When and how did it happen?

[ck4829]

Last edited Tue Apr 7, 2026, 02:47 PM - Edit history (2)

The country and people of the Revolutionary War, the Underground Railroad, the Labor Rights Movement, the Suffragists, the Civil Rights Movement, the Gay Rights Movement, and Black Lives Matter reduced to this whimpering mass; letting the executive steamroll all over them, letting the "healthcare" system rip them off left and right, letting the Sackler family flood their streets with opioids, and lied to by a fake media.

When did it happen? How did it happen?

What exactly broke the American people and their spirit so badly?

Just looking for a year or just a range of years at the least, thanks.

Update: Be sure to read #30 and #54

[Blues Heron]

1. Murdoch,Limbaugh and the great redneck brainwashing of the last 25 years

[ck4829]

4. Lee and Hitler must be looking up right now

"All it took was a media that stupefies their people, unbelievable. Why didn't we think of that?"

[Aristus]

34. Hitler DID have a media propaganda machine. A pretty comprehensive one, for the times.

Hitler's propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, covered all the usual media outlets of the time, print, radio, film, etc. But he may also have been the first propaganda minister in history to platform mass mind control on television. Germany had a fledgling TV system in the 1930's, and there was regular propaganda programming. And, of course, the 1936 Berlin Olympics were broadcast on television.

[ck4829]

35. Oh no, he had one for his own country for sure

Seeing all the Putin sympathizers today though on Twitter, we would have had people on social media trying to tell us Hitler is the good guy if it was around back then. That's the machine I am referring to.

[GaYellowDawg]

27. YES!

I would add fundamentalist Christianity to that.

[ck4829]

42. And I think in this case, psychology and socialization are factors here too

Christianity and religion in general CAN be a force for progress and reform. Religion does not have to mean going backwards. MLK, civil rights leaders, John Brown, and others drew on religion. Jesus healed for free and drove the money-changers out of the temple.

And can't exclude non-Christians either. I personally would have down a darker path if not for Najeeba Syeed.

---

The issue here is that fundamentalist/hardline Christianity indoctrinates people religiously and then they are essentially "pre-made" for what authoritarianism needs from them.

Take a look:
* Don't question what we say
* Don't question what's in front of you
* Be OK with verbal, physical, financial, even sexual abuse from those over you
* The outsider is the enemy
* The one who disagrees is the enemy
* Those over you are there because of God and questioning that means questioning God

[Cosmocat]

28. 100% this

nm

[31st Street Bridge]

36. All of this and more

Especially on Dec. 12, 2000, when SCOTUS illegally halted a state-mandated vote recount and handed the presidency to W, only to have the corrupt media tell us all to "just move on."

This country has been one big criminal enterprise since the days of the Dulles brothers and their ilk.
Meanwhile, public ignorance, greed and racism just keep growing.

[ck4829]

48. That was so much another part of the decline, along with the electoral clown college

A giant middle finger to the will of the people... no wonder they are giving up.

[bearsfootball516]

53. Yup. I'd even argue it goes back further.

Reagan dismantled the Fairness Doctrine, which directly led to the creation of right wing talk radio and Fox News. Limbaugh was around as early as the mid 80s.

[blm]

56. Talk radio was being fed pro-fascist propaganda planted by Washington Times.

[magicarpet]

62. Consolidation of media,...

President Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The act, signed into law on February 8, 1996, was “essentially bought and paid for by corporate media lobbies,” as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) described it, and radically “opened the floodgates on mergers.”

Much more at link below,

https://truthout.org/articles/democracy-in-peril-twenty-years-of-media-consolidation-under-the-telecommunications-act/

[dalton99a]

2. It was a continuous process. Trump is the end result

For now, anyway

In time Republicans will produce a worse dictator

[ck4829]

5. If Republicans have taught us one thing: They only go one direction... downhill!

[leftstreet]

3. Ask student Gaza protestors

People who got arrested, kicked out of school, blacklisted, protesting a genocide funded by US dollars

Let's start there and work our way back, touching on things like the Patriot Act, the expanding surveillance state, the politicians who turn away from civil rights issues, the courts that are only interested in the rights of capitalists.

Maybe some pattern might emerge

[ck4829]

6. Yep, I can see that. All factors for sure.

[MineralMan]

7. We had two very good opportunities to avoid that.

One was in 2016. Had we elected Hillary Clinton that year, Trump would not have gotten his foot in the White House door.

