crash course reagan revolution
Reagan and his conservative buddies intentionally gutted the American middle class, but they did so not just out of greed but also with what they thought was a good and noble justification. As I lay out in more granular detail in my new book The Hidden History of American Oligarchyback in the early s conservative thinker Russell Kirk proposed a crash course reagan revolution hypothesis that would fundamentally change our nation and the world.
Why the “Reagan Revolution” Scheme to Gut America’s Middle Class is Coming to an End
The American middle-class at that time was growing more rapidly than any middle-class had ever grown in the history of the world, in terms of the number of people in the middle class, the income of those people, and the overall wealth that those people were accumulating. The first chapter of his book, The Conservative Mindis devoted to Edmund Burke, the British conservative who Thomas Paine visited for two weeks in on his way to get arrested in the French revolution.
Burke and his contemporaries in the late s believed that if working-class people made too much crash course reagan revolution, they would challenge the social order and collapse the British form of government.
So Parliament passed a law making it illegal for employers to pay people over crash course reagan revolution certain amount, so as to keep wage-earners right at the edge of poverty throughout their lives. For the outcome of this policy, read pretty much any Dickens novel. Young people would cease to respect their elders, women would stop respecting and depending on their husbands, reovlution minorities would begin making outrageous demands and set the country on fire. When Kirk laid this out inonly a few conservative intellectuals took him seriously.
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People like William F. Bra burning became a thing, at least in pop culture lore. Along with national protest, draft card burning was also a thing. And throughout that decade African Americans were increasingly demanding an end to uslawessentials violence and an expansion of Civil Rights. In response to several brutal and well-publicized instances of police violence against Black people in the late s, riots broke out and several of our cities were on fire.
These three movements all hitting America at the same time got the attention of conservatives and Republicans who crash course reagan revolution previously ignored or even ridiculed Kirk back in the s.
Suddenly, he seemed like a prophet. Their plan was to declare war on labor unions so wages could slide back down again, end free college all across the nation so students would be in fear rather than willing to protest, and increase the penalties Nixon had already put on drugs so they could use those laws against hippy antiwar protesters and Black people.
The Nixon campaign inand the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people.]
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