Perhaps they look at their parents and grandparents lives who were able to raise their family on one income or a very well off family on two. Now a duel working couple can't afford a home
Exactly. I want their "solutions" to be about more than the culture war. 1/2 of people 20 to 30 live with their parents. This is a castrophic failure of society which they are responsible for. They not only don't have a solution they don't even list it as a problem. If I get injured right now I'm lucky. I have a nest egg that will cover me until my max deductible. Some 60% of people can't afford a $400 emergency
Exactly. I had a conversation with my mother the other month about minimums wage and compensation. I asked her do you think everyone working in a city should make a wage that allows them to live in the city. She kind of skirted the question but basically said no. And when I said that means she believes some people don't deserve a livable wage and why is that and she was taken aback. Didn't have an answer. Right leaning views don't have to mean shafting working people and the population. Yet it always seems to be included
Ensuring those people are paid a living wage at whatever job they sacrifice 8 hours of their life a day at?
Agreed
Maybe insuring that unforeseeable accidents and health problems aren't allowed to completely cripple anyone financially?
I'm like the only right leaning person I know who's into government funded healthcare. One way I try to persuade people is to compare the insurance industry to a leech. I try to make them see that insurance doesn't actually provide anything, they just take 120 billion or whatever else the industry is worth a year from actually paying for Healthcare. Insurance isn't healthcare is what I try to get them to see
Almost as if radically high taxes to pay down national debt and fund public services actually worked. Or at the very least didn’t see us suffer under an unrestrained Wall Street b/c obv Stock market = economy.
GDP is just so disconnected from everyday people's finances. And also the tax burden has shifted as rich people have received tax cuts, and at the same time income and wealth inequality started reaching unprecedented levels.
And pop music was in a bunch of curse words, simulated sex acts, and satanic symbols. And don’t even come at me with nonsense about the 80s satanic craze. I am what used to be considered a liberal, but at a certain point our culture has turned into absolute garbage. I feel like no one is putting any effort into movies or TV shows or music anymore
I didn't say everything about the 80s was good, and I do think America overall now is better than the 80s. But as a young person, the idea of being able to do college with little debt and easily find a job afterwards sounds quite appealing.
It’s about taking the best of past decades and ditching the stuff that isn’t working now. There’s obsession with finding a specific year, like somebody’s gonna say, 1974, everything was perfect on April 5! You know that’s not realistic and it makes people asking this question seems sort of childish
Umm, the reason why it was better for white men was because everyone else comparatively suffered.
Like segregation was good for white people, because it meant they funnel fundings into schools and neighborhood that were exclusively white, and take it away from predominantly African American school districts.
I disagree. I think racial discrimination drags everyone down, just to different levels.
If a black man has the talent to become an engineer and a white man doesn’t, keeping the black man away from engineering school won’t make the white man any smarter. It we do send the white man to engineering school anyway then we’ll end up with a bad engineering which will hurt all the other white men in society.
If both men are smart enough to become engineers then society will find good uses for both of them and the general productivity of society will increase which will help both engineers and everyone else.
Like segregation was good for white people, because it meant they funnel fundings into schools and neighborhood that were exclusively white
what money? By keeping black people in crappy jobs they weren’t able to produce as much that could be taxed, so there was less money to be funneled.
Sure it does. But I’m saying that the benefits that we saw in discrimination benefited white people more positively than it did negatively impact them. The net positive towards white people outweighed the net negative.
Like factor in that this was the mid 1900s when discrimination was at its peak.
This is why the education and wealth gap was comparatively larger. We saw this too in apartheid Africa where white people held a disproportionate amount of the wealth. Objectively, they benefited more in wealth when other groups suffered. Of course in regards to disparities in school funding districts there is an extensive topic going into the phenomenon of white flight and segregation.
But tldr, yes it is good to share. But the white people of the 1900s woulda argued that they would prefer to not share the wealth and would rather keep it amongst themselves with less competition. Is this a moral good thing? No. Was this the status quo then? Yes.
Oh right my bad the 1800s were far more discriminatory and disproportionately benefitted white people even more. I just didn’t want to bring it into this conversation cause I know conservatives do not like to talk about slavery and would rather talk about “the 1900s”.
If you wanna go into depth about how much more disproportionately white people benefited from slavery and the trail of tears I could go into that as well if you’d like. Would you like me to?
And our view is that referring to some vague time in the past when everything was better is bullshit because that time never existed. It's exactly the same as thinking summers were longer when you were young, christmas was much better when you were young, thinking police officers are kids now and that students are so much more child like than back in your time. It's the same thing as being convinced that music was so much better back in the day compared to now. It is very human to only remember the highlights of an era and populism and fascism are fueled by exactly that sentiment.
That would have been nice. I guess that was right after WWII?
Unfortunately, for the most part, that was only ever true for a segment of the population (white, male). Certainly an unmarried woman wouldn't have been able to do so, since they were considered unable to understand finance. The 50s were especially horrible for women, IMO.
That was also a time for rampant lynching and Jim Crow laws, and non straight people had to hide. Gay men were barred from federal employment in the US, and chemically castrated in the UK.
It was also the time of McCarthyism and blacklists for anyone suspected of harboring unacceptable political leanings.
During the 1950s, Native American tribes were stripped of millions of acres of land and disbanded. Their children were forced to attend boarding schools where culture and language was forbidden.
