A friend of mine wrote this and posted on Facebook. (His hobby is history.)

[Kablooie]

Over the decades American politics tended to evolve through larger megatrends, regardless of party.
After the whole system collapsed in the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt began the evolution of the government doing more things for the average person. Unemployment insurance, Social Security. Even Republicans went along: Eisenhower with the highway system, Nixon with the Clean Air and Water Acts.

But by the late 70s, this Liberal philosophy ran down, partly from LBJ's Vietnam commitment breaking the postwar economy. Conservatives revamped their philosophy of hating Big Government. Essentially their same Coolidge-Hoover approach in a new package, hawked by their master salesman Ronald Reagan. "Less Government is Better." This idea that if you rolled back taxes and regulations, and let businessmen do whatever they want, everyone would be happy. After forty years, now this philosophy seems to have run out of gas.

Donald Trump is the final gasp of this Less Government school. This year we have been hit by a major crisis, the biological equivalent of a war. 150,000 of our friends and neighbors are dead. People who were alive back in February. Millions unemployed and tens of thousands facing default, eviction and maybe starvation. And our morally bankrupt government has no reaction, no plan, no idea what to do. Nobody has lowered even one lousy flag to half staff.

If we get through this next election with the necessary seed change, a new way of looking at governments relationship to its citizens will be in order. Hold on to your hats, folks!

[Solomon]

1. Yep. Things they are a changing.

[cayugafalls]

7. Seed Change is correct in this instance.

A dramatic change or departure from status quo as a means of solving a problem, such as a paradigm shift.

[elleng]

3. Thanks.

[unblock]

4. Indeed, it's entirely possible that he becomes seen as this century's hoover

Hopefully the economic damage isn't as great this time around, but I don't think we can underestimate the damage he's done on multiple fronts.

The judiciary, the bureaucracy, foreign relations, our intelligence network, etc.

We will be rebuilding from the damage republicans have caused for decades.

[lastlib]

5. That would be too complimentary to him....

He's more like this century's Czar Nicholas II (sans the assassination.....)--self-entitled, arrogant, but incompetent, and unable to see what's coming because of his stupidity. IMHO. The closest presidential equivalent would be Andrew Johnson or James Buchanan, both incompetent, ignorant dubf*cks.....

[Get Me Outta Here]

6. Or

Jeff Davis running out the back door of Whitey House in heels and a dress trying to look like Melanie.

[catchnrelease]

11. That's an insult to Hoover!

While he was not a good president, Hoover at least was a smart man. He had a degree in geology and was a successful mining engineer, which made him a (real) millionaire in the late 1800s. And during WWI he did humanitarian work for both US citizens and Belgians that were under German rule. You could never call *45 a humanitarian. In fact, he's barely human!

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

9. I have long thought that the high water mark of this country was the Kennedy Presidency.

One can quibble about the exact high water point, but our decline can clearly be dated to Ronald Reagan's time in office.

The essential reason that most people don't get that we are declining is that we still seem to have a powerful military. Right now an inordinate and unconscionable amount of our budget goes into the military, rather than into things that actually improve lives, such as health care, education, or infrastructure.

I like to say that we are a lot like Spain in 1587. In that year Spain strode the globe, colonizing at will, taking gold and other resources as it wanted. But the next year, 1588 it made the mistake of trying to invade England. Bad idea. Not only were English ships and sailors a fuck of a lot better than they'd anticipated, but a nasty storm sprang up and did a lot of damage to their fleet. No invasion of England, alas.

After that it was pretty much all downhill, although it wasn't obvious for some years.

It's also crucial to know that Spain made the deliberate decision NOT to tax the wealthy, but instead shifted the tax burden to the poor. Sound familiar?

We are like Spain in the late 16th century. We are still pouring money into our military, cutting taxes for the rich, increasing them for the poorer people. We currently have military bases in some 70 countries. The only reason we haven't been summarily tossed out in recent years is that our military does bring a lot of money into the local economies. But that won't last forever. Either they'll get tired of us and toss us out, or our economic realities will cause us to leave. Although that last may not happen soon enough, unfortunately. Eventually we will not be able to afford that bloated military, no matter how much everything else is cut. And at some point people will no longer stand for the crumbling infrastructure, the lack of social supports, the declining standard of living everywhere. Unfortunately, by the time that happens it will probably be too late, and we will suddenly look around and realize we are at best a second rate country.

[misanthrope]

12. Nice analogy

Well done

[moondust]

10. Yes.

I've been wondering lately how much of this anti-mask and other antisocial/anti-science behaviors are the cumulative result of 40 years of Republicans hating "Big Government" that started with Reagan.