If Gore had won the presidency, things would have turned out very differently. And let's not forget that things worked out quite well for a while under Clinton.

Well, that's because Clinton and every Democratic President since has been an Eisenhower Republican. Hilary campaigned for Barry Fuckin' Goldwater.

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/126630

The Clintons also laid the groundwork for scaling up the prison population to boost slave labour and poors suppression.

Something the republicans gladly inherited.

I'm not old enough to have voted, but I remember the last few of the Reagan years, when his dementia was just as obvious as McConnell's or Feinsten's.

Wilson started it, Roosevelt and Eisenhower propped it up, inadvertently or not, Nixon continued it, and Reagan paved the way for the shit we see today.

And Jude Wanniski, author of The Two Santa Claus Theory, which has become the backbone of Republican stupidity ever since.

Reagan and Thatcher introduced neoliberalism into their respective countries. If you were right, it would have been pointless to vote for a center left party in the next election because they wouldn't abolish it. But when the Democrats/Labour came into power, first thing was to undo all the shit and abolish neoliberalism, right? Right?

John the Duncan made a good video about how the center left parties legitimized and normalized neoliberalism in the next legislative period. If you want me to, I can see if I find this video.

Yeah, they fucked society up in their unique and terrible ways, but they are absolutely not the cause of our problems, just another symptom.

It may be simplistic to focus blame on some individual antagonist, but the one named is probably the one whose choices carried the greatest weight toward achieving the current condition of disaster.

At any rate, as a champion of individual responsibility, he would happily accept, no doubt, his own.

Rupert Murdoch wouldn’t have been a thing if Reagan hadn’t ended the fairness doctrine. Rupert Murdoch is Reagan’s fault.

Good faith is a bit of a weird way to say exploitation, slavery, genocide and war in the global south

It seems that what you mean is social democracy broadly fails to meet the needs of the working class because it binds our fate to the exercise of ruling power.

The War on Education started with Reagan! It tracks

yeAh capItal leTters aRe liKe caPital ciTies, thEy beLong nEar tHe cenTer.

You gotta wait for the capitals to trickle down

Bitcoin was created in response to this, it's even written in the first Bitcoin block ever minted "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks". The US government printed nearly a trillion dollars to bail out the banks, governments worldwide did the same as the economic crisis unfolded. People lost their jobs, their savings, all of us had our currency devalued by the massive (but necessary) money printing to stave off a total financial collapse. And the CEOs of those failed banks had the audacity to give themselves lavish bonuses with that money. It was a massive wealth redistribution. And not a single one went to prison for it. 99% of us were forced to foot the bill for the reckless actions of a vanishingly small but ridiculously wealthy and powerful portion of the population.

And unfortunately, we have had to do this again and again because of a crucial flaw in modern banking: if banks loan out money, and everybody is all loaning to each other, there will be an economic shock that comes along that causes a bank run. When that happens in an interconnected, global economy, you can't have a big bank fail, because all the other banks will fail too, and the entire financial system will outright collapse, just like it did during the great depression. The guy who realized this is ben bernacki, he won a nobel prize in economics for pointing out that much of the harm from the depression came not from the market panic but from the failure of the banking system and faith in it afterwards. You don't know his name, but you would recognize his face, he is the one that sold the bailouts to congress and the world. But he does not have a solution to this problem aside from bailouts. Constant wealth distribution trickling up to those who are already the most wealthy and powerful in the system.

Satoshi saw this and knew there was a better way, so he created a new currency system in which no one person or organization could ever have the power to just turn on the money printer like that ever again. Because the temptation is just too strong. Every empire or nation that has ever failed ended with a period of hyperinflation caused by the massive increase in the money supply. Both sides in the US civil war did it, Zimbabwe did it, Nazi Germany did it, the USSR did it, Venezuela did it, the Roman Empire did it. Every country that is at war and runs out of money to fund the war does it.We need a system which does not rely on human choices being the difference between a sound money supply and a useless one. That is what Bitcoin is. It has a fixed supply. And the only person who can spend that BTC is the one with the keys: you. And it can be accessed by anybody in any country in any economic situation so long as they have a computer or phone and internet access.

Edit: Got Bernacki's name wrong

yeah I was going to say not to forget nixon but reagan was really a turning point but so is trump now. pre/post wise I feel trump is worse but that just might be the bias of how adjacent it is currently.

I blame the wrong side winning at Thermopylae.

Have you caught yourself doing that?

More than emphasizing the figure of Reagan, I suggest learning about neoliberalism overall, and its emergence as the global order.

Frankly, Reagan was just a simpleton in a suit, by my estimation.

Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman are the more relevant figures historically.

I'm not familiar with books on Reagan but if you want a great book on how the right wing billionaires manipulate things with money I suggest Dark Money by Jane Meyer. It's in the same vein and dark money is a highly interesting topic.