The second opportunity was in 2024. Had we elected Kamala Harris that year, Trump would not be in the White House now.

We did neither. There is strong evidence that low turnout in those elections by Democrats was the reason those two women lost. I believe that s the correct explanation.

Perhaps, if we manage to get another chance, we won't make such mistakes again. Hope springs eternal...

[ck4829]

9. You're describing, perfectly, the manifestation of the decline. I'm curious, though, about what caused it

Howard Dean humiliated out of primaries for a... funny sounding yell? It was a scandal that Obama wore a tan suit?

And I'm not even making this exclusive to Democrats. The mere allegation that John Tower liked to drink was enough to sink his nomination for Secretary of Defense.

I'm thinking it had to be something before 2016 for us to go from to the above to this state of existence, if you can call it that, where if our country/collective will was an animal then euthanasia would be the humane option.

[LR3]

11. This is only one factor, but it is a big one

Wealth Inequality.

Societies that allow this sort of disparity we see today inevitably have massive issues. It creates the very conditions for grievance politics we have today.

Republicans benefited politically from the very inequality that they, largely, created through their policies. I don't think it will end well for them, or anyone else for that matter.

[ck4829]

12. For sure. Remove wealth inequality, remove right-wing politics and the decline for sure

It is integral for sure, there might be things that definitely helped as well

"Republicans benefited politically from the very inequality that they, largely, created through their policies. I don't think it will end well for them, or anyone else for that matter."

This made me remember of Jim Adkisson shooting up a Unitarian Universalist church and murdering 2, and wounding 4.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Knoxville_church_shooting
https://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/07/28/church.shooting/

He blamed liberals for his woes in life, but his food stamps were being cut and that also infuriated him... It was no Democrats or liberals cutting his food stamps though.

Republicans and our media want millions more people like Jim David Adkisson, shotgun or not.

[MineralMan]

13. I'm citing two specific elections where it made all the difference.

Two elections with Trump running as the Republican. We could not, or did not, take either of those opportunities. That's on us, frankly. Squarely on us.

[MustLoveBeagles]

14. Agreed 👍

Where in the hell were the Democrats for those election cycles?

[ck4829]

15. I see what you are saying

But one day in November shouldn't be enough to break us though.

We lost our spirit and our standards. As others have pointed out; it was a process.

And it shows up in more than electoral politics.



If you showed this to the parties of the Revolutionary War, the Underground Railroad, the Labor Rights Movement, the Suffragists, the Civil Rights Movement; they would be demanding to know why we haven't tarred and feathered/ran out of the town/shut down/boycotted/protested/resisted in every way possible our government, our media, and other parties.

They would be shocked at what the country has become and disgusted at our apathy.

And we were clearly up there with other countries at one point, but a difference appears, and it appears long before 2016.

[-misanthroptimist]

8. Like going broke it started slowly, then fast

It probably began in earnest when the New Deal put the mega-rich into a tizzy. They even tried for a coup in the 1930s. That failed but they continued working and plotting.

Then in the 1950s, we went about countering Communism in just about the stupidest way possible.

Add into that the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s which cost the Democrats the "Solid South". Hey, at least the Democratic Party got rid of almost all of their racists.

Additionally, faux-patriots were outraged by our loss in Vietnam.

The Women's Movement outraged another group of barbarians.

In the 1980s, Reaganism (which primarily appeared due to economic issues that were beyond any President's control) took hold. Televangelists also became popular, roping in people who needed a Biblical reason to continue hating those around them.

In the 1990s - 2000s, the internet became a thing. Right-wingers were getting destroyed in debates, what with facts and reality having their well-known liberal bias. This made the anti-American faux-patriots even angrier and led them to just give up on facts for the most part. They began using isolated facts out of context to "support" their arguments, or they just made things up. They discovered that this worked due to the fact that the net allowed their BS to spread around the world at a high rate of speed. So, they just started lying non-stop, knowing that they could just move onto the next lie while the previous one was still being countered by those that had read a book or could think critically.

But the cherry on top was that America elected a...a...a black man President!! Even their lies didn't prevent it. All of their hard work to undermine liberal democracy was at stake.

It got even worse when Democrats nominated a...a...a woman for President! This could not be tolerated by the right wing and allowed them to bring whatever misogynists and chauvinists hadn't already signed onto their movement.

That's the bullet points. Of course, the whole thing start-to-finish descended from the fact that Union didn't hold the leaders of the Confederacy accountable nor the States that joined the Confederacy. Had the South been dealt with properly at the conclusion of the Civil War, little of the above would have happened. Now, we likely have to do the whole thing over again.

