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How was this a surprise?
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this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2024
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I mean I guess exciting is one way to put it if you find the great depressing exciting. Even if it did lead to FDR and a number of progressive policies it still took around a decade of horrible unemployment and poverty to get to that point.
Yeah, but the happy times in the 50s to the 70s had one more factor, that the world was recovering from an insanely destructive world war that left the US unscathed, a unique thing at the time.
China was just coming out of a nation-deciding civil war, in addition to the genocide and war with Japan, Japan had Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Europe was in ruins and was gearing up to holding guns to each other's heads for the next 40 years, and Russia was kinda like it is now.
I wasn't even really talking about the boom after the war, I was talking more about the progressive reforms and things that happened that helped end the great depression which was mostly before the war. The war definitely helped continue that recovery and expand it into what we saw after the war but I think generally people agree the great depression was over in 1939 which was right as the war was starting.
Yep. Things will only get shittier in the US for as long as they/you don't reverse the inequality trend. It's impossible to have a functional democracy with the current gini coefficient. And it's rapidly getting worse.
At some point, from an evolutionary perspective, it's probably rational to crave chaos, system collapse or revolution, if you're at the perceived socioeconomic bottom. Trump 2.0 might have been that point. Democrats didn't present a credible solution, rather they just demonstrated that they don't understand much. Just more neoliberal globalist crap, sprinkled with a touch of welfare and identity politics. Then it might be better to just opt for high risk and chaos, and hope you get lucky.
(I know there are good democrats as well, but they're not in charge.)
Yeah I totally agree, I'm just still holding out hope there's some way to get real reforms that help people cause that would be the best case scenario. But yeah it is starting to seem that chaos and system collapse might be the only way to get real change. I just worry we're at a point where if the system collapses we'll end up with Nazi Germany rather than New Deal America.
It's a gamble for sure.