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Lawrence Glickman Profile picture
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7 Jan, 4 tweets, 2 min read
Since Reconstruction, variants of the claim that "our freedom is being stolen" has been used to justify white backlash.
In a fairly anodyne version in 2016, Phil Gramm said, "I’m afraid that if we don’t win this election and overturn Obama’s programs now, my five grandchildren will never know the America I knew....our freedom is being lost."
dallasnews.com/opinion/commen…
Gramm was, of course, evoking Ronald Reagan's 1961 claim that, if Medicare passed, we would spend “sunset years” telling “our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free."/3
Remarkably, as I documented in @washingtonpost,
repeating Reagan's risibly bad prediction has become a staple of conservative rhetoric. /4
washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/0…

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More from @LarryGlickman

Lawrence Glickman Profile picture
7 Jan
Query: Has anyone compiled a comprehensive list of the prominent people, politicians, media outlets, and organizations (ranging from the National Association of Manufacturers to the NAACP) calling for Trump's immediate removal from office?
How about an article on the growing list of diverse group of people, media outlets, and organizations calling for Trump to be immediately removed from office? @politico @nytimes @washingtonpost @thehill @WSJ @bpolitics
In 1998, there were many articles that cataloged the newspapers calling for Bill Clinton to resign.
apnews.com/article/3c011b…
Read 4 tweets
Lawrence Glickman Profile picture
31 Dec 20
Why does nearly every article about the GA Senate race start with the Republicans groundless charged about the “extreme socialism” of the Democratic candidates? And why is the not only real but self-proclaimed extremism of the GOP never mentioned? /1 nytimes.com/2020/12/30/us/…
I provided a brief history of the socialism charge from the New Deal to the present in this @DissentMag article and have more to say about it in my book, FREE ENTERPRISE: AMERICAN HISTORY./2

dissentmagazine.org/online_article…
Here is a passage from the introduction about the “slippery slope from reform to totalitarianism” that was central to the anti-New Deal playbook and to all subsequent reform efforts. /3
Read 5 tweets
Lawrence Glickman Profile picture
21 Dec 20
In FREE ENTERPRISE, I discuss a group that condemned advocates of a robust welfare state as daydreamers who promised "something for nothing." Yet these people, who, like Paul, depicted themselves as hard-headed realists, posited the miraculous, faith-based nature of free markets.
Paul’s critique, founded upon a kind of inverted producerism, has a long genealogy.
In 1950, Robert Bremen’s noted the “semantic somersault” of the phrase “something for nothing”: it had become “a missile by the spokesman of big business and political conservativism to hurl at what they called the ‘gimme’ attitude of the common folk toward government.”
Read 5 tweets
Lawrence Glickman Profile picture
11 Nov 20
I disagree that Trump ran as an "economic populist" in 2016. He called for tax cuts for the rich, opposed increasing the minimum wage (@PeterBeinart says otherwise), & called for eliminating health care for millions. The populism was purely performative.
nybooks.com/daily/2020/11/…
Here's a good @washingtonpost roundup on Trump's minimum wage claims during the 2016 campaign. /2
washingtonpost.com/news/fact-chec…
Trump said a bunch of bs stuff about how his taxes would go up, but his proposed plan made clear that it benefitted the wealthy, that it was a typical Republican plan./3
taxfoundation.org/details-analys…
Read 10 tweets
Lawrence Glickman Profile picture
26 Oct 20
The irony of the 60 Minutes interviews is that Biden faced much tougher questions. They asked him, and not the guy who recently bragged about acing a dementia test, whether he was senile. They asked him, and not the guy who just got out of the hospital, about his health. /1
When Trump couldn’t name a policy priority, rather than zeroing in on his inability to do so, Stahl changed the subject to “Who is our biggest foreign adversary?” Other than COVID, she didn’t ask him to defend or explain any of his policies or about his personal tax avoidance./3
To be fair, Stahl had more questions that she didn’t get to ask because he walked out early, but there was nothing about his threats to free and fair elections, about about kids in cages, or about tax cuts for the rich, about corruption in his administration, or climate change./3
Read 9 tweets
Lawrence Glickman Profile picture
24 Oct 20
This piece is incredibly credulous about Trump's approach to the economy and in accepting the myth that, prior to Trump, the GOP embraced "sacred verities about government debt." nytimes.com/2020/10/24/bus…
First, the record over the last forty years makes it patently obviously that the GOP only embraces these "sacred verities" when a Democrat holds the presidency. /2
It quotes an AIE economist saying that Trump has "completely moved the Republican Party away from reducing Social Security and Medicare spending" but not Trump's own claim that he would consider cuts to Social Security and Medicare in his second term./3
vox.com/2020/3/6/21168…
Read 16 tweets

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