[ck4829]

10. Dang! Excellent points. Can certainly look at it like death by a thousand cuts

One can certainly imagine that the nazis and the confederacy are looking up at us right now with glee, seeing our spirit and will sapped by the inside.

[Tree Lady]

16. I am taking a history class on understanding

How maga started. So far only one class and he started after the civil war when there was a major fear from working poor of freed slaves taking their jobs and the push from the angry plantation owners creating the divide.

[ck4829]

19. Oh yes, a key part of the beginning of this

We didn't do enough de-confederation... I don't know, but the same thing that happened to Germany after WW2, but for here.

[question everything]

17. Social Media

There were always fringe, crazy ideas but they got to be main stream thanks to social media.

Many here detest “main stream media;” many choose to get their information from alternative sources: YouTube, podcasts etc.

The difference is that the legacy media: NYT, WSJ, perhaps even the WaPo correct wrong information. Do any of the podcasts? Or the alternative videos continually posted here, even if “liberal?’

These alternatives lead many to be exposed only to sources that confirm their stand. No room for opposing ideas, to just listen and debate.

[ck4829]

23. Oh that is very important, media correcting itself

These "new media" types double down... "OK it's not true, but imagine if it WAS *gasp*"

[intrepidity]

18. Citizens United. nt

[ck4829]

24. Indeed, the ball rolling down sped up after that for sure

[WhiskeyGrinder]

20. It was built broken, on a framework of white supremacy. If we don't dismantle white supremacy, we'll keep struggling.

[Just_Vote_Dem]

22. THIS

[ck4829]

25. For sure

The LBJ quote about the "lowest white man" plays here. There is certainly a lot of them.

[haele]

21. The failure of Reconstruction and rise of the Gilded Age.. Taft splitting from Roosevelt

Which sidetracked Roosevelt's initiatives for Environmental, Public Health, and Labor rights, Trust-Busting - and incremental Civil Rights.
Yes, Roosevelt was a bigot, but he was also a realist who had actual experience dealing with the causes of poverty and crime - and showed political willingness to incrementally introduce racial and gender equality measures even if he didn't personally agree with them.
This allowed Wilson to trash the "inconvenient" and expensive progressive policies to benefit Populist Capitalism and technological "progress" policies benefitting investors. Which led to Harding, and the rise of the Millionaire/Mob cabal dedicated to returning to the Gilded Age and Nativist policies to create a class system where only the owners would have "Democracy", and everything and everyone else was "owned".
They funded a lot of Anti-Communist and "Traditional" or Populist business groups to infiltrate and isolate small communities or community support organizations similar the KKK model without using that name - because the KKK had already lost widespread favor for their violent small-town isolation enforcement practices against white non-KKK members or visitors and their Anti-Catholic policies by the late 1920's. The rise. The goal was to polarize, isolate and capture a sufficient number of "in groups" while demonizing - and stealing community property and resources from - the out groups.

FDR, and to some degree presidents Truman through Johnson neutered them, but the Southern Strategy brought them roaring back

[ck4829]

26. Oh yes, others have pointed this out. We couldn't have this decline without the failures of reconstruction

It definitely started creeping in with that.

[muriel_volestrangler]

29. Temporarily overcome by the country and people of

genocide of Native Americans, southern secession for slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, the Gilded Age, Jim Crow, the America First Committee, McCarthyism, the Moral Majority, the Tea Party, and MAGA.

Like tides, the morals of the USA ebb and flow.

[ck4829]

31. There is a cause and a reaction, definitely

[ck4829]

30. Great lessons, all who posted. Really. All factors for sure. Read on them people reading this thread. I need to add this

This was also something to generate discussion. There are people who are really opinionated about certain topics here and I made this with that group in mind, and on this? Crickets.

This isn't to DU in general or even the majority of DUers. But you know who you are. If you are not part of them, then you probably have an idea of the people I am referring to.

For that select group, I have this to post to you:

You have failed every activist before you. You have failed everyone who fought and died for freedom whether it was a soldier, an abolitionist, an activist, whoever they were.

If you want to say you are interested in politics in a political forum and can make your voice known on other things but avoid answering the questions I posed above... then you don't deserve the things they fought, suffered, bled, and died for.

Maybe you should just exit thinking and talking about politics in general. It would be better for everyone: even you. Then you could at least be honest with yourself.

