Good Thing*
*Terms and conditions apply, depending on your skin color and gender, sexuality, mental health and income level
For some of our population, the green line has been in a very rough place for a very long time. If anything it’s only gone up for some people since WW2, despite recent setbacks. Still a long way to go, but I have a feeling there are more than a few families who are looking out at the US in disarray right now and shrugging because it’s always been like this for them.
Well, it did look like things were getting better. The civil rights act was a move in the right direction, and then you had diversity initiatives and you could be excused for thinking that things would actually be better. And then Reagan stepped in and started undoing all the wins, focusing first on breaking Unions and Labor rights, which hurt minority most, but eventually fucked everyone.
Fareed Zakaria proposed that the end of the Cold War meant America no longer had to make capitalism appear to be better for working people than communism so stopped pretending.
I.e., back to the coal mines and debtors’ prisons of the Industrial Revolution.
The X axis is clearly time. “Some metric” ought to be on the Y axis.
“Intensity of thing”?
I might include Nixon on the graph too.
Why? He wasn’t even a crook.
I mean, he SAID he wasn’t a crook, and by today’s standards of critical thought, that’s an ironclad defense. Right up there with “Nuh uh” and “Your mom.”
You won’t have Nixon to put in graphs anymore!
I’d start with Truman. His involvement with the Korean war set the US president of constant proxy wars
But is the Dow Jones Industrial Average over 50,000?
50,000!?
It is not
Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, East Timor, Chile, Cuba, Guatemala, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, slavery, native American genocide, Hay market massacre, Palestine etc etc strongly call into question the shape of this graph. Should be a lot flatter.
People don’t even know why. That’s how good the propaganda is today…
Good thing should go up post WW2. The fall at Reagan is correct though.
Graph maker forgot about segregation and the CIAs global war on socialism
Americans according to Americans. Pretty sure a lot of people had issue with Ronnie’s handling of AIDS and corporate tax cuts
Reagan’s handlers opened the door to corporate raiding which was devastating to working people.
according to white, straight, cis male Americans with money and inherited property
ftfy a lil’ more
Liberal delusion.
The US crashed the entire world economy after a massive wealth concentration “golden age”. Millions died as a result. That depression created the conditions for the second world war. In the run up to that, the US was very much supporting the fascists, with most of our business leaders providing funds and openly collaborating with them. We had Nazi rallies in Madison Square Garden. The second largest fascist movement was right here in the US.
And then WW2 started and we did nothing. Not until the Soviets actually showed they could put up a fight. And we got involved so that we could stop the spread of communism, not to stop the fascists. Evidence? The US collaborated with the Vatican to safely evacuate 10k Nazis and place them all over the Americas, sometimes through the monastery system and sometimes just openly in governments. When the US built West Germany openly Nazi politicians were elected into positions of top leadership. NATO was staffed with Nazi officers. And one of the top missions of NATO, Operation Gladio, was to organize Nazi collaborators throughout all of Europe, including in those territories liberated by the Soviets, to create armed violent militias that could be activated to fight the Soviets if NATO required them to.
Black/white apartheid was the law of the land well through WW2 until it finally started to break in the 1960s. Even then racial apartheid had become endemic, systemic, and the idea of repairing the damage done was never further from realization. By the 1970s mass incarceration and massive expansion of the parole system created a carceral system worse than anything the planet had ever seen. It imprisoned more people than the Soviet GULAGs ever did.
And THEN Reagan showed up.
This graph represents a professional white middle class perspective, completely isolated from the violent and heinous reality of the country and so insular as to be delusional from the perspective of the majority of people in the world
It’s a “meme” meant to be a “joke” about how this country has been for decades. Don’t look too much into it…have a laugh and go on with your day.
I don’t laugh at erasure of atrocities.
It’s ml.
It started with Nixon, though (arguably before, but not in pop-psy). Reagan should be the point of convergence.
I’ve seen less accurate, you’re good 😅
I was looking at some other data and saw a lot of corrections around 2016. Go figure.
