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Comment by smallmancontrov | Hacker News Reader

In the hands of 4th party system Progressive Republicans and 5th party system New Deal Democrats, government was an extremely powerful force for trust-busting.

In the hands of 6th party system Republicans, namely Ronald Reagan and Robert Bork, the government worked hard to usher in a a new era of Robber Barons. We live in the culmination of this project.

History says the result depends on the hands, not the tool. 6th party system Democrats have largely failed to undo the Reagan/Bork policies, but that's an act of omission not comission and even then Lina Khan was a big step in the right direction. This issue was on the ballot in 2024 and will be again in 2028. Hopefully we make better choices in 2028.

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If you are going to limit the 5th Party system to the first half of the long 1930s-1990s period of overlapping realignments (which is pretty reasonable), then the 6th Party system should be the second half of that period, and the period from about the end of the Clinton Administration on should be the 7th Party system; you can call now the 6th Party system if you call the entire long realignment period the 5th (which makes some sense, too, though there is a pretty significant difference between the New Deal dominant period and the Civil Rights dominant period of the realignment), but to split it somewhere in the middle but then lump the period after with it makes little sense.

If you want to call Obama and Biden 7th party system, I don't really agree but I also don't think it matters for my argument: we can just re-label them and move on.

It is pretty funny you refer to these periods because they are the quintessential example of big business pushing for regulations to push out their competitors and become monopolies. And the "progressives" enthusiastically supported such monopolization.

Regulated monopolies are much better than unregulated ones. Free markets generate the latter, and they have created most of the big issues we have today: inequality, climate change, the military industrial complex.

"the trust-busters were the REAL monopolists"

Source: trust me bro. Lol.

This is so vague as to be impossible to pin down what you mean in order to refute it without you slipping out of it. But in very general terms, trust busting was a real thing that happened in this country once upon a time, yet would be unimaginable under the current ruling class.

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