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Comment by smackeyacky | Hacker News Reader

It's not really a speed run.

The seeds were planted after Nixon resigned and it was decided to re-shape the media landscape and move the overton window rightwards in the 1970s, dismantling social democracy across the west and leading to a gradual reversal of the norms of governance in the US (see Newt Gingrich).

It's been gradual, slow and methodical. It has definitely accelerated but in retrospect the intent was there from the very beginning.

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Excellent post.

You could say that was when things reverted back to "normal". The FDR social reconstruction and post WW2 economic boom were the exception, anomaly. But the Scandinavian countries seem to be doing alright. Sure, they have some big size problems (Sweden in particular) but daily life for the majority in those countries appears to be better than a lot of people in the Anglosphere.

A difference also is neoliberalism ramping up in that time period of the 80s. The concept of privatizing anything and everything and bullshit like “private public partnership” are fairly recent.

The way most of you define "fascism" America has always been fascist with a brief perturbation where we tried Democracy and some Communism.

If you see it that way this is just a reversion to the mean.

True. We have collectively forgotten segregation was a thing in the US. Perhaps it has always been a right wing country that flirts with fascism.

The Constitution was clearly written for rich land owning white men first of thought, and everything else being left out or only in fractions. They added some checks and balances as a hand wavy idea of trying to stay away from autocracy, but they kind of made them toothless. I'd guess they just didn't have the imagination that people would willingly allow someone to go back towards autocracy since they were fighting so hard to leave it.

Every time you claim to go after the "rich" you just go after normal people. I think everyone has figured that out.

It's been an unfortunate truth that the US has long been a country that's flirted with fascism. Ultimately, Thaddeus Stevens was right in his conviction that after the civil war the southern states should've been completely crushed and the land given to the freedmen.

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