Quote:
Originally Posted by Martina
I think it's important for people to remember the past, but not so they are grateful or even inspired. The fact is that the past contains possibilities that seem closed off to us now.
Republicans prior to Reagan weren't, for the most part, rabid deregulators. So many things we feel are almost impossible goals now were accepted from the end of the war through the seventies. I wish people knew that.
I don't care if today's activists appreciate what previous folk did, even the terrible loss of life. I would just like it if they had a sense of the world before Reagan when corporate greed had not corrupted most aspects of life. People label as socialist policies that Nixon supported.
We are lying to kids about their future prospects. We don't have the jobs anymore to support most people as middle class workers unless we really tax the rich, create a high minimum wage, and do unprecedented things to make housing affordable. That looks like, and is, socislist. Before we exported jobs and gutted viable businesses to sell them for parts, before our economy was based on finance and services for the rich, it was possible to be a working person and own a house. You could send your kids to college, take vacations, afford health care. We won't be going back to that without also returning to pre-Reagan tax rates. We will never go back to that without changes that seem extremely radical to most Americans. But no Republican of even the Reagan era could have foreseen how fast and deep the decline of the working and middle classes would be.
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In 2016 i would get really mad when i felt like progressives seemed to want to de-emphasize social justice in favor of economic justice.
This remark of Biden's really makes the point about that, though. Because all of the struggles he pointed to, with the exception of the draft, were minority struggles. It was totally possible for the average white person to almost completely ignore them. I know because my parents appear to have experienced the 60s exactly as if they were still in the 50s, although they did remark that we were lucky to be attending already-integrated schools and not living through the process of getting them there, like they did.
Today's economic struggle has started hurting the majority, and in 2016 it was easy to point to this as the reason there were suddenly so many whiteboy Marxists, who then began to make a case for why we should tolerate pro-lifers, risk the supreme court with write-in votes, etc.
But if it's a choice between whiteboy Marxists claiming identity politics are a distraction, or a bourgeois cishet white man pointing to civil rights gains as a way to dismiss what we're doing to our young people? I might switch my morning dogwalking podcast from Rachel Maddow to Chapo Traphouse