How did we get here?

[surfered]

[True Dough]

1. The bigger question:

How do we get out of here and return to civility?

[OldBaldy1701E]

6. I think I would rather proceed forward rather than 'return' to anything.

But, that's just me, I guess.

[MarcoZandrini]

19. Here's how...

“Forward, always forward.” Churchill

[maxrandb]

2. Whenever asked how we ended up in this shitshow, I say something like this

Well, you see...

President Obama didn't fix all of America's problems within a week of taking office, and even had the gall to not deliver ponies as demanded.

We decided that the way to make America "more progressive" was to sit out the 2010 Mid-term election (A CENSUS YEAR), and allow unhinged racists with tri-corner hats and Medicare provided "My Scooters"...screaming like banshees for 14 months about getting "gubmint out of my Medicare", to take over 65% of all State Legislatures and Governorships, as well as a majority of the Federal Government House and Senate.

Then, we sat back as a racist fucking orange circus clown spent the next 14 months demanding to see the first African American President's Birth Certificate. We never showed up to protest at the studios of ...NOT ONE SINGLE one of the 1,500 Hate Radio stations, (MANY BASED ENTIRELY WITHIN THE CONFINE OF 80-20 BLUE TO RED CITIES), who spewed racist birther shit 24/7.

Then, it became perfectly normal for CBS, NBC, ABC, the NY Times, the WA Post, and of course Faux News to present the entire racist birther shit as nothing more than a "he said-she said" issue.

Then we gleefully watched "Game of Thrones" and wondered how people could allow such a fucked up...but totally entertaining...leadership structure take hold in Westoros.

Then we got busy with our kids and our lives as our newly empowered T-baggers drew state and federal congressional districts that looked like a sheep fucking a housecat...we expressed a little bit of concern when all of these "snake swallowing a shriveled penis" districts ensured our new overlords could win 45% of a states voters, while getting 86% of its representation...coincidental, of course.

Then we nominated a fantastic candidate, and one that was probably the most qualified ever to serve as President, but all anyone wanted to talk about was some "scandal" about some "email" bullshit...except for some of "us"...who preferred talking about how "our wonderful, started from nothing and worked her ass off to get where she was, truly historic candidate, was just EXACTLY THE SAME as an orange colored, racist freak-show, carnival barking, used-car-powered-by-snake-oil selling, serial unwanted pussy-grabbing moron".

Then, just to ensure we went completely through the Looking Glass and were using the broken shards to slit out wrists, we enabled the party of the "orange colored, racist freak-show, carnival barking, used car, snake oil selling, serial unwanted pussy-grabbing moron", to be the only check on his power.

There's something in there about some Russians doing some shit, but truly...THIS SHIT SHOW IS ALL OURS.

and that's the story of "How we ended up in this shitshow?"

[malaise]

3. Great post

Rec

[OldBaldy1701E]

5. Just one thing.

This all started long before the orange gibbon was even a thought of politics.

We need to stop acting like this all came from him. The elite have been trying to make things more like a dictatorship for decades.

We just fell for the programming.

[Hope22]

7. I think that was the point.......nt

[OldBaldy1701E]

11. I suppose, but there are only mentions of times since 2000.

This started long before the 2000s.

(In reference to maxrandb's post, not the original one.)

[Hope22]

28. Yes, folks like Rumsfeld and Cheney to name a few...

…..their sorcery was almost a fifty year run. They have been living in the bowels of this government for an eternity!

[Clouds Passing]

21. More than a century

[OldBaldy1701E]

32. True. (n/t)

[betsuni]

12. With so many Americans not voting when they could or voting Republican, this is The Will of the People.

The shit show is all ours. The Will of the People.

[Bluewonder]

40. Was the 2024 election the will of the people?

I encourage everyone on DU to go to the website electiontruthalliance.org
https://electiontruthalliance.org/

I wonder what the DU membership thinks of their data and arguments. It seems plausible that the 2024 election results did not reflect the will of the people. The only way we would know is to do a recount. There is a petition to do a recount in Pennsylvania.

