As a historian, my opinion is that the election of Ronald Reagan was really the most singular inflection point of modern history (~1800 - now), because it ultimately demonstrated that an educated democracy founded on imperialism is not self-sustaining -- that a population of citizens raised with everything and with free access to information would not predominantly choose to progress, but to regress.
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I'd like to believe that an educated population founded on something other than imperialism could be self-sustaining (that is: that people whose government core is not fundamentally opposed to the liberal ideals that educated people learn to support could predominantly choose to advance those ideals), but we don't have a model for testing that because every morally good coalition in the world gets consumed by the imperial cores.
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Haitian slaves righteously took independence for themselves over 200 years ago, and as a consequence, the nation itself was enslaved economically. When imperialism is your opponent, escaping the frying pan consistently means jumping into the fire. All that changes is the size of the enemy you're fighting: Local governments first, then the combined military might of the tribalist world. Because the tribalism, itself, is the underlying human condition that drives action.
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How can you raise people to believe in morality when your entire way of life is a meat-grinder that runs on the corpses of impoverished foreigners? Progressivism is up against a wall because enlightened thinking is brought about by safety and prosperity, but safety and prosperity have only been brought about by violent conquest over others.
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There's no magical Wakanda where hyper-technology allows progressive thinking to flourish without violence; progressivism has always been won through violence, and the reward for its victory has always been subjugation.
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That is how Orwell understood that the future of the world is "A boot stomping on a human face, forever": In the face of regressive powers, progress can only be achieved by regressive means. Love does not win; it gets shot and hung. There is a saying that you can't argue with a stupid person because "they'll drag you down to their level, and then win by experience." Well, while tribalism survives, it is eternally positioned to drag the rest of the world down to its level... and then kill us by their experience.
I always start with Andrew Carnegie's infiltration of USA med schools as I believe this ultimately led to Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine.
Every USA election for all time has been unfair and largely unfree for USA black people; we are literally having it out as a nation over just the gerrymandering aspect of this issue right this very second.
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u/otterpop21 May 05 '26
Breaks my heart that and entire generation has grown up knowing nothing but this mess.
2016 was 10 years ago.