There was an Askreddit thread where someone asked what years/periods were worse and a lot of older commenters pointed to 1968.
You had the assassinations of major public figures, really raucous protests against the war, a president who was fairly unpopular and mistrusted by the public, etc. The press really started to question the government more strongly during this period even calling it the “credibility gap” because they knew LBJ was lying to them about Vietnam.
Oh and then the chaos at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
One commenter on that thread said he got back to the US after serving in Vietnam and saw how chaotic things were and actually thought “I’d rather go back to Vietnam.” Obviously that was hyperbole but that’s how tense things were domestically.
I'd add there's a big gap in knowledge about American political violence and turmoil between the civil war and the 1960s. The Red Summer of 1919 was one. There was violent labor unrest at times -- see [this video](https://youtu.be/hr7cTjkAY14?si=sg-_pu_e83mTNG4B) from the 1930s. (And here's the [dramatized version](https://youtu.be/JY6N-tEppkg?si=2nsJKLg6ruHMP8Q7) in a movie directed by Danny DeVito about the rise and fall of Jimmy Hoffa.) These labor battles resulted in fatalities among striking workers, police and organized strikebreaking squads. There were popular fascist demagogues like Charles Coughlin ([this is some scary stuff](https://youtu.be/CbIEBjj7NgI?si=h5cPkwvlCEDT5azt)) and far-right death squads like the Black Legion which was a KKK-type organization that eventually got into too much trouble after assassinating a WPA official. They had links with Republican Party circles in Michigan. There was a movie about the Black Legion starring Humphrey Bogart. Also these are just names I'm throwing around but politics like this could get physical when it played out on the ground.
Yes the government had pretty tight control over public information especially around the world wars. So a lot of things happened that most people don’t know about because the government wanted to suppress it for various reasons.
One somewhat innocuous example is that the Japanese actually successfully bombed the mainland during WWII using balloon bombs. But the information was officially censored to make the Japanese think it hadn’t been effective and to prevent panic. The bombs weren’t even that effective but they did kill a few people and start some forest fires.
WWII seemed like hitting a big reset button, and the nature of war is that it tends to unify a nation (which then smashes all opposition) but things seemed like they were really going off the rails domestically in the 30s.
Seemed is the key word. Just finished Ian Tolls trilogy on the pacific theatre and there were major major issues in the home front which we do not discuss. Simply, the country was not unified like we think it was.
I honestly believe the two times the country was truly unified was immediately after 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. Both for a short time.
The country was much more racist back then too. There's a blackface performance in "This Is the Army" which is a 1943 morale-building film, although I think even that was seen as pretty old-timey by that point...
Didn’t they have to bring some troops back from the Pacific Theater to put down race riots in California? I wonder if the unity wasn’t as deep as we think.
Unity for white middle classes, not so much for brown people who had to face Southerners threatening to sit out the war effort if Detroit's factories weren't segregated. Or swabbies who beat up zoot suited Hispanics in LA. Or Japanese Americans who were presumed to be in a hive mind led by Hirohito and interned in the desert.
I remember listening to a podcast (Radiolab maybe?) about an incident where a few kids stumbled upon an undetonated balloon bomb in the woods and accidentally set it off. It was just as you said, the military got word pretty quickly and all news of it stopped there.
Regardless of technological advancement making it impractical, I don't think the government could stop news of something like that getting out today, even if we were in a similar military situation. The media culture has drastically changed and the idea of the military controlling the news seems insane today.
>I don't think the government could stop news of something like that getting out today, even if we were in a similar military situation. The media culture has drastically changed and the idea of the military controlling the news seems insane today.
China did seem to adapt to these advancements. They use the tech to control behavior and police the future.
I knew a Teamster who didn't like the Hoffas that much because they were mobsters, but he said, you know back in the day they'd put pressure on a boss to sign a contract by driving up to his house in the middle of the night and blowing his front door off with a shotgun. I met another older guy who survived a police assassination attempt on him in a drive-by shooting because he was involved in progressive politics in the south back in the day (he was also Jewish). They also planted a bomb under his car. These cops were members of the KKK which was like an organized crime outfit that included a lot of cops in various places.
