man i’m not cool, i just did the reading last time this came up
we were way into social welfare in the 40s just like our european kin, we were all about the marshall plan rebuilding europe so they could buy our products, we were way into them building up social welfare programs and a social safety net because we knew that strong communities would build strong economies would build strong market demand for american manufacturing
teddy roosevelt, the great imperialist that he was, was also way into this stuff, he fought literal robber barons - when fdr also went after the awful rich twenty years later, jp morgan famously declared ‘god damn all roosevelts’
it was literally civil rights and reagan that poisoned america against the social safety net, welfare programs, civil service, etc - as soon as black americans gained equal access to the things my grandparents used to build the good life my parents wrecked (thanks dad), suddenly that shit was ruining america
i mean look at what lbj said when they enacted medicare in 1965:
It was a generation ago that Harry Truman said, and I quote him: “Millions of our citizens do not now have a full measure of opportunity to achieve and to enjoy good health. Millions do not now have protection or security against the economic effects of sickness. And the time has now arrived for action to help them attain that opportunity and to help them get that protection.”
this is literally a year after the civil rights act - lbj escalated the vietnam war but he also passed huge social reforms aimed at combatting racism, poverty, and unemployment, and he had a growing economy to back all that up and the american people, even us whites, ate that shit up
then reagan came along and poisoned the well, and ever since the national discourse on poverty hasn’t been functionally distinguishable from a charles dickens parable published in //1843//
meanwhile romney was poisoning the well in business, leading the charge from stakeholder capitalism to shareholder capitalism
compare the johnson & johnson credo in 1943 to mitt romney talking about letting detroit go bankrupt in 2008
and i’m not kidding about mitt romney being personally responsible for this transition - it was his generation and his friends that exploited financial deregulation to do, basically, exactly all the stuff that led to those regulations in the first place
tl;dr reagan and romney led the charge away from an america built on progressivism and civic-minded capitalism, away from the social consciousness of henry ford and back into an era of robber barons and vampire capitalists that would make john galt blush
and reagan’s main weapon in that was anti-black racism and the terrifying spectre of sharing white prosperity with the wrong joneses
and it turned out we were down with that
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