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"Somehow" we did that back when we believed in a strong federal government working for the benefit of the people. It's no wonder that we lost the ability after

"Somehow" we did that back when we believed in a strong federal government working for the benefit of the people. It's no wonder that we lost the ability after decades of anti-government propaganda and regulatory capture.

yonaguska 1y ago
I don't believe we are capable of a strong government that will also work for the benefit of the people today. Anti government sentiment didn't just spring up from a vacuum.
- Arainach 1y ago
  It sprung up from capitalist propaganda and intentional sabotage of the government by conservatives. > I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub. Grover Norquist said the quiet part out loud in 2001, but conservatives have been running that playbook since the New Deal.
  - GolfPopper 1y ago
    >*"conservatives have been running that playbook since the New Deal" I think one of America's many failures is allowing a radically revolutionary right-wing (that is currently headed full speed to fascism) to keep calling themselves "conservatives" when that label is about as incorrect as can be. They don't "conserve" anything. They're not actually reactionary, although they often pretend to be. They are not trying to be defenders of Chesterton's Gate[1]. They're radicals, who want to reshape society to their own whims and prejudices. And they ought to be address and treated as such. 1. https://www.chesterton.org/taking-a-fence-down/ https://www.chesterton.org/taking-a-fence-down/
    - questionableans 1y ago
      I agree. Of the two major US political parties today, one is primarily radical right with a small conservative branch that is struggling to stay in their party. The other is conservative to moderate with a small liberal branch that is fighting to make their party stand for something.
      - jampekka 1y ago
        That liberals are the left wing in US is quite telling. In Europe and Latin America liberals are (center-)right.
        b800h 1y ago
        The word "liberal" means different things in different places.
        jampekka 1y ago
        Maybe, although many policies by European liberal center-right parties are to the left of US liberals. The main reason is probably that US never had the major socialist movements of 20th century Europe. Before those liberals were the left in Europe too.
  - yonaguska 1y ago
    For me it happened when I was growing up and I watched my family bankrupted and pushed to near homelessness with zero legal recourse due to a corrupt local government. There are countless others that have found themselves at the mercy of a large government, with unlimited money and resources.
    - Arainach 1y ago
      ....so you prefer a "small" government, which history has shown time and time again leads to corporations doing evil en masse, ruining all sorts of lives around them?
somenameforme 1y ago
It's not that people turned against the government just randomly. Who was the last genuinely socially motivated President we had? I idealize JFK, but I think that's largely because of his charisma, how he ended, and obviously the space program. Yet how did he not just immediately condemn and completely dismantle the entire CIA when the proposal for Operation Northwoods [1] reached his desk, and was one signature away from execution? And that'll probably look benign as the actions from more recent decades are declassified in the future. And after his assassination everything went downhill fast with divide and conquer, all alongside global self destructive geopolitical nonsense that continues to this very day. We have spent, just since 2000 upwards of a very conservative baseline of $10 trillion on war and military related expenses. That's a starting point of about $30,000 for every single man, woman, and child in America. Think about all of the amazing things we could have done with that money. Instead we just blew it on pointless wars and have literally less than nothing to show for it since they not only made the US far less safe, but made the world far less stable. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods
- Arainach 1y ago
  LBJ made more progress on social issues than any President with the possible exception of FDR. Certainly dramatically more progress per year in office. Jimmy Carter was also socially motivated. Reagan changed the game, Newt Gingrich destroyed cooperation, and now we're living in the world they created.
  - somenameforme 1y ago
    Modern politicians are really good at framing everything as being the most socially motivated thing in the world. And I think LBJ is the grandfather of this stuff. When you read of his private discussions, socially motivated is just about the last thing he was. He wanted absolute political power and understood that he could create systems of dependency to achieve it. It just so happens that systems of dependency can also be framed positively as 'solving hunger' or whatever. The fact that 60 years later 'solving hunger' has translated to having more than 41 million people completely unable to feed themselves without government assistance is not a coincidence. It a third stanza of that old saying 'Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for life. Give a man a fish every day and he'll do whatever you want to keep getting that fish.' There's countless ways we could have spent that war money (no different during LBJ times with Vietnam) to help create ways for people to be able to genuinely provide for themselves. But I don't think this was ever the goal.
brabel 1y ago
There’s a good argument for America having been able to do all it did despite being a democracy without a strong central government, not because of it. Look around the world and see how many countries managed to achieve similar success using the same liberal principles? Most of Europe became rich under imperialist, authoritarian governments not with their current system. I would love to see a good counter argument that’s convincing since I find this realization extremely sad as for all my life I believed the propaganda about democracy and liberalism being the route to success just to see most countries that tried to emulate that fail miserably.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- majoe 1y ago
  > Most of Europe became rich under imperialist, authoritarian governments not with their current system Europe prospered under democratic governments after the second world war. My particular region of Germany was rural, agrarian and piss poor before the war. Now it is an industry hub and one of the richest regions in Germany, all thanks to a democratic government, which prioritised development of rural areas. The wealth we now enjoy is incomparable to what we had under authoritarian rule before. Let's also not forget, that the Cold war divided Europe in two halves, one with democratic governments and one under authoritarian rule, an A/B test so to say. The end result was, that they needed a wall in Berlin to keep the people from fleeing to the west. > Look around the world and see how many countries managed to achieve similar success using the same liberal principles Beside the whole of Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Uruguay and Taiwan come to mind. Taiwan has a per capita GDP 2.5x that of mainland China.
  - brabel 1y ago
    Sorry but I have to mention that Nazi Germany became incredibly prosperous, but it decided to use its wealth to obtain military power. Also, Europe dominated the world for a couple of hundred years before the Great War. Some parts of Europe may have been poor during that time, but compared to the rest of the world I do think it was a whole lot better. Japan was incredibly rich in the beginning of the 20th century - and it was definitely not a democracy. Australia, Canada and NZ are all part of the ex-British Empire and I would say that's what made them prosperous, not their political system. South Korea rode on the back of US support, like Japan after the war, but I do agree they did that while being mostly democratic. Uruguay has just very recently become a nice place due to basically a single guy! That president, Jose Mujica, was such a legend! And a big critic of capitalism , by the way. Taiwan was what we used to call the "Asian Tigers" that became rich in an incredibly fast manner... I don't know that you can attribute that to a political system at all: Singapore was and is a dictatorship and is perhaps the best example of Asian Tiger - it became richer than Australia in like 20 years! All in all: you do not convince me. You do not seem to understand what made those countries rich in my opinion and you haven't really reflected on it if you really think that democracy was the common theme. EDIT: Taiwan is a tiny island, China is a huge country. The GDP percapita of Shanghai and Beijing is about the same as Taiwan... Hong Kong and Macau, also part of China, have much larger GDP/pc still.

