And you’re ignoring that Regan et al went after the unions and undermined your ability to negotiate against your much more powerful employer.
But I do agree, a lot of people forget that, while stress and uncertainty are up for a lot of people, material wealth is also way up. The thing is, it’s an unnecessary trade-off. We could have an abundance of security in all areas of our lives.
As much as I think “whataboutism” is an overused word, this is a perfect example of it. It’s not germane to anything in my post. I pointed out that the “good old days” claim in OP is a myth. A claim of, “so and so made things worse” has nothing to do with my statement.
While Reagan was president, one of my grandparents was in a union. They still had to use a toilet in the hall that they shared with the neighbor. They couldn’t afford a car. They didn’t have a TV. None of those things were available because all the factories in their country got bombed. At the same time my other set of grandparents paid taxes but never got to vote. They lived in a colony of the democracy-loving British but since they were natives they were second class citizens.
Pretending that the world was some paradise until Reagan and the neocons showed up is just willful ignorance.
Maybe I didn’t acknowledge strongly enough that you’re 100% in saying that shit sucked back then. Shit sucks now, too. They just suck in different ways unique to each time.
The killing the unions comment was in reference to the idyllic income OP is nostalgic for, since they are part of the reason such a situation was possible. Sorry if that felt like “whatsboutism,” it wasn’t intended to be that way.
That makes sense.
I get frustrated at frequent oversimplifications. Reagan and the neocons certainly made things worse but they were a few out of many factors.
Even if we imagined a world where we have a bunch of Bernie Sanders all over government there are limits to what they can do. Strong unions in the US wouldn’t have done anything to stop Asia from industrializing, Europe from rebuilding its economy or the rest of the developing world from trying to move out of agrarian economies. When the US car companies were the only game in town there was a lot of excess that could be spread around to workers. Once a bunch of other countries started offering cars it put more and more pressure on the US companies to spend more money on quality and charge less for finished products. Over here we got used to a war induced monopoly and convinced ourselves that’s “normal” or that it’s simply the result of democracy or American ingenuity.
If we actually want to improve the state of regular people we’ll have much better success if we’re honest with ourselves about both the present and history.