[ck4829]

54. So the circle really has nothing to post now, huh?

It's funny, right now, my list of people I ignore consists of exactly 2 people. One argues in bad faith and will take what you say and misconstrue it to mean something else and I'm pretty sure the other has a weird grudge against Rep. Ilhan Omar.

But here and now, I think it should grow. If you know who I am talking about, you should do the same for your ignore list and jury blocklist. Notice how this thread is informative and engaging, and that's because they aren't here, and that is of their own volition right now. And if you want to know who they are, I will gladly send you a list. Your experience here will become so much better for it.

At this point, I would say that the group I am referring to is worse than MAGA.

[Cirsium]

32. 1770s

The slave holders, the land thieves, won and they created a new nation founded on slavery and land theft. Abolition and the Civil War set them back for a while, but they soon regained their footing. Since then, progress has occasionally been made through great sacrifice and effort, but white nationalism always comes roaring back stronger than ever, smashing all of the gains.

[ck4829]

37. I see that, I want to believe in something more hopeful

[Cirsium]

40. of course

Understood. But hoping and believing is what we have been doing. Time to face the truth now.

[Lonestarblue]

33. I would say it all started with Reagan.

He embraced subtle racism, put forth Friedman's economic policies favoring the movement of the country's wealth to the rich, caused poverty to increase, denigrated poor people on welfare with his "welfare queen driving a Cadillac" line, and broke the back of the air traffic controllers union and set the anti-union tone still being pushed by Republicans today. One of Reagan's media consultants, Roger Ailes, went on to turn Fox News into the Republican sewer it is today.

[ck4829]

38. Things definitely sped up downhill at that time during his term

[Shipwack]

49. Borowitz in his book "Confederacy of Dunces"

Also put the Reagan as the start intellectual decay in America.

Reagan was dumb but hid it fairly well, and Quayle was dumb but didn’t have the talent for hiding it.

[Johnny2X2X]

39. The Civil War and Reconstruction

We're still fighting that war and the corporatism of the time after the war.

[ck4829]

47. We really are.

[gay texan]

41. I saw it coming with Reagan

You know, ive been yelling and warning people for years that this day was gonna come.

Voluteered, voted, gave money etc.

In the end some stupid motherfuckers have got to learn the hard way.

[ck4829]

45. They really are gonna have to learn that way

[CoopersDad]

43. James Earl Carter was the last of the greats.

Yes, I was happy that Bill Clinton won and ecstatic with Barack Obama, but the last truly great president, IMO, was Carter.

And I'm glad I was around to witness his works then and until now.

[ck4829]

44. Before my time

But it does sound like he had a moral conviction few have today.

[CoopersDad]

46. Solar on the white house, Habitat for Humanity, his Malaise speech...

His "malaise" speech was timely and important, it spoke well to what was to come to this nation and this culture.
Of course, his works with Habitat after retirement speak volumes.

Text here: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/carter-crisis/

[ck4829]

50. "What was to come" - That is the truth right there

People have mentioned the failures of reconstruction and yes, that's where a lot of this started.

But, oh after he lost the election... that's when things really picked up.

I have a graph in another reply that makes this apparent.

[rampartd]

51. november 22 1963 to be precise.

[ck4829]

52. Would be interesting to see what happened had that day took a different course

Certainly our country would be better for it.

[blm]

55. WashTimes feeding pro-fascist propaganda to talkradio in 80s, begetting FOX 'news' in 90s.

The moneyed fascists and traitors were dead set to tear down democracy in the US and replace it with muscular fascism.

[ck4829]

57. Hey, the Unification Church was also involved with the Washington Times, right? Sun Myung Moon made it happen I think

Go well with what GaYellowDawg added in #27

[blm]

58. Sun Myung Moon had a longtime association with Poppy Bush

Going back to the 60s and 70s.

I don’t believe in coincidences that alter world events.

[ck4829]

61. Same here

[meadowlander]

59. We just got tired of progress in the 1970s

and let inertia and a bunch of snake oil salesmen convince people that you can have a great country without paying taxes, serving in the military or public service, helping your neighbours, standing up to your bosses, committing to lifelong learning, or paying attention to the news.

Trying to be good was too hard so a lot of people gave up and turned being a selfish asshole into a virtue.

I think it was accelerated by the hopelessness that people felt at offshoring of jobs in the 90s and early 00s. That busted the unions and the myth of the American Dream. Everything since then has been sleepwalking, grievance and learned helplessness.

[ck4829]

60. And that is so unfortunate