Reagan was one of the worst things to happen to the US. Maybe we should just stop electing shitty actors to do a difficult job.
Reagan (or more specifically Michael Deaver) taught us that propaganda works incredibly well, almost every time.
Most of us didn’t learn it though. And here we are.
Reagan (or more specifically Michael Deaver) taught us that propaganda works incredibly well, almost every time.
Hitler (and many mfers before him) already taught that lesson, people fall for it every, single, time.
That’d require learning a lesson. And we’re collectively far too stupid to do that.
Reagan was one of the worst things to happen to the US.
100% agree
Maybe we should just stop electing shitty actors to do a difficult job.
I'd argue the opposite on that tho.
We kept hearing with Biden that a president can't do much, it's all Congress.
So why are we running career politicians when the majority of America hates politicians? Why did we just one an ex-prosecuter when most Dem voters hate our justice system?
Like, we can at least halfway it with someone like Al Franken, someone that started out somewhere else then switched to politics. But why not just say fuck it and run Taylor Swift for president? Count on her carrying the entire down ballot and getting dual majorities and she just has to not veto what lands on her desk.
Either the president doesn't really do anything and is just a figurehead or it has to be someone with decades of government experience.
It can't be both.
But there's certainly no reason to keep picking people with zero charisma for what's basically a convoluted popularity contest. Even foreign relations, I guarantee foreign leaders would give Brad Pitt a better deal than Joe Biden. They're not getting down into the nitty gritty, the drones work out the details anyways.
Obama and Bill won off their charisma above all. Biden as well was incredibly charismatic back in the day, it's just as came out recently, his health had been an issue basically the entire term. I'm not saying this as a dig, but he is a shell of his former self. 40 years ago he was considered the best public speaker of his generation.
As much as I want a progressive and think they'd win on policy, what matters before the platform is charisma and we need to admit that.
It's insane we didn't learn it after Al Gore, but clearly the DNC didnt.
As popular as it is to hate “career politicians“ I actually completely disagree with that concept. Most career politicians are fine and will do a competent job given the chance.
I don’t want someone who promises me Mars and then spends 4 years figuring out the job and covering their ass. I want somebody who will get a rocket up in the air at all to start so we can build on it.
Reagan was a shitty actor with a good persona and voice. He was simply hired to act as POTUS, reading the script written by American billionaires.
And that's been the president's role ever since
Worst thing so far.
and now he is burning in hell with Tatcher and Pinochet ❤
The continued idolization of Reaganomics is a huge reason why the US continues to enshittify.
Maybe there shouldn't be such a focus on cults of personality and electing celebrities. Imagine qualified people being in office.
The thread of anti-intellectualism runs deep.
I have a suspicion that anti-intellectualism and unaffordable education go hand in hand.
Education is unaffordable also due to classism, which reagonomics is really drenched in.
I did. I was told I was transphobic and pro-genocide by some totally not russian trolls.
Infographic is correct, though it left out how he destroyed labor unions and a bunch of other stuff, but you can only fit so much in there. Reagan and his despicable cohorts like Gingrich were the beginning of the end for not just the ability to reach the middle class, but indeed for the middle class itself in this country (as his contemporary partner in crime, Thatcher was for the UK).
It was an absolute tragedy. If Trump wasn't coming back in, Reagan would still hold the top rank in amount of devastation caused, but I'm pretty sure Trump will manage to surpass him on that front in his second term.
The most prosperous decade of the 20th century was the 1950s.
The top tier tax rate in 1950 was 84%, and that was the lowest it would be until 1964. The rest of the 1950s were at 91%-92%.
The important thing to remember is that nobody ever paid the top-tier tax rate. Instead, they spent their income. When they found themselves $10,000 over the line in 1955, and about to pay $9100 to Uncle Sam, they said "Hold up. Let's spend $10000 on something useful and deduct it as a business expense".
That spending turned into paychecks for the workers who produced the purchased item.
$10,000 over the line in 1988 meant they got to put $7,200 into their stock portfolio, send $2,800 to Uncle Sam, and the worker is laid off because they had no incentive to actually spend their excess income.
This man is responsible for the nightmare that is my life.
Fuck going back in time to kill Hitler, if I ever get into a DeLorean or a phone booth, I'm coming for that ass Reagan! THIS ONE'S GONNA BE FOR FREDDIE MERCURY!
Edit: Just got back, I think I got the wrong year or something, missed my shot too. Feds tried to stop me from getting back to the car, I got them to go bother some dickhead who wouldn't shut up about some Crazy Taxi movie or whatever the hell he was talking about. Can't try again for awhile, DeLorean's out of plutonium.
If I could go back in time and kill three people from history, I'd kill Reagan three times.
Hey, get rid of Ayn Rand and Nixon too
Ronnie was a senile racist POS and he pushed the deregulation for the financial sector.
The mental institution thing... That's maybe not entirely fair. Prior to Reagan, most residential mental institutions were terrible places, worse than some of the worst prisons in the US. Closing them seemed better for the residents than keeping them open and attempting to reform. But it's certainly had a lot of unintended consequences.