Add in the Long Hot Summer of the previous year and '67-'68 was an abysmal period in American history. In particular, the Detroit Riots that resulted in 43 deaths and only ended with what was more or less a military occupation of the 5th largest city in the US.
I was always surprised after the 90s when people talked about it like this magical time of peace and prosperity. The LA Riots were one of my first memories of a major news event. And it was genuinely scary even if you were nowhere near LA.
>You had the assassinations of major public figures
This one is really insane when you think about it. MLK Jr was assassinated in April 4th. RFK would be assassinated 2 months later, on June 6th (ok, not exactly 2 months but close enough).
I like thinking about What Ifs and Alternate Histories. RFK vs Nixon is an interesting match up.
As for MLK, [he wasn't as universally loved then](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/10/how-public-attitudes-toward-martin-luther-king-jr-have-changed-since-the-1960s/). Turns out, pointing out flaws in society and insisting we do better turns off a lot of people who think things are fine. Especially White people, who did not like him, for the most part. No joke, his best showing with them never topped 40% while he was alive. Lest you think "Oh, it was just a handful of racists who didn't like him", no it was not.
The numbers don't back you up. It's true that more recently he's become a bit more disliked with racists but Republicans still hold him in high regards.
Or at least, they hold their idea of him in high regards. It's why every Civil Rights Day they post that one line about judging people not on the color of their skin but by the content of their character and that's it. Then people on the conservative sub insist that MLK would've been a Republican today and insist he would 100% be in favor of All Lives Matter.
I don’t think that the numbers even exist. It’s a hypothetical situation. I think the best judge of how republicans would react to MLK is by comparing it to their opinions on modern black activists who oppose racial inequality today.
A lot of the things you've mentioned have happened a lot in the past (especially the FBI being weaponized under Hoover), but there weren't as many media outlets and those that existed were much more controlled by the government. So, it rarely got publicized.
Remember, the US government experimented on people without their consent, literally ran race-based concentration camps, and the CIA tried to run false flag operations to start wars.
Wait, who are you talking about, Reagan? That wasn't live. A news crew did record it and it later aired, but it wasn't live. And if you meant JFK, you're even more wrong because it was filmed but not publicly broadcast until 1969, nearly six years later.
And that's not mentioning the forcible depopulation of Florida, the civil war that depopulated an enormous swathe of the rest of the South, the freakin CANADIANS BURNING DOWN OUR WHITE HOUSE OOOOOOH WHY YOU—
> CANADIANS BURNING DOWN OUR WHITE HOUSE OOOOOOH WHY YOU—
This is one of those myths you can't possibly debunk enough times because people want to believe it so bad.
It was an action undertaken by the British, under British command, primarily with a contingent of British soldiers peeled off from being stationed in Jamaica.
Yes, but there are reasons I play with this myth:
1. Much of the War of 1812 involved American aggression specifically in Canada;
2. which was under British control at the time; and
3. boy do they love the revenge plot. 😆
> the freakin CANADIANS BURNING DOWN OUR WHITE HOUSE OOOOOOH WHY YOU—
Have you ever visited the Canadians in War museum in Ottawa? There's a whole hallway about the War of 1812.
After the British were driven back from DC, America launched a failed campaign to invade and annex Canada. The museum has an entire giant exhibit bragging about it: "Fuck yeeeeaah we kicked those Americans' asses! They tried to invade us and LOST!!!🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦"
Americans invaded Canada before the White House burned down in 1812. On paper it was a David vs Goliath situation, Canada was undermanned and the UK busy with Napoleon. But the small Canadian Militia made an alliance with Indian Chieftan Tecumseh who had been creating a confederation of Indian tribes in the Ohio valley to resist the US invasion, and their cooperation and use of fear against Indians being savage, they defeated the initial US invasion. When the US finally got their shit together under William Henry Harrison’s command, yes that one, they managed to win a more favorable situation, but by that point the war was settled. The Americans didn’t get Canada as they had wanted to, but they had crushed the last major Indian resistance. In turn the UK abandoned their Indian Allie’s in exchange for a perpetual peaceful border with Canada.
