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I Blame Reagan [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-04-22

And you may ask yourself, "Well, how did I get here?"

- The Talking Heads

Good question. Was Trump inevitable? Was the USA destined to start a slide into fascism? We are not the only country battling with populo-fascism. In our case, i suspect the reasons are largely economic. More specifically, the economic situation for a vast percentage of our population has been manipulated to give rise to Trump and his cadre of opportunist billionaires.

I blame Reagan, or more accurately, the forces that backed Reagan. The gradual but ever increasing theft of purchasing power from the working class and the non-stop media blitz blaming it on the poor and immigrants created the inevitability of Trump.

We have long had self-labeled Conservative interests battling against workers’ rights since the founding of this country. There were the massacres of labor unions, the persecution of supposed communists, the vilification of suffragists, and countless other examples of often violent crackdown against any who felt that people should be treated with some fairness.

But there was a gap.

After WWII, the 40 hour work week was pretty much standard and some (OK, I’ll admit only some) workplace safety standards were becoming common practice. From the '50s through the '70s we had a "Working Middle Class". An hourly laborer could afford to own a car, keep a roof over his head, feed his children, etc—in other words to meet his basic life needs.

If he were white.

The Civil Rights movement began to push that into communities of color to a degree. We started to see people of different races, men and women able to afford a decent living. Started, that is. The pay gap has never gone away, but strides were made.

Admittedly there has been pushback in the propaganda machine all along. Sensible programs to help provide the most basic of benefits and safety have been portrayed as laughably extreme. I remember when the first OSHA safety regulations were published. My father was building a house at the time, and the laborers working for him were mocking OSHA as the stupidest thing they'd ever heard of. I remember them quoting rules, "Don't climb up a one-rung ladder," "Don't step in a cow pie, you might slip and break your arm" "Don't stick your hand in a bucket of tar"

Note: roofing tar is (was, I hope techniques have improved in 55 years) heated to between 400° and 425°F, poured into 5-gallon buckets which are hauled by rope up onto the roof, and then carried by hand over to where they need to be poured and spread with a rag mop. I had a 6th grade classmate who lost all the skin on both forearms when a bucket he was carrying splashed. Who let an 11-year old carry 5-gallon buckets of tar in the first place? NM labor practices were (still are) 3rd-world at best.

At the end of the '70s, there was a pronounced revolution of wealth against the poor. Since then, money has been hemorrhaging from the working class to the wealthy. Safety nets have been mocked and ridiculed until one by one, the very people who need them most have been duped into demanding they be dismantled.

The so-called "Tea Party" was a perfect example: Access to health was becoming increasingly difficult for more and more people. Workplace-provided insurance meant that prices went up, and usually only salaried employees had policies good enough to actually afford them. (I remember one of the policies offered by my wife's employer in 1988 had a $5000 deductible—in 1988!!!). The financial backers of the Tea Party convinced people somehow that providing access to healthcare was a government invasion of their rights. The voting populace ate it up, and many people died when their states refused to accept the expansion of Medicaid eligibility. I don’t know the accurate numbers, but I do personally know several individuals—I say do because they still live on in memory.

Since then, that playbook has been more and more successful at getting the working poor to vote against their own interests. It's one of the largest redistributions of wealth in history!

And today, they no longer need the veneer of convincing people that the wrong thing is right. They've successfully consolidated enough economic and political power that they're just grabbing openly They firmly believe there's not a damn thing we can do about it!

Dear god I hope they're wrong!

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