I don't think it is mental illness causing the homeless crisis. Homelessness is up 20% from 2023 and I'm pretty sure the high cost of living is to blame.
Libs prefer blaming the victims of capitalism rather than capitalism itself.
A lot of homeless people are mentally sound, but are struggling with sky high prices, or dont have the motivation to work 60 or 80 hours, facing, constant exhaustion to live in a hole in the wall.
Fascists don't actually care about anything other than attacking the poor, minorities, women, etc.
Reagan was "great" for that.
I know he was really bad, but Trump promised he will do everything in his power to be worse.
There was this one time a painter couldn't hack it
If you ever happen to visit Berlin in Germany, make sure to spit on his memorial plaque, as he is worshiped as a freedom fighter in Germany.
I (german) know of nobody that does that
Same shit in Poland. What’s crazy is that we are suffering from his incompetence here as well.
Jimmy Carter lost to him, and while looking back from fifty years later Carter looks progressive...
At the time there was a fracture of the Dem party from the left because they considered Carter too moderate.
The most important part of learning about our political history is understanding what we've lost over time. Like the existence of a party even remotely leftwing.
Quick edit:
A big reason for Carter's loss was the inability to solve the Iranian hostage crisis right before the election. Which we later found out Republicans colluded with Iran to not resolve it while Carter was in office, then the whole Iran-Contra shit.
Also reminiscent of how Nixon prolonged the Vietnam war for the same reason...
And I won't be surprised to find out in a decade Trump did the same with Israel.
Like, people kept acting shocked about current events just don't know we're watching reruns. It's like when people got excited about Game of thrones and waited years between seasons for cliffhangers. The books already existed and they could have just found out what happened.
But just like they wouldn't read the books, nobody wants to read a history book anymore.s
The Iranian hostage crisis was not a major part, it was more symbolic for how people felt about him - it mattered way more to Reagan as an issue of optics.
Many Americans felt he was ineffective. What really drove that initial impression of being an ineffectual leader was the state of the economy, which whether you blame him or not was not very good. Stagflation was really bad when he was in charge. People remember high gas prices when they think of Carter.
Now that I write this in some ways it mimics a lot of what happened with Biden.
The number of people that died of AIDS each year under his watch was in the millions. Not 90k.
Sold 500 missiles to Iran is such a hilarious understatement of the shit show that actually was Iran Contra.
The whole situation was very complex, and only a mastermind would be able to comprehend the whole thing.
No offense, but mental institutions were/are horror farms. Could have been better, should have been better, never was.
Among the highest, if not the foremost rate of undeclared abuse. Dumping grounds for the unwanted, unrestricted experimentations for sadistic monsters, no-man's-land for the so-called human rights.
Whatever other evil might have been done, putting an end to those mental institutions can only be a kindness.
I'm lucky (unlucky?) enough to have worked at a day program for special needs and some of our clients were old enough to have been in institutions, released "to the wild" and then reintegrated into the modern system.
The ones capable of remembering and verbalizing their experiences had some wild stories, and while instutuons were often hell, being kicked out on the streets with no options was worse.
Like, it would be if Biden announced he was fixing the issues with our healthcare system by outlawing medical care.
Sure, the existing system sucks and in a lot of ways it's good it's gone....
But for fucks sake it was better than literally nothing.
That's not even getting into how it demonized mental illness and led to people in rural areas still refusing to get children diagnosed because the label is what they're afraid of. Because all they know about mental illness is all the desperate homeless people Reagan released and they passed those biases down to their children
the caption of a political cartoon i remember from back then:
"ronald reagan did for this country what pantyhose did for finger-fucking"
The working class and thus the creation of the middle class was subsidized by our government from FDR up until Reagan. The 1950s wealth and family focus BOOM was a result of this subsidization that began with FDR. It is why everyone (white and male) owned a house, a car, and had a job.
We are living the end result of the Reagan experiment, the flip from subsidizing the working class and thus subsidizing the creation of a middle class, which does not happen organically in capitalism, to the subsidization of corporate and the top 1% instead. The claim was it would be more efficient to subsidize corporate and simply have the wealth trickle down through the rest of the economy.
This, right now, is how trickle down pans out after the 40yr experiment. We’ve equalized woman and non white people under the law, great, but did it in a time without subsidy. So now we are all equally shit upon, barring some holdover family accumulations dating back to the 50s.
And now, drum roll, we’ve elected President Musk, the grand winner of said 40yr subsidization experiment, the ultimate welfare queen, to decide our working class government efficiency going forward.
I wonder how that will work for working class going forward?
As non American I was ready to just move on and let them suffer in their own cycle of nonsense. But we can't even do that. Since jokes about invasions are increasing at an alarming rate. Jokes about countries sovereignty became completely unfunny after Feb 2022.
He was re-elected in a landslide because America is and has been--for at least my entire lifetime--all about aesthetics.
If this next administration isn't the actual downfall of democracy and just another blip in history I wonder if trump will have the same sort of vibe to his legacy that Regan has.
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