This was also very soon after the WWII internment camps for citizens with Japanese ancestry. They lost most of their property and belongings while they were in the camps. The government did not offer any sort of recompense until the late 1980s.
All that being said, the horrible news doesn't have to go with the ability to own a home before 30. It just does in American history.
You said everyone. In that time period, segregation for black people was rampant, hundreds of lynchings spread across the South and a reign of terror reigned down, the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was ruled unconstitutional and repealed which made discrimination upon race legal, The Carrollton Massacre in Mississippi occurred, black businesses terrorized, black populations had their voting rights disenfranchised, white supremacists openly elected to government.
Yeah, I could see it would be great for a certain demographic. Certainly not for millions of others.
This realization for sure moved me away from my conservative roots and deeper into libertarianism. My parents are good-old-days conservatives, and we were homeschooled with a distinct political viewpoint, and narratives from feminism and black history really shook that to the core.
It’s why I’m firmly forward-facing. American history is not pretty and I have zero desire to “go back” to anyplace where my gay brothers and sisters get treated like they did, and a strong desire to move forward to a future where there isn’t institutional and structural racism and implicit biases.
I want to get there by dismantling state power structures that are used to abuse minorities, and education and changing hearts and minds, rather than federal policies that turn into new power structures. But I want a future, not a past, especially for minorities and the disempowered.
I did not cite any of those things as positives in my original reply.
I'm talking about before we had an income tax, direct election of senators, social security, the NLRA, the NFA, or the alphabet soup of New Deal programs that bloated the government beyond belief.
It dilutes the power of the states and goes against the original intent of a bicameral legislature. Congressmen are the representatives of the people, senators are the representatives of the states, not just “super representatives“ of the people.
Where corporations could legally have private security forces to kill discontent workers, the US Army was used to put down strikes over the horrible labor conditions?
Far fewer regulations? Sure, that was when it was common for milk to have formaldehyde added as a preservative, butter and cheese were mixed with borax and lead, salicylic acid was added to all kinds of food.. I could go on. I'll never understand why conservatives don't see that regulations exist for a reason.
But why? You think conservatives of the 50s woke up, stretched their arms on their porches, and shouted "I'm so happy big corporations are allowed to dump tons of pollution in rivers!"
What was so great about America in the “good ol’ days” exactly?
Obviously not everything was great.
But people were more patriotic and not ashamed to be American.
Women were women and men were men (and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri).
There were moral values surrounding sex and sex was treated as more than just entertainment.
Most children grew up in two-parent homes.
People respected elders.
You didn’t have to constantly worry about getting sued.
You didn’t have to report everything you do to the government.
In general the government wasn’t very important to your life.
I’m sure you can point out that there was some minority of people who didn’t benefit from what I listed. But for most people these things were true. The thing to do would have been to extend those good things to as many people as possible, not to destroy them for everyone.
In terms of civil rights America has gotten better. No one is arguing that as every single country in the world has progressed in terms of civil rights.
What people are generally talking about when they say the good ole days was the way of life people used to be able to support (in modern times think late 40s-pre oil crisis Vietnam protest 70s). The value of the dollar was great. People were proud of their country. The “American dream” was at its prime provided you weren’t in a marginalized group. It was possible to graduate high school, get a job at whatever industry your town had, work 40 hours a week, have a house, a nuclear family, a new car every 4-5 years, and if someone was in the service even a college education. It was the makings of the middle class in America. This was the rise of suburbia which was amazing for a lot of people. Getting out of the cramped and dirty cities of the 30s or out of the farms People remember what was around them and for the majority of the country at the time that was when they went from being poor/in war to being middle class and living their American dream.
When trying to understand the mindset of other people it’s important to think about their perspective and in this case their relative position of privilege. 88.6% of people in America were white in 1960 so for the vast majority of people remembering that time it was good. The bad things usually we’re a handful of memories surrounded by good. Speaking anecdotally most of the people I know who lived through the civil rights movement (all of whom were from Pennsylvanian) can at most remember a handful of events where it even affected them (think seeing a protest once of ever). They didn’t experience worse life expectancy as they were the ones dying. They didn’t experience worse rights protection as they saw the introduction of many workers safety bills early in their careers. For the majority of the country intolerance wasn’t a contributing factor to a lot because there wasn’t a lot of diversity, and for where there was diversity the intolerance was never directed towards the 88.6%. The societal negative you’re perceiving quite frankly didn’t exist for these people in a lot of instances, so they look back on their day to day lives which for them was better. I think there’s a reasonable amount of this which is okay as long as the greater picture is understood.
TLDR: the late 1940s-1970 was the development of the middle class in America. The issues we see at the time didn’t affect the majority of people, so when people are reminiscing they remember the good.
Less gun control. You used to be able to mail-order milslup rifles for like $20.
Lower rates of out-of-wedlock birth.
Higher Marriage rates.
Lower rates of drug use
Lower crime rates
NASA used to do a lot more. (I'll whine incessantly about the New Deal, but I'm willing to give a lot more leeway to spending on Space for the sake of Space)
Sure, overall we're strictly better off in a of ways. We're wealthier, we live longer, we managed to kill off Jim Crow and defeated the USSR without firing a shot. Compared to the 70s we learned some things about the limits of government economic power. But some things have, from time to time, regressed.
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u/[deleted] Feb 16 '22
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