Basically, this entire country was falling off a cliff for 250 years.
The Jesuits started it back in 1776 to use D.C. as the military and intelligence capital in the NWO. Look at D.C., and how it’s laid out. They literally gave us the plan for DC, which is a pentagram, the bottom of which being the White House.
Also, the White House was named after English Jesuit preacher Andrew White. Oh, and he founded Maryland.
Edit: I forgot I made a statement, but I had researched some more since.
Same graph, but I would just replace Reagan with Nixon.
Nixon was operating under constraints and expectations that led to some positive things in spite of himself (e.g., environmental regulations, improved relations with China). It was the Ford administration that saw the advent of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bush Sr., that defined the later trajectory of the Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II administrations.
And while he was a much better human being than Clinton, I’d date the Democratic party’s neoliberal turn to Carter’s administration.
I mean, Carter came into the presidency at a time when Keynesian economics were at their weakest position, both publicly and academically, in decades. I suspect without Reagan achieving 8 years of absurd, cursed, idiotic electoral success, and then HW winning a 4 year term after him, we probably wouldn’t regard the Democratic Party as having had a neoliberal turn at all. Mondale and Dukakis were hardly in the neoliberal vein, and arguably even Carter was working from the constraints of his circumstances more than ideology.
Clinton also did a fuckton of deregulation.
clintons was very much a result of reagan. nixon would have liked to do more but his party was not ignoring everyone but their base at the time and recognized there had to be some give and take and they still had some connection to actual ideals. Nixon was kinda the start though its just reagan made it more publically so and its become more public with each new one.
“Some metric” should be on the y axis, and the x axis is time (years), right? Or is it incorrect for humorous purposes?
The fact that Citizens United didn’t get thrown out immediately by the Supreme Court was probably the final straw.
That certainly kicked everything into high gear.
Reagan, but Reagan was made possible by the Southern Strategy, which itself was a long product of the never-started recovery from the Civil War, which was due to the loss of Lincoln’s leadership.
There have been ups and downs, so the answer to your question of a hard decline is probably more recent events, but they couldn’t have happened without prior ones that paved the way. Just like all the positives.
I really wish Lincoln hadn’t been assassinated. He didn’t just want to reclaim the South; he wanted to reintegrate them and heal the massive sociopolitical wounds. I think the country would be significantly better off if he had been alive to carry out his plans.
It’s an oversimplistic comparison and maybe wasn’t fully possible, but imagine a post-Civil War US where the North did for the South what the US and other countries did for West Germany and Japan.
You mean, transform them into cowed little manufacturers of quality automobiles while they still inwardly remain seethingly racist?
Reagan.
I see lots of reagan replies and I can’t disagree. Don’t get me wrong the 70’s had plenty of issues but it seemed like we generally were trying to make progress up till then and reagan was the start of regression. The thing is we had so much largess to float on and many of the things had short term benefit for larger long term loss. So it seemed decent right through the nineties. It was like two steps back one forward. by trump jr it was all steps back and trump picked up the pace and has now turned around and running full steam backwards. Any progress we have made in between have increasingly not even been able to get us back to where we were and real foundational improvements are hard so they tend to be the kind of short term win that does not bring a whole lot in the long run. Especially when it all gets reversed. Its kinda amazingly sad how different the us and the worldwould be with just a few small things. Think about the hanging chads and how environmental progress would be different and remember the clinton administration had alkaheida on their radar. Then scotus ruling in the shadow of obamas pick being stolen. We are talking massive massive differences in where we would be now.
Reagan.
I vote citizens united
I mean, 2016 for “When did it turn into a definite nosedive,” but the broader question of what caused the nosedive is… much more complex.
Reagan and Citizens United aren’t bad answers, as many here have already offered, if one doesn’t wish to get too deep into “If only we had stomped the first evolutionary idiot to try and crawl up onto land, none of this would have happened” level chains-of-causation.
Reagan materially, Citizens United politically-culturally, one might say.
The neoliberal fad of the 80s and 90s was dying by the late 2000s, and material conditions could have returned to a positive trajectory had Citizens United not ultra-fucked our already-fucked political system.
On the other hand, we live in an unprecedented age of technological change. Maybe this was always the fucked route it was going to go, and we just have to figure out how to come out the other side.
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