Originally Posted by perotista
I used to think both parties by shedding their unwanted wings, the Democrats their conservatives, the Republicans their liberals and today both are trying to get rid of their moderates, those in the center, center right and center left. Both became in their own right ideologues. I still believe that about the Democrats. Not so about the Republicans, they seem to have tossed their ideals onto the trash heap of history in favor of an egotistical opportunist who in reality stand for nothing but himself.

In 1980, the Democrats sat hanging their heads in shame as "The Great Communicator" lambasted them and named them as the source of everything that was wrong about America.
"Government can't solve problems, government IS the problem!"

At the same time, both Republicans AND Democrats (again, Dems out of SHAME!) tossed the working stiffs overboard and tried anything and everything they could to curry favor with the conservative again, including of course the conservatives who once were part of the more moderate wing of the Dems, but who had fled to the Republican Party in the South. Again, their allegiance to the Dems was identified by Nixon, Lee Atwater, and eventually, Reagan, as the reason for their misery.

Only Lee identified it a lot more closely, it was, he said to his Southern friends, that the Dems had embraced the black man.

His famous speech about moving away from "nigger nigger nigger" to using more creative terms comes to mind.



Again, we Dems just stood there, hanging our heads in shame, proffering up our Jimmy Carters, our Walter Mondales and Michael Dukasis', letting the Dirty Tricks squads and plumbers get away with things that should have been grounds for impeachment when weighed together with Iran-Contra. We let them get off scot free.

An actual lefty Democratic administration and actual lefty Democratic Congress never would have let them get away with any of it. And we wouldn't have hung our heads in shame.
But our own internal problem is the same problem that happened in 2016, purity tests.

The New Deal was put on life support starting in 1980, and by 1984 it was pretty much dead altogether, although thankfully the full impact would not be felt until around 1988.

All we need to really do is compare quality of life from back when lefty ideas had roots, power and enduring integrity, and results.

Nothing, and I do mean absolutely nothing, nothing DONE in the years since 1980 has ever even come close to the advantages and quality of life for the largest number of Americans as the experience of the New Deal era.
No metrics, and no markers from these last forty or so years has ever exceeded or even matched the overall quality of life and overall upward mobility of the New Deal era.

And still we hang our heads instead of fighting back. We feel guilty about our heroes of old, for some strange reason. We've been told they were terrorists and America-haters for so long that we've come to believe it, forgetting the truth, ignoring our own instincts.

What a Bernie, or a Liz or an AOC represents is not some Soviet style confiscatory rape and pillage of freedom at all, it's sound medicine for investing in our future generations, it's sound investment in our own shared future. And right now, a guaranteed "Idiocracy Generation" is the price we are paying for having denied the wisdom and moral integrity there's that word again!!) of doing so.

The biblical level weather events and wild gyrations of floods and fires that follow along are the price we pay for denying and ignoring what our well-tuned enviro-sense is telling us.

Forget Corona Virus, a massive MEASLES outbreak is occurring right now in, of all places, BRENTWOOD CALIFORNIA, a satellite of Beverly Hills and Bel-Air. And no, it is NOT the equally idiotic celebrity anti-vaxxer moms, it's the HELP and the tourists and visitors!
But mostly it's the help.
There is no one-sided finger of blame for this, it is as much a failure of essential government services as it is a failure to rein in kooky ultra-liberal pseudoscience and be aware that there's an equal number of RW anti-vaxxers, too. Some of them don't even care about any so called autism link or other phony and bogus link to devastating plagues and maladies, they're just convinced that if the government is involved, it's going to likely kill them where they stand, or turn the frogs gay, or both.

We let ourselves be dumbed down because we were told that we spend too much and tax too much. And that's why we can't have nice things.
Like a thriving democracy with solid and sound public institutions that can partner with the private sector in spirit of cooperation as the cornerstone of our mutual pursuit of the greater good for the largest number of Americans.
By the way, that proved to be very profitable back then!

We didn't fight back hard enough and we let go of our lefty ideals.








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