I think a lot of it has to do with:
the Kennedy assination
The Vietnam War
Watergate
The failure of Operation: Eagle Claw (Iran hostage rescue attempt)
the S&L banking crisis
the Iran Contra fiasco
The Bill Clinton Blowjob Show
The Dot com crash
The Bush/Gore election fiasco
9/11
Hurricane Katrina
Enron
Sarah Palin
The Great Recession
Look, when you do something stupid over and over again and it is shown over and over again on 24 hour news and the internet, people tend to loose respect for you.
I favor social democracy. Nevertheless, it only seems to work in countries where nearly everyone is white. When the War on Poverty, declared by Lyndon Johnson in 1964, made welfare benefits more generous and easier to qualify for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of blacks quit low paying jobs and went on welfare, even though unemployment rates were declining. Whites are less likely to behave that way.
Also, white blue collar workers tend to oppose domestic spending programs that would benefit them - like a single payer health plan - if the programs would also help blacks.
The political center in the United States is to the right of where it is in Europe. This is because the American population is more heterogeneous than populations in Europe. Loyalties of class are usually less powerful than loyalties of race, nation, and ethnicity.
No, it’s because Americans are taught from birth to be religious and to be ideological psychopaths. Americans are taught to regard everyone else as nothing more than an enemy to be destroyed or a resource to be exploited. Outside of their immediate family, most Americans have no compassion or loyalty to each other; they aren’t any more generous to people within their own “race” than anyone else, regardless of your racial fantasies.
Now now Der, we’ve already got this thread chock full of silly bigoted comments hinting at how bad blacks are, we don’t also require silly bigoted comments about how evil Americans are.
It’s not silly, it’s the truth. Americans care very little about the welfare of other Americans. “What’s in it for me” and “I’ve got mine, screw you” are overwhelmingly common attitudes. Americans hate helping each other, and are generally willing to suffer themselves in order to avoid doing so.
On the contrary, I welcome this sort of comment. It demonstrates pretty well that the topic of this thread is nothing more than an attempt to proselytize the informed by people who need to hold up their beliefs as Gospel, regardless of facts and logic.
Regardless whether we are watching New Deal Democrat moving goalposts, claiming that he has accepted positions that do not appear in his posts, or trying to cast a racist rant as a discussion of political attitudes in the U.S. or Der Trihs engaging in one more fundy atheist rant, it is pretty easy to see that no serious discussion with a True Believer will ever succeed as a rational discussion.
I think it is Hollywood’s fault. They started letting those black listed artists work again in the early sixties. They used to make movies that made you proud to be an American starring John Wayne. Now we have ‘actors’ like George Clooney and Matt Daemon who just hate America.
Your claim to have accepted the fact that an aging population contributed to a drop in crime came only after several days of denying it and only after you accidentally posted information supporting it.
Longer sentences might reduce some crime. An overwhelming increase in incarceration due to harsher laws and penalties rather than keeping felons in prison longer does little more than create more career criminals by placing more at risk youths into situations where their only role models are criminal and they are hindered from finding work when released.
Regardless of that argument, the aging population argument is only “far worse” if you can explain why Canada experienced a similar drop in crime rates without the exploding incarceration rates.
The only people who might see the government “advancing” blacks at “their expense” are lower income whites. Yet the loss of respect for the government cuts acrosss all social and economic boundaries. You are singling out one (rather small) sectrion of the society who has perception problems and trying to claim the attitudes of the overwhelming majority of the population is the same as that small segment.
Do you have anything resembling a reference to support this silly claim? (Fox News, perhaps?) Please show that a significant number of blacks actually quit jobs to go on welfare, then provide evidence that whites did not do the same thing at the same rates.
So, you are saying that these people are willing to harm themselves solely to prevent a hypothetical benefit to people with whom they are not even in contact, just based on skin color? Are we supposed to feel sorry for such people?
The sea change in American presidential politics–the replacement of a liberal majority with a conservative majority–involved the conversion of a relatively small proportion of voters: the roughly five to ten percent of the electorate, made up primarily of white working-class voters, empowered to give majority status to either political party.
I am afraid that this claim is entirely vitiated by this:
None of tyhat actually explains, (or even addresses), why Canada and the U.S. can have similar drops of crime when you were claiming that the huge increase in incarceration in the U.S. was the primary, (at the time, you were saying only), factor in the U.S. rate while Canada had no such prison explosion. That is hardly “logical.”
So what? Your OP, (and numerous posts since that time), discussed a general trend of the American populace. Had you simply asked how Reagan won the presidency and the Republicans later took Congress, we would be having a different discussion in which your claims, here, would be one (of several) factors.*
Once more, you have moved the goalposts.
(Another factor, of course, would have been the Republican “Southern Strategy” that played up racism, often with lies, to sway an ill-informed portion of the electorate. Look how often “Affirmative Action” gets dragged into these discussions, with the clear claim that AA is “giving” “white jobs” to blacks, when the reality is that AA has generally provided women, not blacks, more opportunity to enter the workforce. All those white males are being told to fear blacks getting their jobs when it has actually been their own wives and daughters. :p)
