I’m not saying this in any kind of ‘America Rah Rah’ sense.
Not at all.
Modern conservatism has certainly damaged a lot of parts of the US in terms of functionality.
But honestly, just go to any newspaper archive that has info going back to the civil war period or before.
Just browse through the ages. The way people talked about eachother. The outaged conservatives, the small touches of progress for that time taking off on occasion.
America has been filled with every form of hate we’re seeing now, every form of manipulation, company control, false claims, racism, religious supremacy, lawless actions, etc. that we’re seeing now.
We just had FDR between then and now.
Why does that matter? Because the movements that lead to FDR’s rise and long run of power mostly just kicked conservatisms ass when conservatism failed hard in the depression and through to the early response to WW2.
Those movements made government mean a LOT more than it did before that era, when the world wouldn’t have even imagined the USA as some world power at the scale it became.
They made what we consider the US to mean the US as we meant it for the last 100 years.
The movements that lead to Trump have been trying to tear back every part of that legacy ever since then.
Reagan was obsessed with ‘socialized medicine’, Bush was obsessed with ‘personal responsibility’ in the sense of privatizing Social Security. Trump’s been obsessed with rolling everything back just to brand the future with his stench.
Maga has always been an echo of these things, longing for the power the likes of slave masters and emperors, of rule by absolute fear and dominance, which did have similar waves of support.
But none of it has especially broken the USA.
Corrupted in huge chunks by time and that effort yes.
But here’s the thing — even if every bit of that FDR legacy was absolutely burned… you know what?
It can be rebuilt.
It can be pushed FURTHER along the lines that FDR wanted.
We can each have even MORE than most European and Nordic nations have in terms of social benefits and shared gains from our nation’s growth, encouraging much more growth, from everyone.
And like Social Security, each bit we add will become increasingly more difficult to roll back, just by pure contrast as attempts to slice it away pop up, and misery rises each time.
But… restoring and expanding those foundations has to be a goal. An open goal that we work towards.
Not some nebulous ‘maybe’ by a fraction of the party — but an open goal that you vote anyone out of a primary for not supporting, and you use to grow the party by insisting on together. You have to build generations of willpower together on that goal. You have to bring people IN and grow the party again using those goals.
Because we all benefit from it — rich or poor, by having the nation be stronger, and having a more stable base we can all work off of, and more in the hands of people who will use it instead of hoard it, or use it to manipulate the system and thereby tear us all down. By having meaningful standards of education, strong unions, infrastructure, protected rights, and market protections with teeth.
That also makes us more able to break up these corrupting influences that we’re stuck only imagining we can fix now.
There’s nothing broken even partially that we can’t use to make everything work better.
It’s only really broken if you give up on making it better.
What people don’t trust now is the mixed messaging with no coordinated efforts to even PROPOSE fixing anything, and active efforts to sabotage even negotiating fixes by current party leadership.
So — wherever you can, dump the corporate leaders, and get your nation back. Companies will be better off for it, history has proven, by keeping just a few from controlling the market and having our leaders in their pocket. Have them cater to US, not private companies demanding concessions and advantage over others.
We’ve been in worse places, faced worse challenges by the cruel and the greedy — and we can get back to helping people instead of hurting them again.
We just have to make hope meaningful again, and push to go further together than we ever had in the past. To make america better again.
Because we’ve never been entirely great — but we have been better. And we always can be.
