To be fair, you didn’t have to wait long after the summer of 2001 to get some “less boring history”.
(Amateur social historian alert)
I suspect those history books will point to the 9/11 attacks as a pivotal moment in the decline of the US.
Yeah, the GOP was already well on its way to bonkersland, but the shock of 9/11 – and the awareness that for the first time since the Cold War we did indeed have external enemies – helped the GOP secure the patriotic rah-rah vote for at least a generation.
They made disagreeing with GWB the equivalent of spitting on our brave men and women in uniform, and IMO that support for the military trumps (pardon the expression) just about everything else. The fact that the administration’s response to 9/11 was a short-term disaster and a long-term failure did nothing to sever the GOP-military-patriotism connection in many voters’ minds.
Indeed. It cemented in many Americans’ minds that any expense, no matter how great, was justified in order to keep the country safe from terror attacks. Not just for the loss of life but also for the humiliation.
A lot of people decided that fresh perspectives on our foreign policies and diplomacy were for pussies.
Popular history books will. It’s an easy narrative with stunning visuals, obviously a seismic-level event with identifiable fallout effects.
I think more learned books, however, will point to the rise of the Religious Right as being more important to the eventual decline of America for they have consistently backed policies which have purposely weakened our government, purposely impoverished the citizenry for the benefit of plutocrats, and purposely increased the States military and policing power in a world of, even including 9/11, decreasing tensions.
In one way, Atlas Shrugged had it correct - we are dying because of a philosophical contradiction: there is a minority which can see the following and call it improvement:
It’s not merely today’s Republican party which is a danger to America. It’s been the Republican party of the last 40 years, beginning with Reaganomics and the modern conservative movement, which has been a complete and utter disaster for this country.
The beneficiaries of all those trends are indeed a minority. But what about the much larger cohort (still technically a minority, I suppose) who are by and large hurt by those trends but still consider them an improvement?
Some are blinded by racism, others by religion. I still maintain there are an awful lot blinded by raw, unthinking patriotism that was always there but was metastasized by 9/11 and weaponized by the GOP.
Wow! Impressive research. Thank you!
Good graphics.
Re ‘the value of the college degree’, the flip side to that is how the cost of that degree has far outpaced the increase in wages, such that people have to mortgage their future earnings - by a good decade or two in some cases - just to stay in the middle class.
And if you have a workplace accident or crack your back while changing a light bulb in the garage…welcome to poverty.
Oh, apropos of nothing, I saw this tweet:
Yeah, if I was a Democrat running for office on a platform of health care reform, I would list the prices of insulin in foreign countries as compared to the U.S. and ask how we can defend a system that allows this to happen.
Then there’s this…
https://twitter.com/Zeddary/status/1420070150045319169?s=19
For context:
And why this is relevant for this thread:
Today, a single vial of insulin that lasts me about a week is priced at $300+, only in the United States.
I don’t know where this person is shopping, or if they get something ‘special’, but I can buy a vial of regular insulin at Walmart for 25 bucks. Lasts longer than a week.
I can tell you in my Medicare experience, insulin is one of those drugs where 1 person can pay $25 and the other $250. It largely depends upon which state they live in. There are also people who can only take one particular form of insulin (Aspart vs Lispro) which may not have coverage on the Medicare Part D plans available in their county.
I mean, trust me, they are out there. I have a whole thread about this nonsense.
Meanwhile, while the January 6 hearing is listening to the testimony from the Capitol officers, the House GOP holds a news conference in which Elise Stefanik blamed Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi for the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
Agreed. I found this article with a relatively recent survey:
The prices of insulin in the USA are indefensible in my opinion.
October 12, 2020 - Insulin prices are more than eight times higher in the US than in 32 comparable, high-income nations combined, according to a new RAND Corporation study.
They found that overall, the average US manufacturer price per standard unit across all insulins was $98.70, compared to $6.94 in Australia, $12.00 in Canada, and $7.52 in the UK.
Specifically, for rapid-acting insulins, the US reported an average price of $111.39 per standard unit versus $8.19 in non-US countries. And for intermediate-acting insulins, the US reported an average price of $73.56 per standard unit versus $5.95 in non-US countries.
For the life of me, I don’t understand why Americans elect mentally ill people to run their country. I mean, she is clearly, obviously not well.
It was the mentally unwell that elected her.
Now, Nancy was speaker. But Mitch was Senate Majority leader, then. Does he not have to shoulder some of the blame himself?
IOKIARDI
Maybe because we’re a mentally ill country.
The Pelosi retires as house speaker thing actually does have a bit of truth to it. Retiring was part of the agreement that she made in order to serve her current term: that she will retire as House Speaker at the end of this term.