Comment by api
7 days ago
When the history is written I think the Citizens United decision might be pegged as the end of the American republic. It allowed endless amounts of dark money including foreign money to pour into US elections.
In any case, I think we're seeing the beginning of the Chinese century.
1) Chicago-school interest groups successfully putting people on courts and in the legislature to all but completely eliminate anti-trust enforcement, starting in the '70s. TL;DR policy used to be that a company holding too much market share was per se bad for the country and that the government could act on it, the shift added more tests making it slower (so, also more expensive) and harder to successfully enforce anti-trust, so much so that we all but stopped doing it.
2) Failure to send Nixon to prison.
3) Loss of the Fairness Doctrine under Reagan.
4) Failure to send a whole list of Reagan's folks (and maybe Reagan) to prison over Iran-Contra and other misdeeds. And those same names keep popping up, making things worse for the '90s and '00s. This was a huge mistake.
5) The Democrats totally surrendering economics policy to a newly farther-right [edit: more accurately, a set of policies championed by a certain set of pro-capital right wing interests—we recently saw this totally overthrown by right-populist policy, when Trump took over the party in 2016, which was the most remarkable development in US party politics since the '80s] Republican view, in the '80s, and adopting basically the same policy. This set the stage for the current backlash, because this all-in neoliberal shit was never popular, but persisted because both parties supported it.
6) Loosened media reach ownership rules in the early '00s.
7) CU
8) Nobody at any point finding a way to dismantle the Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society (if you're wondering "how", it seems the NRA had been doing all sorts of illegal shenanigans for a loooong time—I'd be absolutely floored if these two don't have some big ol' skeletons hanging around)
9) We all watch a coup attempt live on TV (re-watch some of the news footage if your memory is fading, it remains shocking) and then the Biden administration dicked around during the six months or so when it might have been possible to go after the leaders of it.
10) The Internet putting intense pressure on the news media, leading to even more profit-focus than before (and see also the loss of various controls above) with nothing done to try to mitigate that.
11) Extreme centralization of control of the narrative online under a handful of platforms (and the narrative is "whatever gets us more eyeballs", see again #11) and nothing done to fix that.