And neoliberalism is how it got here. I think (and I myself feel this way) that Obama getting in on “change you can believe in” and then… not changing much at all was essentially the final nail in the coffin.

A reasonably large majority of the country went from super stoked about a black candidate who was promising to meaningfully make the lives of normal people better to utterly dismayed that neither he nor anyone on the ostensible left did fucking anything to materially and meaningfully help normal people - but billionaires and corporations sure as fuck made hay the whole time.

And the other infuriating aspect is that this whole game plan of the right - yes, the overwhelming majority of the right, not just the far right - was known, visible, and predictable. It wasn’t a mystery. Political foresight would have been to realize in the early 90s, with the rise of Newt Gingrich, that this is no longer a poker game, because the right stopped playing by rational rules and norms, and just decided to go all-in on populism… and the “left” didn’t fucking care, or admit that the paradigm has massively changed.

It’s also utterly dismaying to realize that a big part of the relative political stability in the US since the end of the Cold War was based solely on the fact that the USSR was the Big Bad Adversary, and that without a common enemy, the bipolar political system we’re forced to operate in would spiral out of control.

[–] chunes@lemmy.world 2 points 14 hours ago

When I think about how the Obama administration helped the common man, all I can think of is getting rid of the pre-existing condition thing. But all that did was cause insurance companies to deny treatment after you pay them instead of before...