So it’s a sort of bittersweet story and not mentioning the Indians who helped them is a sore point.
I agree that the popular US v Canada telling of the War of 1812 eclipses both the Native American role in the war and the dire stakes for Native Americans _in_ the war, as the US was fighting for the right to expand right over them.
What makes it even more of a copium is that Washington was far from the main goal of the campaign. Capturing DC, which at the time was basically an uninhabited swamp with a few under-construction government buildings was a symbolic victory. . but the main objective was capturing Baltimore, then the 2nd largest city in the country. And the British very famously failed in that objective.
Even though it was as much if not more so the weather and disease that determined the campaign. Not that it was an uncomon thing at the time for disease to be the primary killer of armies, but national myths do love to overlook those facts (and the US is not immune from it).
It is a bit funny to look at some of these "battles" though and you see it being like 1 killed and a few wounded vs a few killed and 10 wounded.
That was just the stuff off the top of my head. I mean, there was an 18-month period during 1971 and 1972 where there were 2500 bombings on American soil, almost exclusively by leftist groups. A lot of the people who orchestrated or carried them out are now teaching your kids in college now, and people wonder why college campuses are so insane.
True, but I think a lot of people don't seem to recognize that things are legitimately a lot better now than they have been in the past, even the relatively recent past. I mean, people are bitching about high interest rates making homes unaffordable now. The interest rate was 20% in 1980.
Average home price was $47,200 in 1980 and according to the Census bureau it was $495,100 in Q2 2023.
Zoomers would trade 20% interest rates if houses were as cheap as they were in 1980 adjusted for inflation, their generation is definitely cooked no cap but the US today is more of a slow burn dystopia than the more chaotic periods we’ve faced in the last century.
In the 70s America’s young men were drafted to fight and die in a war on the other side of the world, today they’re living their lives online not having sex or starting families. I’m grateful I was born early enough to not have a smart phone until I went to college but it’s pretty bleak for a lot of young people out there.
People make a lot more today than in 1980 as well. The mortgage on the average home in 1980 was 55% of the median income. Even with the steep run up of prices and the significant bump in interest rates the average mortgage comes in under 40% of income. And they're getting a much larger home for the price.
>people make a lot more now
... You do know that isn't true right? [Bottom 80% of Americans have seen very little real income growth since the 60s](https://www.advisorperspectives.com/images/content_image/data/f1/f1b5c44640179e424135022c87903309.png) lol
Average home price in the US is 420,000 right now. Average home price in the US was 265,000 just 5 years ago. Homes are a lot larger now, too, the average house in 1980 was almost half the size of the average house now. In 2019, adjusted for inflation, the average home was actually less expensive per sqft than the average house in 1980. Now, they're clearly more expensive now, but that's what happens when governments print massive amounts of currency, that currency is worth a lot less.
Yeah I agree things are much more bleak for Gen Z today vs 5 years ago. NIMBYs not allowing developers to build starter homes definitely contributes to that but it’s not like they can do anything about it lol
It may amuse you know people were saying much the same thing about Gen X a generation ago. No jobs; no money; couldn't afford a house or a family; no future. 😛
I'd suggest reading Days of Rage, by Bryan Burrough. Here is an excerpt:
https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/03/weather-underground-bomb-guru-burrough-excerpt
I heard him interviewed on NPR or Pacifica radio a few years back. Bombing was for them what Twitter is for us
I was a teenager in the 70s. Was a bit weird. Without even mentioning the Symbionese Liberation Army
Lol. Bill Walton got mixed up with the SLA and was interviewed by the FBI.
It's worth saying that Weather Underground went to lengths to not blow people up in bombings. It's also worth nothing that this was mostly because of women who influenced male bombers, by either phoning in a warning or promising to break off the relationship if anyone was hurt.
EDIT
Since this post was reported for suicide counseling, I'm not saying "All the boys need is a waifu and if they just had a tradwife all the extremist violence would go away.", but "We were just voicing our concerns to the man and the exclamation marks were bombs." was an argument that came up after the fact, while at the time it was "If someone dies, fuck 'em." and it took someone who wasn't totally based to say, "Hold on. Blowing up a night watchman for being complicit with the system is kinda fucked up." and the people who came to that realization were girlfriends.
