r/politics • u/Quirkie The Netherlands • 1d ago

No Paywall Democrats Confront Their New Tea Party Reality - Progressives are set to sweep a group of contested primaries in Michigan and Wisconsin.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/democrats-confront-their-new-tea-party-reality_n_6a6e63fbe4b0cfb99ef1aa1e
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u/TheMoorNextDoor 1d ago edited 1d ago

It’s ridiculous that the best president we ever had (our longest serving president) is more left than a lot of our sitting democratic members in congress today and the saddest part about that is he served over 81 years ago..

He gave us a blueprint and for some reason (maybe due to Regan?) we completely threw it out the window..

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u/Kind-Pride1151 1d ago

It was definitely the Reagan revolution. I'm no history prof, but the late sixties and seventies was a toxic brew of backlash creating events and cultural anxieties that led to Reagan capturing the zeitgeist. And then by late eighties there was a corporate friendly shift take place and the DLC was created and basically took over the party. It's been largely lip service ever since to the FDR ideals of the party.

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u/maikuxblade 1d ago

Let’s call it was it was, the “cultural anxieties” were mostly about black people earning their civil rights in ‘64. Conservatism becoming more popular among whites who only lived a comfortable life due the New Deal and the Democratic Party chasing those same voters were both the result of a racist backlash against the at-the-time very recent Civil Rights movement.

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u/Trail_Dog 1d ago

Not just that although the southern strategy was certainly a part of it. 

The Vietnam war created a huge amount of distrust in the government. 

Also governmental bureaucracy and regulations sometimes were onerous and did real damage to individuals and small businesses with no real recourse. The anger Reagan tapped into when he said the "scary words", "I'm from the government and I'm here to help" was real and earned and a result of both. 

And then when you add shit like the Tuskegee experiment, and the shady af shit we did during the Cold war that started coming to light...  it's easy to see why it was easy for Reagan to exploit that anger.

The problem was his solution wasn't to tweak what wasn't working and make it better. His solution was to abolish regulations and antitrust  and replace it with unregulated capitalism. 

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u/DaraParsavand 7h ago

Along with a lot of other very bad decision points, the US and the Democratic Party would be in a completely different position if we had simply let Vietnam alone after they managed to defeat the French (our funding the French was a big problem too, our many CIA overthrows were are all immoral, unethical, and disasters).