I agree with you both. (I’m a born-and-raised Coastal Elite who has lived and raised a family in Flyover Country for 20 years, so I have a fairly informed perspective on this).
I think Reagan made Americans proud to be Americans again. A second oil embargo, rampant inflation, the Iran hostage crisis… Reagan gave people hope. (Whether you liked him or not – I called him ‘Ronnie Ray-Gun’ or ‘Ronnie Slay-Gun’ because of his policies – he did give America a ‘shot in the arm’.) But I think the Conservative takeover really started with Newt Gingrich and his Contract on With America. In my recollection, that’s when Republicans started their campaign to take down the Federal government in earnest; or, as they said ‘Starve the beast’. Or as Grover Norquist said much later (2004, I think), ‘My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.’
The thing is, we didn’t have the Internet when Reagan was President. I don’t think I had it until 1997. After that, radical Republicans were able to spread their words, and their ignorant constituents were able to spread their lies and propaganda. So I’ve come to the conclusion that it was the Internet that gave the idiots all that power.
That would be the father who, when he was in severe cognitive decline, Donnie tried to manipulate into changing his will to benefit Donnie and screw over everyone else in the family? Yes, much respect, so honored.
I hadn’t thought about that, but maybe there is some element of causation there. The way I recall it, the internet really took off for the general public in the mid '90s (I’d put the year at 1995, but I’m sure it was a little more gradual than over just one year). I agree with what you say about Reagan as well. He was old school conservative, more so than Ford, Nixon, or even Eisenhower, but he wasn’t a fascist, and at least at that time his supporters weren’t either. The 1994 mid-terms sounds right to me as to when this all started. Can Biden stop it? No, but he can delay things another 4 years.
I thought I recalled a 1994 Time cover about angry voters that would correspond with this idea. But when I looked it up, it was from 1992 – and the voters weren’t angry at Dems, but at George H.W. Bush.
House Republican whip Newt Gingrich heard the political noise emanating from New Hampshire and said it sounded like “a primal scream.”
The scream, if primal, was perfectly articulate. The New Hampshire primary amounted to a cry of anger, disgust and pain that was above everything else a warning to George Bush, a kind of political death threat. New Hampshire’s Republicans gave only 53% of their vote to the incumbent President …
Gingrich was an evil genius. He saw the anger that lost his party the White House in '92 and, by '94 had harnessed it to drive his own party’s resurgence. And it still works 30 years later.
Moderating:
Please stop hijacking on the topic of Trump, Reagan, Gingrich, Bush and others. This is a thread to discuss Joe Biden and his approach to winning the 2024 election. Let’s stay on this topic, please.
Reagan set in motion deregulation of FCC and this produced talk radio (Limbaugh) and Fox. That was already pushing all the propaganda long before the Internet.
Now that’s an aspect I had not considered. Thanks for bringing that up.
Which makes me wonder what Reagan, and whoever in the policy wonkery department came up with this idea, thought they would accomplish by it. Was it “regulation bad; freedom good”, or was it “This will permit our overlords to launch hard right for-profit propaganda and take over the country in 10 or 20 years once the effects have soaked through our society”?
Moderating:
Is this thing on? Are you both truly ignoring the mod note that immediately precedes your two posts?
Take this discussion to another thread. This one is to discuss Joe Biden’s run-up to the 2024 election.
Nevermind. I don’t want to be off topic.
I don’t normally browse X (formerly known as Twitter), but a correspondent alerted me to this ad for Biden that was posted there. Looks like Biden’s campaign is taking the gloves off:
Yeah, but gas is $4 a gallon. /undecidedvoter
I wonder (and this might be silly or perhaps fodder for its own thread) what would happen if Biden passes away while in office. Does Trump just roll over Harris? If Biden gets (gods forbid) assassinated does that help or hurt Trump?
We’re fucked. I can’t imagine there’s enough time to establish the Harris brand while still fighting the headwinds already hurting the Biden campaign.
If this should happen, we just have to hope it’s after January 20, 2025.
I hate to be this cynical, and I’m an enthusiastic fan of Biden, but I think that way, too. Just get elected and sworn in, please. If he dies on the second day of his second term (God forbid), I will give zero fucks over the “I told you he was too old” scolds.
I suspect a good portion of people who consider themselves patriots or want to see themselves as patriots could give a fuck what those Europeans think, and even see it as a badge of honor or that we’re doing something right, not like those liberal, socialist know-nothings.
While things could certainly change and I hope they do, the general consensus in the live debate thread is that Joe is getting his ass handed to him by Trump right now. Lots of talk of how Biden is just too damn old and someone, anyone should replace him. It will be interesting to see if the talking heads on the news shows agree.
Crazy thought: Harris/Biden. He wouldn’t be off the ticket entirely, it would show that he’d still be using his skills and experience, and the incumbent advantage would still be there to some extent.
But in the end, what I keep thinking is that everyone seems to be saying, there has to be someone better. Why are they so sure?
IMO, Trump won the debate. Trump is a master of the Gish Gallop, and Biden only called him out on a small percentage of his lies.