gets to that degree of enforced-transformation, through Liberation, if possible.