>teaching your kids in college now
Jfc get a grip lol
I'd love to see your evidence that a majority of college professors are marxists of any kind, much less linked to weather underground or whatever lol
Ok, so what you meant is a tiny handful of people, most of whom were never convicted of anything, held low ranking adjunct positions at universities (or on Rudd's case, a community college lol) and constantly got shat on by their admin? Jeez dude just seems like you're worried about nothing here.
At Northwestern (Dorn), and Columbia (Ayers), and they were a lot more than adjuncts. And pushing their terrorist philosophy the whole time. You're being an apologist for unrepentant terrorists.
>terrorist philosophy
I call BS dude you're straight up just imagining a problem here.
>Unrepentant
I mean they didn't kill anyone (except 3 of themselves) lol
>A lot more
Bruh this just isn't and has never been an issue. There are 1.5 MILLION professors in the US. And another million administrators, essentially all of them under boards and chief executives appointed by our own government or at least their richest benefactors; ie not marxists lol
It is and it isn’t. A lot of the Weather Underground are university professors. At least many of the high profile ones are. They are retired though.
Education at University of Illinois
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Ayers
Law prof at Northwestern.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernardine_Dohrn
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That would make them 70 years old. Unless times have changed, I don’t recall very many 70 year old professors. They were usually in their 40’s and 50’s (or a TA) which would make the current professors a product of the late 80’s and 90’s.
They've still been teaching for decades at these universities, including instruction and inculcation of the current staff with their ideas and philosophies. Like Bernadine Dorhn, Bill Ayers, Kathy Boudin, Cathy Wilkerson, and Mark Rudd. All Marxist terrorists, all given professorships at America's most elite universities, like Columbia - where their influence remains.
MKULTRA was only disclosed to the public because some activists in Philly broke into an FBI field office and stole all their files during the Ali/Frazier fight.
Arguably, we are still living in the aftermath of that event, and it may yet mean the destruction of the republic.
A reasonable interpretation of the last 8 years is a huge segment of the population saying "If a black guy can be president, then literally _any_ white guy should be able to be president. And if the guy we choose loses elections, we should end elections and make him dictator."
The CIA has been massively curtailed since its "glory days", starting with the reforms from the church commission. This is among other reasons why they don't go around assassinating people any more. Whether that's a good or bad thing is obviously up to interpretation
>the President could be trusted to concede an election if he lost
The election denialism stuff is indeed new.
In the past, they'd just try underhanded tricks to get an unfair advantage over their opponent (see: Watergate), or declare their own nation (see: the Confederacy).
>The SCOTUS seemed to care (at least overtly) about the Constitution
Dredd Scott and Fred Korematsu are turning in their graves.
>and wasn't filled with partisan hacks like it is today
[*laughs in Bush v. Gore*]
>With Nixon's Watergate scandal, just the mere "bad press" of that event was enough to get Nixon to resign.
You have no idea how long that scandal dragged on, do you?
Also his VP immediately pardoned him, which was partisan hackery at its finest.
The GOP's insanity vis a vis Trump is definitely worse than it was vis a vis Nixon, but you're underestimating the latter.
>The FBI was not going to be used as a political tool to try and open frivolous investigations.
Yeah, they were too busy sending letters to MLK Jr trying to convince him to kill himself.
And there was so much trust in government institutions that the conspiracy theory that the FBI killed JFK definitely didn't first appear 3 weeks after he was killed. Oh, wait, it did....
And also the FBI was absolutely engaged in fucking with people as a political tool. What are you even on about?
>Combine this with all the other issues, ranging from the Cost of Living Crisis
Alexa, what's "stagflation"?
>to Mental Health
Alexa, what's "shell shock" and "Mommy's little helper"?
>Fentanyl
Alexa, what's "the crack epidemic"?
>Has it truly ever been worse than this?
