09-20-2022, 06:21 PM
(09-20-2022, 05:38 PM)nguyenivy Wrote: With that cycle in mind, what should Carter have done? So the New Deal was no longer in demand by the late 1970s/early 1980s. What was? (I am a Millennial who does not remember life before the 1990s.) Was what we wound up getting actually in demand or did it fill a vacuum?
Our difference in time perspective is amazing. To me the demise of Carter to Reagan is yesterday. I guess as you millennials get older these days will seem like yesterday 40 years from now.
But we can learn history even if we didn't live through it. But maybe they don't teach that in school anymore. Or what is essential in it. The videos I have posted about neoliberalism/Reaganomics on this essay I wrote about it tell the tale:
http://philosopherswheel.com/freemarket.html
George Monbiot says in another video (not the one posted on my essay linked above) that intellectual ideologues had been developing neoliberalism/free-market BS for a long time, so it was available off the shelf to fill the vaccum in the 1970s and early 80s when it seemed the Keynesian/New Deal economics model wasn't handling the inflation/resource blackmail/pollution problems of the 1970s and the stagnation of US companies. There was nothing really wrong with the New Deal model, but it had no answer for these resource/pollution issues or runaway inflation partly caused by excess union/strike activism as well as resource blackmail by the Arab/Muslim countries in 1973 and 1979 that caused long gas lines and high gas prices which sparked bad recessions.
But the corporations felt the sting of consumer and environmental regulations that were passed during the Awakening in the 15 years before 1980, and prejudiced people and their preachers were turning against those empowered by the civil rights movement and against the increasing secularism and counter-culture, and they both found a charming actor and former governor of CA who could delude people into voting for him with his image of strength, confidence and optimism and who was a bulwark against these trends. It worked, and so Reaganomics was imposed on the people, and voters were deceived into supporting his neoliberal ideology and prejudice from that day to this, causing steady middle-class decline-- although the Biden presidency, influenced by Bernie Sanders, has recently moved the needle a bit away from neoliberal Reaganomics, and the big spending on the covid rescue plans and infrastructure departed from it as well.
Carter was no match for Reagan as an appealing candidate, and he appeared helpless to deal with the challenges at home and abroad. I don't think there was anything he could have done. American voters choose the candidate that appeals most to them, regardless of what policies are imposed or what problems may exist, or how well the president and his party are dealing with them. Carter just seemed out of his depth. He was an appealing candidate, but Reagan's appeal was superior.
The horoscope score is a good indicator of which kinds of candidates appeal to voters in the USA, and which ones appeal the most. The scores illustrate the fact that unskilled candidates can't be elected USA president, unless both parties nominate unskilled candidates (as happened in the 1910s and 1920s and in the 1880s).
http://philosopherswheel.com/presidentialelections.html