Thread by @JoshuaCypess

1/ Many people remark that we wouldn't have survived 4 more years of Trump (ym'sh) - and I agree - but this was a 40 year project of destroying the democratic form of US gov., starting with Reagan, and accelerated from Gingrich.

DJT was to almost the final hammer blow.

2/ Both Roosevelts changed the function of the government from preserving the entrenched power to an instrument to help people survive & thrive

TR was a Progressive, tore down the monopolies, established public health etc. When he left the party, the GOP became what it is today

3/ Wilson took up TR's platform (TR helped by splitting the 1912 vote) and when the GOP won in 1920, they actively tried to undermine the entire new project of what America would do for its citizens.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1912_Unit…

4/ Of course 12 years of retrograde regressive GOP destroyed the economy and led to a worldwide depression which aided the rise of totalitarianism around the world. 1920/1929 and 2020 share so many characteristics

But FDR, thank God, was able to pull us from the brink

5/ For the next 40 years FDR's vision of the government being the support and protector of its citizenry culminated in LBJ's Great Society, finally bringing many of the gifts to the oppressed engine that drove America's prosperity: African-Americans

6/ The Democratic Party switch to support Civil Rights led to the massive white supremacist backlash (the "Southern Strategy" "law and order" and other racist euphemisms) that found leaders in Goldwater (helped by the Q precursor John Birch Society) then Nixon & ultimately Reagan

7/ Nixon still believed in government helping its people, so did GHW Bush, but Reagan manifestly did not and became the pagan god of the anti-government movement. So many GenX Republicans worship Reagan, and it's pathetic given he stands for Sodom's cruelty & greed

8/ When the GOP saw Clinton - a reconstructed hippie married to the scariest type of woman they could imagine, one with a backbone & a brain - they knew the American experiment wasn't going to work. Rather than secede like their grandfathers did, Gingrich destroyed from within

9/ @Teri_Kanefield, exploring the research of many scholars like @HC_Richardson and @TimothyDSnyder, shows how the Roosevelt-LBJ version of government was anathema to the revanchist reactionaries that took over the GOP. That's what's been assaulting us for 40 years

10/ So, yes, we wouldn't have survived another 4 years, but we've been dying off from guns and horrible health care and stagnant wages and disintegrating local news & public education. We barely pulled off saving the country in 2018 & 2020, because we were nearing the end

11/ It's common misconception that Darwinian systems create the 'fittest' and this ideology has been applied to biology and economics. It's the root of the Reaganite worship of markets uber alles, and it's no wonder it's connected to supremacist ideology

https://twitter.com/JoshuaCypess/status/1349070500211863553

12/ All systems run according to conservation of energy, which means they persist not b/c they're optimized for peak performance. Nope: to conserve resources, they run at the lowest level to be barely functional, unless maintained by intelligence & culture to actually be optimal.

13/ If left alone, a system (like government, the markets, a VIRUS) will reduce to it's lowest level of performance that just keeps it working. And since spot-fixes are cheaper than system overhaul, the system will only be fixed piecemeal (#Literalism helps see only trees, too)

14/ America was under assault by the GOP for 40 years, with it turning hot under Gingrich and massive assault under McConnell's obstructionism. This led to Trump (ym'sh) being able to seize the machinery of disdain, rapine and hate the GOP created but left rudderless

15/ Utter neglect - the ideology of The Holy Marketplace - left us with income inequality last seen before Teddy Roosevelt (for why, see above) and a pandemic killing stupefying numbers of citizens, a number of whom voted for the party which doesn't care that they die

16/ So, yes, we pulled away at the last moment before utter societal collapse. The ideology of pre1994 is still found in the military (thank God) which kept us from a full-on autocratic take-over

I just hope we can demolish the evil ideas of the Hoover-Reagan axis & save the USA

17/ Ultimately, I want to use this moment to teach that systems survive, a culture survives, because of active curating & altruistic maintenance. Selfishness, cheating, neglect are all signs of a sick culture.

Those were the sins of slavery & white supremacy. We must change.

18/ @threadreaderapp please unroll.

@threader_app please compile.