[Chemical Bill]

48. Welcome to DU.

Sorry in advance about the naysayers.

[SharonAnn]

13. Don't forget Newt Gingrich, delegitimizing the Clinton presidency.

[JudyM]

34. As I recall, Newt led the genuinely hostile/cheating, Ayn Rand mentality in congress.

[Polybius]

15. That was amazing, but please do a follow-up

I'd love for you to write about how we failed to prosecute him for January 6th and classified documents, and our missed opportunity in 2024.

[llmart]

18. You nailed it once again.

Especially your statement of how this shit show is all ours. It boils down to the people.

[Ol Janx Spirit]

23. So true. And IMO, the 2010 midterms was the most disastrous point on this timeline we now follow....

Citizens United came earlier that year and allowed corporations to pour money into campaigns against Democrats that voted for the ACA. The TEA Party rose during this time and energized Republicans to "Fire Nancy Pelosi."

Meanwhile, a lack of Democratic "enthusiasm" led to the loss of 63 House seats--the largest single-election shift since 1948. Democrats barely retained control of the Senate, but critically Republicans flipped control of 20 state legislative chambers and won 6 governorships, which allowed them to dominate the critical redistricting process following the 2010 census.

We are still living with the repercussions of that horrible result.

52 million new voters have registered in the intervening years since that election, and it is likely that many of them have no knowledge of that catastrophe for the Democratic Party or what it did to skew our politics. They've only ever known the extreme partisanship that Citizens United and redistricting brought us after 2010. To them this is how politics has always been. It's hard to blame them for being cynical about political parties, but somehow reaching them is going to be critical to saving Democracy as we have known it.

[LisaM]

36. Yes, I read a comment recently about the divisiveness of the far left.

They are angrier at the center left than they are at the far right. We have seen it time and again, look at Kshama Sawant heading to Michigan specifically to see that Harris lost the state. Look at Susan Sarandon screaming at Dolores Huerta. This is a huge problem and the people responsible just shrug.

[Chemical Bill]

49. Republicans have been forcing Democrats out...

of the votor rolls since before you say Democrats sat out the 2010 midterms. Please give credit where credit is due.

Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program - Wikipedia https://share.google/kZwV9cKk5T6EWlNtE

[mcar]

55. I'm saving this. It says it all.

Thank you!

[debsy]

4. There are a few crucial missing pieces in there, IMHO

1) 9/11

The events of 9/11 were critical to perpetuate conspiracy theories and then take advantage of the terrorized citizenry via the vehicles mentioned in the cartoon.

2) Mitch McConnell

This “man” was perhaps the single person most responsible for letting Donnie dumpster get away with his preposterous behavior. He could have prevented dumpster from being eligible from holding public office but he was too cowardly and full of lust for power to remove him from office not once, but twice. Had he upheld his oath to the Constitution like Mike Pence did on J6, we would have been spared dumpster walking back into the Oval Office. That and he stole two seats ( one could argue three because of how he rushed coney-baret through, breaking the traditional rule for how justices are confirmed in the senate) on the SC that belonged to the liberals.

[Hope22]

8. The 'Patriot Act'

That effectively tied the hands of peaceful protesters. Do so at the peril of family finances…..it seems like nothing now in light of rogue I.C.E. but it was a big thing back then.

[debsy]

9. Very true

[llmart]

17. Very important.

The Patriot Act and creating a Department of Homeland Security. I cringed when I heard both of them. I remember thinking it sounded so creepy a la nazism. The Patriot Act went so far as to allow the feds to come into your public library to see what you had been checking out and reading or surfing on the web.

[Hope22]

26. Yes to all of this.

A reminder that we have been living this nightmare for a looong time!!

[MIButterfly]

31. I remember when I heard they named it Department of Homeland Security,

I turned to my mother and said, in my best German accent "Just like Nazi Germany - da homelahnd."