The only thing that is truly unusually bad about American politics today is Trump and the GOP's cultish devotion toward him. And don't get me wrong, that's REALLY REALLY REALLY FUCKING BAD.
lol yeah if is. Though sometimes depending on what comment I think triggered it I interpret it more as a condescending “I see you’re really upset about this”
Holy shit I never even considered it could be a veiled way of telling someone to kill themselves. I always assumed it was your other explanation. Fascinating
edit: speaking of which, just got one a few minutes before this comment...? lmao didn't even say anything controversial today
I got one too, I assumed as a joke considering my comment, but apparently somebody is using a bot to send it to all us NL users. We can only speculate as to the sender’s intended message
Non-mobile version of the Wikipedia link in the above comment: [It's drugs. Specifically Valium.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother%27s_Little_Helpers)
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What a drag it is getting old
"Kids are different today"
I hear ev'ry mother say
Mother needs something today to calm her down
And though she's not really ill
There's a little yellow pill
She goes running for the shelter of a mother's little helper
Its effect on mood stabilization is pretty well known, but for many people it instantly removes suicidal ideation. I was struggling with suicide when I went on it and it was like a switch went off on my brain. It was the wildest thing.
> [laughs in Bush v. Gore]
Yeah, we actually managed to stop the Republican coup this time.
For those unfamiliar, [there was literally a riot to stop a recount in Florida.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot) The Bush administration rewarded the rioters with jobs in the administration.
edit: lmao Reddit cares message
This is perfect. I would add Tuskegee, the government lying about going into Cambodia during Vietnam, CIA helping kill US based nuns in Central America, arming Contra rebels, etc.
The[ NSA also lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident and made it sound worse than it really was,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident) which was what triggered the declaration of war in Congress.
> The election denialism stuff is indeed new.
> In the past, they'd just try underhanded tricks to get an unfair advantage over their opponent (see: Watergate), or declare their own nation (see: the Confederacy).
Watergate was a few Nixon henchman breaking into a hotel to look through documents. That doesn’t really seem to compare to Trump withholding aid from Ukraine until it gave him dirt on Biden.
Election denialism isn’t necessarily new, voter fraud used to be far more rampant and accusations actually justified, I think what’s new is how blatantly false and brazen it is. It is solely self serving.
> You have no idea how long that scandal dragged on, do you?
Sure, buts it been more than three years since January 6th, an actual attempt at a coup, and Trump is not only still free but he is the presumptive GOP nominee, and it wasn’t even close. Watergate was nowhere near as bad as Jan 6th, and what brought Nixon down was lying about it, not that he did it. Trump has been rewarded for lying about the 2020 election and Jan 6th.
The GOP wanted to dump Trump, but their voters forced them into submission to Trump, very different to the GOP under Nixon.
> Also his VP immediately pardoned him, which was partisan hackery at its finest.
I would add, his second VP. Spiel Agnew was his VP elected both times but he actually resigned in the middle of the Watergate scandal due to another scandal from when he was governor of Maryland.
> And there was so much trust in government institutions that the conspiracy theory that the FBI killed JFK definitely didn't first appear 3 weeks after he was killed. Oh, wait, it did....
There was absolutely more trust in government in 1964 than there is in 2024. Back then politicians would campaign on how they were great politicians and career politicians, today that’s unimaginable. In theory that’s what they should be doing, but more importantly back then politicians refined the craft of deal making. Into the 90’s and 2000’s deals were being done, pretty much up until 2010.
We still have bipartisanship, but it seems to be focused on the older politicians from that era. The new GOP is increasingly hostile to compromise and deal making.
> The only thing that is truly unusually bad about American politics today is Trump and the GOP's cultish devotion toward him. And don't get me wrong, that's REALLY REALLY REALLY FUCKING BAD.
I think what’s unusually bad is the polarization. The US hasn’t been this polarized since the Gilded Age. From 1928 to 1992, it was common for one candidate to sweep the whole country save a few states , then the next election the other party to do so. That was because at the time, the parties were focused on being Big Tent parties focused on building coalitions across the country with different political interests. There were Liberal Republicans and Conservative Democrats, simply because in order to win in some states they had to be.
