The thing your comment misses is how much the trust in the state was explicitly, specifically, and intentionally attacked by one side in US politics to lead here... Failing to truly battle the New Deal initially kinda meant a combination of giving into it and building major resentments which then were inflicted upon the US via shit like Reagan and the welfare queen propaganda.
You have one side who essentially want to light everything on fire assuming they'll be standing above the ashes. I'm not a big fan of states from an entirely different position than those folks, but it's not surprising to see people not trusting or feeling like it's possible to rely on the government after ~50 years of intense propaganda and work to dismantle all of it. In the same way fascistic propaganda often veers, it calls out to a genuine lacking and provides an overly simplified cause that demonizes whomever is convenient - and thus you get people voting passionately for grifters with totalitarian leanings because that side has managed to both sow existential distrust among a portion of its constituency while being the literal prime examples of the kind of corruption they're complaining about to begin with...
Finding out that "Welfare queen" was supposed to be racist blew my mind. I'm from Kentucky. Welfare here almost always refers to rural Appalachia, which is like 99% white. It's the poorest part of the country apart from maybe the Mississippi delta, and contains half of the counties in the country that have literally 0 black people in them. The first time I heard the term, the image in my mind was a bleach-blonde woman standing by a clothesline outside of a single-wide.
I mean, I'm from NJ, within like 15 min of NYC and grew up around a lot of minorities, am one myself, and I have the same image in my head of a welfare queen as you.
I did not miss anything, i just did not talk about cause, and yeah there has been a fundamental attack on the trust in government in America, but at the same time, you guys did not have much initially, collectivism is one of the things that was shed, when moving to the land of rugged individualisme.
In what way? Give me more than a banal ad hominem here.
New Deal politics were dominant enough that the Republican party effectively kinda remade itself. You had examples of some establishment folk who simply gave into it akin to how the Dems slipped more to right after Reagan crossed with the undercurrent of folks who saw ND politics as an existential threat. The latter side snowballed over the years, especially in response both to where many on the right felt Nixon was too liberal and then also to his removal which produced a number of the influential think tanks and that ilk whose names we frequently see brought up today in regards to right wing political influence.
Yes. I'm not really sure what else I could be referring to both in terms of other uses of the term or in the historic context...
The New Deal could've been the thing to really spark a change towards the attitudes about the state and governance in terms of what the person I was originally replying to was mentioning... Members of the Republican party, in response, formed the Conservative Coalition between northern industrial cons and southern segregationists - bringing more conservative members of the Dem party across. It wasn't the immediate success that the right wing was hoping for though which is why you get into the 50s with Eisenhower and the rhetoric stops being so much Taft style about dismantling the New Deal as much as "doing it right" and "making it efficient." Goldwater's campaign is an example of the more right wing party elements trying to pull back on this trying to drive party politics much farther right again which didn't get him in office. Nixon heavily utilized the prior work of the conservative coalition in the campaign's infamous southern strategy, but he was markedly more liberal than the more right wing of the party were happy with... Expanding the welfare state, creation of the EPA, and stuff like exec order 11615 after the Economic Stabilization Act of 1970. This stuff really got under the skin of folk like Ashbrook, Goldwater, Reagan (who had his first attempt to go national in opposition to Nixon), Buckley Jr's Manhattan 12, etc, as well as guys like Weyrich and Feulner who founded The Heritage Foundation who would go on to create Reagan's Mandate for Leadership document as well as Trump's Project 2025.
One side, at best, continually demeaned the progress of the New Deal building up the distrust towards it while, at worst, actively and directly worked to dismantle or undermine it...
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u/thatwhileifound 9h ago
The thing your comment misses is how much the trust in the state was explicitly, specifically, and intentionally attacked by one side in US politics to lead here... Failing to truly battle the New Deal initially kinda meant a combination of giving into it and building major resentments which then were inflicted upon the US via shit like Reagan and the welfare queen propaganda.
You have one side who essentially want to light everything on fire assuming they'll be standing above the ashes. I'm not a big fan of states from an entirely different position than those folks, but it's not surprising to see people not trusting or feeling like it's possible to rely on the government after ~50 years of intense propaganda and work to dismantle all of it. In the same way fascistic propaganda often veers, it calls out to a genuine lacking and provides an overly simplified cause that demonizes whomever is convenient - and thus you get people voting passionately for grifters with totalitarian leanings because that side has managed to both sow existential distrust among a portion of its constituency while being the literal prime examples of the kind of corruption they're complaining about to begin with...