MGuy wrote:Can someone give me a rundown of how we went from a nation that enacted a bunch of socialists schemes and regulations to drag ourselves out of a depression just to turn around and do the opposite? I mean we've already proven that socializing shit and regulations are good to do. How did we get to a point where these libertarian ideas are even taken seriously when our own history shows they are not?
You have to remember that politics is not fact-driven. Keynesian economics (which says "government spending can bootstrap an economy") was pretty much universally accepted as true and efficacious in the governments of the West after World War II. Western Europe went whole-hog on Keynes and enacted welfare states and socialism and everything associated with the modern EU. The United States, on the other hand, is a different beast. FDR was despised in his own time and forever after, mostly by upper-class white Southerners (who are collectively the worst). There was an honest to god
fascist conspiracy to overthrow FDR before WWII broke out. Even among the common people, his policies weren't wholly supported - his margin of victory in each term's election shrank as well.
Despite the effectiveness of the New Deal programs at bringing people out of poverty and improving the standard of living for Americans (cf. the Tennessee Valley Authority), this is not something that the Southern aristocracy wanted then or wants now. Colin Woodard
wrote a book about, among other things, why the South is such a fucked up and horrible place. It goes back to the fact that that region was colonized by Barbadian slave lords. Wealthy whites in the South don't want anyone, white or black, lifted up to compete with them. It's just not allowable in their ethics, so they cry foul when the federal government steps in to give the poor an "unfair" advantage.
The situation in the South became critical in the 1960s during the Civil Rights movement, when average Southerners came to resent the federal "overreach" that violated their local autonomy (Southerners have a history of reacting... poorly... to such). Elsewhere in the country, the government was losing face due to fuck-ups like the Vietnam War and Cold War policy in general. Rising violence in cities, the trinity of 60s assassinations, Watergate, oil embargoes - basically look up everything in "We Didn't Start The Fire."
The late 70s saw these undercurrents of resentment against the ruling liberal government structures boil over in the United States and elsewhere. It manifested in many ways, from the NRA's
Revolt at Cincinnati to the elections of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. 1980 marked the beginning of the deregulation madness in the United States, as Ronald Reagan rode a tide of public dissatisfaction on promises to shake up business as usual. His campaign slogan, "Are You Better Off Than You Were Four Years Ago?" touched on the disaffection of Americans with the so-called "malaise" years of the Carter administration.
Reagan was the first of the Tea Partiers, and he opened the floodgates for everything that came after. Everyone voted Reagan because he was saying something that everyone "knew:" the current policy wasn't working and something new had to be tried. Unfortunately his solutions were batshit, but not so batshit that the average person would know that.
Supply-side economics was the answer to Keynesian policy provided by cranks like Arthur Laffer, Milton Friedman, and Alan Greenspan. These guys were very smart and very persuasive, they just happened to also be very wrong. But, they gave a plausible, respectable face to the madness that Reagan made a Republican doctrine.
Grover Fucking Norquist was soon to follow, and his crazy anti-tax anti-government-everything influence on politics has persisted and thrived to this day.
With a plausible competing economic model on offer that appealed to naive American ideals of self-sufficiency, individual responsibility, and equal opportunities, the GOP began to line up behind this new economic doctrine, that would begin to
define the ideological content of the party. One supply-sider alliance with fundamentalist Christianity later, and the rest is history.
tl;dr, why did America overwhelmingly give Reagan a mandate to get rid of a tried and proven economic policy that had brought millions out of poverty and generated millions of jobs and college educations? Why did we end up with
this? It's because business as usual in the 1970s truly
wasn't working, and the only alternative Americans were presented with was plausible, what we wanted to hear, and pitched by one of the most charismatic men ever to run for President.