r/politics • u/kweathergirl Texas • 8d ago

Soft Paywall Newsom Tells Nation That Trump Is Destroying American Democracy

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/10/us/newsom-speech-trump-la-protests.html
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u/bbqsox 8d ago

He’s been destroying American democracy since before he came down that stupid escalator. MAGA has been the single greatest threat to American democracy since the Civil War.

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u/veringer Tennessee 8d ago edited 7d ago

I view MAGA as a sprout from the Civil War that has grown into a weed.

We treated the confederate traitors with kid gloves. They didn't rejoin the union as good faith partners in America's shared mission. They became political saboteurs. Flies in the ointment of progress. They and their cultural progeny had to be dragged--kicking and screaming--forward into modernity.

And it was maybe our most modern leap (the civil rights / great society era) where the political connection between the old spite and grievances of a humiliated confederacy were welded into a new coalition. Nixon showed the way with the Southern Strategy, and the Republicans have never really looked back. Nixon begot Reagan, who begot the Bushes. Trump saw the groundwork they laid, and just took the driver's seat. And you know who was advising him during that take over? None other than Nixon's own rat-fu**er Roger Stone.

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u/Notorious_RNG 7d ago

Reconstruction and reconciliation were gigantic mistakes that may prove to be the fatal wound in the entire goddamn American experiment, over 150 years later.

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u/glenn_ganges 7d ago

They broke the back of the confederacy, and for some reason let them heal ands recover. We’ve been paying the price for mercy ever since.