Yes, but in the Reagan era, the status quo hierarchy was still comfortably in power. The divisions in society dating back to the civil rights era were still there, but the white supremacy wasn’t yet panicked about losing their grip over everyone. Indeed, the conservative revival that brought Reagan to power was the middle stage of the positioning of white supremacy as the controlling ideology of the Republican party.
Let’s assume you’re correct. What accounts for the improved treatment of minorities in the 80s compared to the 50s? The efforts of Civil Rights leaders like MLK Jr. Rosa Parks, and Cesar Chavez? The willingness of powerful white people like Earl Warren, Dwight Eisenhower, and LBJ to somehow force the regular white people to start treating minorities more fairly? The inevitable progress of human rights? I might have believed the last one as an answer, even as recently as 1/5/2021, but not any more. I don’t know what the answer is, but I also don’t accept the idea that the 80s were just as bad as the 50s.
Well, it’s not like we Canucks did anything. Likely, we wrang our hands, said a few empty phrases about “standing with our American partners”, then went back to eating beer nuts and watching three-down football.
Apathy. Whatever the conflict, anger and rage cannot be kept up indefinitely. They wear people out and people start checking out.
There were several contentious elections in the late 1880s, including the rigged 1876 election and Cleveland’s split terms. I remember reading somewhere that at some point there was a marked reduction in interest in politics. It’s something that doesn’t translate to history books because someone is always running the country and some things are decided. But I don’t buy that “Trump makes it all different, this is permanent.” Human nature says otherwise.
I don’t think the current state is permanent, but the risk is there. If a Democrat wins the presidential election in 2024, I think Trumpism won’t be a thing for 2028. However, that’s a big if.
Even if Trump wins in 2024. He wins, he’s elected fair and square. He’ll ignore a lot of stuff you hold dear, but 100 different Republicans will do the same. He’ll still be stupid and ignorant, but he was already that in 2016. He’ll ignore shit and go golfing, provided he’s still capable of doing that.
He isn’t a world builder. He isn’t going to build a bunch of concentration camps.
Yeah, sometimes you can have revolutions. But they take a lot of work. If you go back to 1968, everyone thought the Black Panthers were going to take over. A few years later, everyone just wanted to chill out and do macreme. I just think that a certain level of rage and constant stirring up, that even the left is starting to participate in now, is going to wear on people and they will just start to tune out politics in general. Which would be fine with me, there are a lot of other things in life. I don’t need my voting record enscribed on my tombstone.
There are two ways I look at it.
The first is maybe we are not as divided as feared. Let us look at the vaccine which has been treated like a culture war issue as an extension of hyper-partisan politics. It feels like we are in a situation where there is 50-50 split on party lines. If you are pro-vaccine you lean Democrat. If you are anti-vaccine you lean Republican. It feels that way because social media, digital media and our cable news fix shape it out to be that way.
The reality however is that 62.5% of the country has taken the two shots of the vaccine. That’s 206 million people. That’s almost 50 million more people than the total number of people who voted in the 2020 Presidential Election which had the most votes cast ever. On that basis we are not so divided because the unvaccinated make up a small percentage and the extremist anti-vaxxers therefore an even tinier minority. They are very loud but very small in the grand scheme of things. Donald Trump on both occasions failed to hit 47% of the popular vote. Mitt Romney funnily enough did when he lost in 2012. Trump’s share of the vote represents 46% of voters and an even smaller percentage of the overall population. So the fact the majority of the population has been vaccinated tells you the majority of his voters have been vaccinated too.
The problem we face though is the extremists are disproportionately given attention too and their ideas, narratives and actions in echo chambers is how you get an event like Jan 6 happening. It turned out a lot of those rioters were not desolate and downtrodden but in fact many of them were comfortably well-off middle class members of society who threw away their reputations for a massive lie. These were people who have lived through multiple elections and presidencies but something possessed them with this one. That I do not think you can heal because once people have been radicalized like that it is hard to put the genie back into the bottle.
You’re missing the point. Yes, things have been steadily getting better for disadvantaged and oppressed groups, for the last 400 years. Indeed, things are better, in general, in 2022, than they were in 1980. Life was much worse, in general, for black people under Reagan than it is now.
The reason they have been getting better is that the dominant group had slowly been losing their grip on total dominance, year by year, decade by decade, century by century.
And as they have been losing their dominance slowly, sometimes in trickles and sometimes in leaps, they have also been developing backlashes, sometimes in the background. Sometimes, violently, in the foreground. Reaganism itself was one of those anti-progress backlashes.
We are currently in one of those phases in which the backlash against the loss of power has reached one of its periodic climaxes, and it’s happening precisely because they have been on the losing side as a long-term trend.
So, the balance of power has generally been changing, and the occasional backlash erupts in violence. However, the fundamental differences between the two sides have never changed nor been healed.
One side is fighting for increasing equality and the other side is fighting to maintain inequality. That has never changed.
40% of the country (you can guess who) would jump at the chance to collaborate with the invaders if that would mean triggering the Libs.
No, but his consiglieres are going to be competent, and will certainly make sure that the R party will never lose another election for the next 100 years.
Single party authoritarian rule is not going to look pretty, especially if the American Christian Taliban get control.
I’m genuinely just asking questions here. How so? In 1983 blacks could vote, eat at any restaurant, had equal protection under civil rights laws, etc. What gains have been made since that time?
At the risk of getting into the same debate, how is my side “fighting to maintain inequality”? I have never even seen a political position that treats blacks differently than whites. If you are talking about derivative effects like a politician is opposed to a social welfare program and that impacts blacks more than whites and is therefore an unequal law, then we’ll just stop there and not go down that road again. If not, how is anyone in the whole country, save for possibly a few Ku Klux Klan members or white nationalists, “fighting to maintain inequality”? What bills have been proposed that give blacks fewer rights, privileges or protections than whites?
To address both questions, a lot of the progress since 1983, at least regarding Black people, has been in the private arena rather than direct government action. In other words, the overall percentage of white people who are racist was steadily on the decline. In addition, those that were / are racist were less open about it, and yes, to me that counts as progress*. My perception is that those “few Klan members and white nationalists” have started to once again increase in number and willingness to commit more violent acts than they would have in the past, the past being the Clinton / Bush Jr. / Obama years.
- I know I got pushback on a thread I opened on this topic a while back, but speaking for myself, I’d much rather deal with a white person who racism consists of thinking that I must like enchiladas just because I’m Hispanic rather than a white person who wants to beat me up or kick me out of his neighborhood just because I’m Hispanic. The latter type of racism now seems to be on the rise.
ETA: There has, of course, been progress on the LGBT front by the federal government. I’d include that as part of how things were still getting better in the recent past compared to 1983.
Affirmative action?