yonaguska 1y ago

I don't believe we are capable of a strong government that will also work for the benefit of the people today. Anti government sentiment didn't just spring up from a vacuum.

Arainach 1y ago
It sprung up from capitalist propaganda and intentional sabotage of the government by conservatives. > I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub. Grover Norquist said the quiet part out loud in 2001, but conservatives have been running that playbook since the New Deal.
- GolfPopper 1y ago
  >*"conservatives have been running that playbook since the New Deal" I think one of America's many failures is allowing a radically revolutionary right-wing (that is currently headed full speed to fascism) to keep calling themselves "conservatives" when that label is about as incorrect as can be. They don't "conserve" anything. They're not actually reactionary, although they often pretend to be. They are not trying to be defenders of Chesterton's Gate[1]. They're radicals, who want to reshape society to their own whims and prejudices. And they ought to be address and treated as such. 1. https://www.chesterton.org/taking-a-fence-down/ https://www.chesterton.org/taking-a-fence-down/
  - questionableans 1y ago
    I agree. Of the two major US political parties today, one is primarily radical right with a small conservative branch that is struggling to stay in their party. The other is conservative to moderate with a small liberal branch that is fighting to make their party stand for something.
    - jampekka 1y ago
      That liberals are the left wing in US is quite telling. In Europe and Latin America liberals are (center-)right.
      - b800h 1y ago
        The word "liberal" means different things in different places.
        jampekka 1y ago
        Maybe, although many policies by European liberal center-right parties are to the left of US liberals. The main reason is probably that US never had the major socialist movements of 20th century Europe. Before those liberals were the left in Europe too.
- yonaguska 1y ago
  For me it happened when I was growing up and I watched my family bankrupted and pushed to near homelessness with zero legal recourse due to a corrupt local government. There are countless others that have found themselves at the mercy of a large government, with unlimited money and resources.
  - Arainach 1y ago
    ....so you prefer a "small" government, which history has shown time and time again leads to corporations doing evil en masse, ruining all sorts of lives around them?