[Wednesdays]

35. das Vaterland. nt

[jaymac]

10. Man!

You certainly nailed it......... McConnell did as he was told........Leonard Leo is laughing at us up his sleeve

[debsy]

14. Good point- Leonard Leo, the wizard of the federalist society!

[CrispyQ]

27. Most Americans don't even know about him. A ton of them right wingers, too. -nt

[Submariner]

16. The ONLY satisfaction I feel about this whole shit show

is the fact that oxycontin junkie pedophile Rush Limbaugh is 'dead', and missing the climax and maga-enjoyment of the mess he kick started under cut 'n run Ronnie Raygun.

[Mr.Bee]

20. Been Sayin' For Years

GOP TV indeed!

[LiberalArkie]

22. Insanity and ignorance did indeed trickle down.

The "chaebol" system of the U.S. business world. The handing down of corporate leadership to the son of the present leadership because "I have searched everywhere to find someone to run this company after I retire, and I could not find anyone better than my son".

And the sone may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, he is just the son.

[Grins]

24. "It all began with Reagan...."

It began long before Reagan, but he put the engine in gear and hit the pedal.

[Martin68]

25. I entirely agree. I watched my parents change from middle-of-the-road Democrats to full tilt right wing madness because

they started getting all their new from Fox. I also noticed that during the Carter administration they started to get a deluge of direct mail propaganda and appeals for donations related to phony right wing causes.

[valleyrogue]

29. Two years: 1971 and 1973.

The radical right had been around a long time before that, but those two years are extremely important.

1971 was the year of the Powell Memo, the blueprint for rich/corporate interests to take more resources away from everybody else, using convoluted logic to that end. It was a response to the movements of the 1960s, which in turn were a repudiation of the shitty 1950s and its straitjacket ideas.

So we had the blueprint, but it was political operatives, the late Paul Weyrich and the recently deceased Edwin J. Feulner, Jr., with funding from Joseph Coors, that really started the ball rolling with the founding of the Heritage Foundation. It laid the groundwork for a host of right-wing "think tanks" (propaganda organizations) and other organizations financed by the likes of Charles and David Koch, the Bradley Foundation, and other foundations bankrolled by billionaires who want to loot from the rest of us and keep "their" money from being touched by taxes or regulations. The pathological selfishness and greed lies at the root of so-called "conservatism," which doesn't actually exist as a political concept anymore but is used as a way to obfuscate what these people are really about.. These organizations use all kinds of convoluted "arguments" in order to protect and preserve the privileges of the very rich. That is all they have ever been about.

The Reagan Administration's refusal to renew the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 accelerated this pathway toward fascism because broadcast media outlets, including talk radio, were no longer required to present opposing points of view. This is why Rush Limbaugh, a nobody from Sacramento, became famous overnight with his slanted political monologues. Allowing Rupert Murdoch to own American media made it even worse despite the objections of people like Senator Ted Kennedy.

We are paying a heavy price now for all this. ALL of it is motivated by pathological selfishness and greed.

[leftstreet]

30. 50+ years, and no one has tried to undo it n/t

[electric_blue68]

37. Ah..."good ole" Paul Weyrich. I think Thom Hartman talked about him, when...

when TH was on Air America Radio.

from Paul Weyrich

"How many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome: good government? They want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."

Remarks to the Religious Roundtable (August 1980), quoted in The Hidden Election (1981) by Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers

[electric_blue68]

38. The Powell Memorandum....

from Washington and Lee University
https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/powellmemo/
[* by me]

"Powell Memorandum: Attack On American Free Enterprise System
On August 23, 1971, less than two months before he was nominated to serve as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Lewis F. Powell, Jr. mailed a confidential memorandum to his friend Eugene B. Sydnor, Jr., Chair of the Education Committee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The memo was titled Attack On American Free Enterprise System and outlined ways in which business should defend and counter attack against a "broad attack" from *"disquieting voices"."

* usually referring to Academia

I was18. Something I missed back then, what with dealing w Nixon in office,Vietnam War etc

[summer_in_TX]

41. Those were key years and figures. The funding of the think tanks included Richard Mellon Scaife too.

Grover Norquist had his own part with his "no new taxes" litmus test. The weakening and hollowing out of America took hold then. He wanted to shrink government to the size where it could be drowned in a bathtub. I've always wondered if he wasn't secretly a Russian agent. Sure he acted like he was virulently anti-communist. But few did more damage to America's government, infrastructure, and education than he did.

