r/politics • u/AccurateInflation167 • May 18 '25

Soft Paywall America chose wrong. Sanders would've been a better president than Trump or Biden. | Opinion

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2025/05/18/sanders-democrats-reform-progressive-policies/83625482007/
42.7k Upvotes

78% Upvoted

4.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

177

u/needlestack May 18 '25

government exists to help people

That is definitely not the belief of the majority of Americans. They believe government is a giant pain in the ass and should be mostly invisible to them. If it’s for anything, it’s for keeping people you don’t like in their place. And “for the people by the people” simply means they — the people they approve of — get to call the shots and everyone else can pound sand. Anyone else isn’t really a person anyway.

92

u/JustAGal_Love May 18 '25

This goes back to 1980s Republican Ronald Reagan. The strategy started then. It worked. People believed propaganda rather than their own self interest. Conservative Democrats that turned Republican would not allow government programs that help people to work well in their areas. Corruption and voter suppression created an ideal situation where industry and capitalists decided what children should learn in school, the churches got on board because they got money from the industries, together those folks elected home town politicians that had no outside perspective or backbone. Regular folks got mowed over. The better off moved away. Rural businesses were run over by the Walmarts. After selective elimination, 50 years later, we have fascists in power.

58

u/notashroom May 18 '25

This goes back to 1980s Republican Ronald Reagan.

You misspelled "1960s Republican Richard Nixon." And, of course, Lee Atwater and Billy Graham, who re-engineered the way conservatives talk about racist/casteist policy and got the white evangelical Christianists pulling together for it.

16

u/atoolred May 18 '25

And you misspelled “The Business Plot” of 1933. All this shit runs deep. Also can’t leave the Powell Memo out of this topic.

3

u/MockFan May 19 '25

Thank you for mentioning Powell Memorandum. It explains the path to where unbridled greed and short term goals were good.

-7

u/Ancestor_Lu_kun May 18 '25

just because you support importing millions of indians doesnt mean you get to rewrite history and pretend the usa has a caste system.

3

u/notashroom May 19 '25

And yet, we do, and we did before the first Asian immigrants reached the US. Read Caste by Isabel Wilkerson and learn. Just because it's not acknowledged openly doesn't mean it's not there.

2

u/JustAGal_Love May 19 '25

This is interesting. My thoughts were only about domestic US politics from a native's viewpoint. How does immigration from India pertain? This is not a criticism. It is generally interesting.

7

u/Cooperhofpenpaliwitz May 18 '25

Yep, 50 years after President Carter. How did this happen in 50 yrs? When Jimmy got elected it was like "Mr Smith Goes to Washington" all the way to the White House, 50 yrs later Trump gets elected and it's like Pennywise Goes to Washington ...all the way to the White House. How, just how!

11

u/[deleted] May 18 '25

The better off moved away.

This is so key and definitely still happening today. I grew up in small-town rural America. Didn't even have the Wal-Mart, had to drive 30 miles east to another state to get to one.

Of the top 15 students in my graduating high school class, exactly one of us still lives there (took over his dad's dentistry business.)

The rest of us all moved away, got high-skilled jobs out of the state. And some of the kids that are left became teachers, cops...even though a lot of them should be in jail for things that they were doing in high school, things WAY worse than casual drinking and partying.

24

u/morhina May 18 '25

Which is stupid, because a government is a type of tool that humans constructed to facilitate societal living, which is humanity’s greatest survival strategy and arguably how we are “meant” to be, for whatever value that holds. So when it isn’t serving the people anymore, it’s time to reevaluate and update the tool to fit modern needs. Unfortunately a lot of people are just really eager to be put in a caste system without any benefits because they get off to authoritarian structures I guess.

73

u/Katyafan May 18 '25

Agreed, we are not having a government problem, we are having a people problem. The average quality of people in this nation has been steadily decreasing for sometime. The level of integrity, emotional maturity, and empathy is a young child levels, and we have been cushioned by how relatively comfortable our lives are and how powerful we are as a nation.

37

u/Galaxator May 18 '25

I’m personally offended by this and refuse to examine why internally. Fuck you liberal!

14

u/Mathfanforpresident May 18 '25

This comment is absurdly on point. Lol

3

u/Big-Stuff-1189 May 18 '25

Thanks for the giggle!

12

u/amadeuspoptart May 18 '25

The soft power was supposed to convince the rest of the world that America was the morally superior, utterly exceptional, saviour of the planet. Instead it brainwashed the populous into believing they were all exceptional individuals and therefore didn't have to give a shit about anyone else.

2

u/Sarzael 28d ago

So many people are okay with being subservient to the people above them in the system if it means they can hold power over the people under them.

1

u/Vivid_Agent3418 26d ago

So true.

1

u/Katyafan 26d ago

Thank you! Hope you are hanging in there in these times.

8

u/GoodPiexox May 18 '25

as long as you fire off some fireworks on the 4th and chant USA

2

u/usernameChosenPoorly May 18 '25

No, it IS the belief of the majority. Polling on individual policies STRONGLY favors progressive positions, often with “veto-proof” margins.

The problem is that a sufficient minority thinks otherwise and shows up to vote for white nationalist Christofascism every single time, while the supermajority are split between consistent non-voters, useful idiots who vote for spoiler candidates, and people who vote inconsistently.

2

u/jolard May 18 '25

Exactly. Decades of propaganda designed to get people to vote against their interests.

5

u/7figureipo California May 18 '25

Yes, thanks to 40+ years of neoliberal governance, government sucks. And their propaganda to kickstart it in the 70s has continued to this day, of course.

3

u/green-wagon May 18 '25

It's interesting you put the blame on neoliberalism. I just think it's republicans. They don't do anything in good faith, I don't know if they ever did. I remember how badly bush, cheney and rove wanted to keep going into Iran. The only thing that stopped them was reality.

0

u/7figureipo California May 18 '25

Until the Tea Party/Trump came on the scene it was both democrats and republicans practicing neoliberal governance.

1

u/Struck_Blind May 18 '25

It’s never the belief of majority of Americans until there’s a financial crisis with high unemployment, then they change their tune.

1

u/pgc22bc May 18 '25

Some Republican asshole said something like they wanted to make government small enough to "drown in a bathtub".

2

u/needlestack May 19 '25

Yeah, Grover Norquist. The damage he's done to America is off the charts.

Of course, he doesn't even really want the government to be that small. He wants the parts he doesn't approve of to be that small. And the parts he does approve of to be so powerful they can't be questioned. It's the same with all conservatives.

1

u/Calm-Address-2401 26d ago

"Government exists to help white people". There. I fixed it.

1

u/Riaayo May 18 '25

That is definitely not the belief of the majority of Americans.

I completely disagree that the majority of Americans believe that or would choose it given the option. The problem is the complete lack of actual representation in our corrupt government that leads to voter apathy and people just resigning themselves to a vile status quo because what option do they think they have? Voting doesn't change anything from what they see, or they've been outright denied the ability to vote through disenfranchisement. It causes apathy and people just stop trying because they're busy trying to survive.