somenameforme 1y ago

It's not that people turned against the government just randomly. Who was the last genuinely socially motivated President we had? I idealize JFK, but I think that's largely because of his charisma, how he ended, and obviously the space program. Yet how did he not just immediately condemn and completely dismantle the entire CIA when the proposal for Operation Northwoods [1] reached his desk, and was one signature away from execution? And that'll probably look benign as the actions from more recent decades are declassified in the future. And after his assassination everything went downhill fast with divide and conquer, all alongside global self destructive geopolitical nonsense that continues to this very day. We have spent, just since 2000 upwards of a very conservative baseline of $10 trillion on war and military related expenses. That's a starting point of about $30,000 for every single man, woman, and child in America. Think about all of the amazing things we could have done with that money. Instead we just blew it on pointless wars and have literally less than nothing to show for it since they not only made the US far less safe, but made the world far less stable. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods

Arainach 1y ago
LBJ made more progress on social issues than any President with the possible exception of FDR. Certainly dramatically more progress per year in office. Jimmy Carter was also socially motivated. Reagan changed the game, Newt Gingrich destroyed cooperation, and now we're living in the world they created.
- somenameforme 1y ago
  Modern politicians are really good at framing everything as being the most socially motivated thing in the world. And I think LBJ is the grandfather of this stuff. When you read of his private discussions, socially motivated is just about the last thing he was. He wanted absolute political power and understood that he could create systems of dependency to achieve it. It just so happens that systems of dependency can also be framed positively as 'solving hunger' or whatever. The fact that 60 years later 'solving hunger' has translated to having more than 41 million people completely unable to feed themselves without government assistance is not a coincidence. It a third stanza of that old saying 'Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for life. Give a man a fish every day and he'll do whatever you want to keep getting that fish.' There's countless ways we could have spent that war money (no different during LBJ times with Vietnam) to help create ways for people to be able to genuinely provide for themselves. But I don't think this was ever the goal.

brabel 1y ago

There’s a good argument for America having been able to do all it did despite being a democracy without a strong central government, not because of it. Look around the world and see how many countries managed to achieve similar success using the same liberal principles? Most of Europe became rich under imperialist, authoritarian governments not with their current system. I would love to see a good counter argument that’s convincing since I find this realization extremely sad as for all my life I believed the propaganda about democracy and liberalism being the route to success just to see most countries that tried to emulate that fail miserably.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
majoe 1y ago
> Most of Europe became rich under imperialist, authoritarian governments not with their current system Europe prospered under democratic governments after the second world war. My particular region of Germany was rural, agrarian and piss poor before the war. Now it is an industry hub and one of the richest regions in Germany, all thanks to a democratic government, which prioritised development of rural areas. The wealth we now enjoy is incomparable to what we had under authoritarian rule before. Let's also not forget, that the Cold war divided Europe in two halves, one with democratic governments and one under authoritarian rule, an A/B test so to say. The end result was, that they needed a wall in Berlin to keep the people from fleeing to the west. > Look around the world and see how many countries managed to achieve similar success using the same liberal principles Beside the whole of Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Uruguay and Taiwan come to mind. Taiwan has a per capita GDP 2.5x that of mainland China.
- brabel 1y ago
  Sorry but I have to mention that Nazi Germany became incredibly prosperous, but it decided to use its wealth to obtain military power. Also, Europe dominated the world for a couple of hundred years before the Great War. Some parts of Europe may have been poor during that time, but compared to the rest of the world I do think it was a whole lot better. Japan was incredibly rich in the beginning of the 20th century - and it was definitely not a democracy. Australia, Canada and NZ are all part of the ex-British Empire and I would say that's what made them prosperous, not their political system. South Korea rode on the back of US support, like Japan after the war, but I do agree they did that while being mostly democratic. Uruguay has just very recently become a nice place due to basically a single guy! That president, Jose Mujica, was such a legend! And a big critic of capitalism , by the way. Taiwan was what we used to call the "Asian Tigers" that became rich in an incredibly fast manner... I don't know that you can attribute that to a political system at all: Singapore was and is a dictatorship and is perhaps the best example of Asian Tiger - it became richer than Australia in like 20 years! All in all: you do not convince me. You do not seem to understand what made those countries rich in my opinion and you haven't really reflected on it if you really think that democracy was the common theme. EDIT: Taiwan is a tiny island, China is a huge country. The GDP percapita of Shanghai and Beijing is about the same as Taiwan... Hong Kong and Macau, also part of China, have much larger GDP/pc still.