[debsy]

33. And let us not forget Barry Goldwater

Here’s an article I stumbled upon from the heritage foundation (yes, the infamous project 2025 heritage foundation), released in 2015.

To give you just a nugget to chew on, here’s this delightful quip:

“It is said that American politics must rest on compromise,” observed University of Virginia professor of politics James Ceaser during Heritage’s Tea Party event.5 However, he continued, “compromise is not the only virtue. One should say something in favor of the virtue of obstinacy from time to time.”

https://static.heritage.org/2015/pdf/IB4337.pdf]

[Buttoneer]

39. Missing Newt Gingrich in the scenario.

[thought crime]

42. The two party system got us here.

Unfortunately, it is true that you can fool some of the people all of the time. The modern Republican Party is based on that truth.

[Bluewonder]

43. Let Robert Reich explain

Right wing media does help garner support for Trump and Republicans, but ultimately it’s the powerful oligarchs behind his policies that deserve attention.
Here Robert Reich shows how we got into this mess.

?si=pkTqGsQmsaGg1OA6
Or just look him up on YouTube.

[mahina]

44. Limbaugh, Quanon, Mike Flynn, Russia, indifference.

[betsuni]

45. Trump is right-wing fear/authoritarian/racist celebrity conspiracy theory media empire come to life.

What I think of when I see so much Democratic leadership bashing: it's authoritarian envy.

[BigmanPigman]

46. Raygun was the worst POTUS ever!!!!!

So much crap in our current lives leads back to that monster. He was the beginning of the end for the USA. Twelve straight years of GOP BS (1980 - 1992) and most Americans are even more stupid now than they were at that time.

[flvegan]

47. American idiots.

Never forget it's the general stupidity of the masses that allowed this to happen. Going back to Reagan, at the very least.

None of the Rush Limbaughs or Alex Jones' matter, nor the Q bullshit (how did literally ANYONE buy into that) without the buy in of the dumbest American fucks, the stupid imbeciles and cultists and the social media that not only got us here, but continues.

But hey, keep posting and reposting that YouTube nonsense and the AI bullshit from TikTok and X. Mash that fucking like button, people! Be the brainless drones they need you to be!!

And we keep getting dumber.

[Morbius]

50. It was THEM.

Us and them. We have allowed our divisions to fester to the point that we cannot unite. Prior to the 60's, I'd say, Americans were able to come together at need. We can't anymore; we're too divided. We've been kept divided by assuring us that we are threatened by THEM. There's no such thing as them. There's only us. Some of us need help; some of us need our heads examined. Some of us need heart transplants. But we're still just us. There is no them. There never was. It was a lie, and we believed it because it's easier to believe in a threat posed by them than admit we ourselves might be flawed.

All the above posts are true, of course. There's just a deeper problem; we're bought into the lie of them.

[BH liberal]

51. Elections of Republican presidents...

from Reagan onward have coincided with the rise of right-wing media propaganda outlets as first radio and then TV networks were bought up and consolidated. Daddy Bush continued the Reagan policies, but the real tipping point, IMO, came when the Dubya "appointment" by the Supreme Court following the 2000 election debacle taught the Republican party that American elections could be manipulated. The antiquated Electoral College system allowed a minority of voters to decide who would be our presidents. The result is that we have allowed an ever-consolidating far-right faction to gain power it did not deserve. The Supreme Court has been corrupted and checks and balances weakened. We are already in a constitutional crisis, and we might as well face it.

[BlueWaveNeverEnd]

52. Its amazing how anti Trump DrudgeReport is now

[BH liberal]

53. It is shocking to see...

how many social and economic policies that have been implemented by the Republican party fly in the face of majority public wishes and needs.

[BH liberal]

54. The fallout from the Citizens United decision...

has been disastrous, of course. We now have oligarchs buying up lawmakers and unduly influencing elections. The founding fathers have to be spinning in their graves.