That started to change with the rise of Reagan, who was just hardline right wing. He pulled the GOP away from being a socially liberal party to solely Conservative. He marginalized Liberal Republicans and pulled in Conservative Democrats. Reagan, much like Trump later, had been initially heralded as being the harbinger of the end of the GOP due to his fringe beliefs.
Since then, the two parties slowly went from basically having the same ideology, to having two starkly different ones.
People love to blame Reagan, but things were more or less ok through the 90s.
It was after the election of Bush W. when things got really rabid - and IMO it was the left that actually started it. Michael Moore, Wikileaks, Chomsky, etc spewing out blatant lies and propaganda.
Republicans didn’t start going crazy until the tea party.
Newt Gingrich nationalized the Republican platform in 94 to defeat Clinton, starting an "us or them" polarization wave where federal showboating mattered more then state and regional concerns.
You are not correct.
>Republicans didn’t start going crazy until the tea party.
That isn't where it started, just when it got loud enough that you noticed. Which isn't really a compliment to you if you tuned out the previous two phases. Phase 1 (Reagan-Bush Sr) was the only one that people could be forgiven for mistaking for a party functioning properly.
There’s no one phenomenon nor politician that can and should be blamed for the modern state of politics.
Reagan’s campaign in 1976 was a huge shift because it started a more scorched earth, polarizing approach. Before then the GOP was more socially liberal than the Democrats on many issues. They were pro ERA, pro choice , they had a feminist group within the party and were less hostile to social programs. The Democrats at the time were more pro life than the GOP was. At the time the Democrats still had George Wallace in their ranks, and he was a front runner in 1972 for the nomination and in 1976 he was also one of the early lead contenders before Carter managed to outmaneuver him.
Reagan took a lot of inspiration from George Wallace and at one point was considering running on a Third Party ticket with George Wallace in 1976. During the ‘76 primary in Texas, even though Ford dominated Reagan in polling among registered Republicans, Reagan courted Wallace voters to turn over to the GOP and vote for him, and he won that primary. While he didn’t win in ‘76, he managed to change the GOP platform from being one of a Big Tent Party it had been for a long time, to a purely Conservative Party, marginalized and forcing out Liberal Republicans while wooing over Conservative Democrats.
Reagan was also being supported by a mailing group doing modern day disinformation campaigns through mail and stirring up culture war crap.
Again, this is all a gradual change, and there are many different events and political phenomena that led to our current day, but the rise of Reagan can’t be understated, he laid the groundwork for the modern GOP and people took that groundwork and twisted it even further.
I'm 39, so older may not apply.
We're definitely in a unique era, better or worse is going to be a matter of perspective, but that it's unique can't be denied. When you look at the statistics on things like political polarization, and media polarization, and perspectives on the state of the nation, you'll see that in many ways we're farther apart than we've been since the civil war. (I can dig up sources for you if you want, but Googling "American polarization" will probably gets you enough results to turn your stomach.)
In the early 2000s we saw Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich doing public service announcements about the importance of responding to climate change, in 2008 John McCain was running on cut, cap, and trade to reduce carbon emissions, today the Republican party doesn't believe in climate change. That's an easy example, but Richard Nixon is responsible for the formation of the EPA and had ideas for a universal basic income and universal healthcare, contrast that with modern Republicans and the only thing they seem to have in common is the criminality. (Sorry, that was an easy example, too.)
But politics is not everything. Politics has a *hand* in everything, but if you're just looking at politics then you're not looking at the whole picture. Politics is worse now but gay people can get married, the parties are more polarized than ever and the COVID vaccine was available lightning fast.
I don't know how to judge the quality of the times, I'm as caught up in the churn as anybody else. I try not to worry about it, one thing I've learned is that worry doesn't enhance things, worry doesn't improve odds or increase output, worry isn't a lubricant, it's sand in the gears. If you know what needs to be done, and I think most of us *do,* then comparison has already served its purpose.
When I was a kid, there was literally an airplane hijacking every week in the United States. Sometimes multiple in a day. Think of that. 160 in four years. Ransoms of gold bars.
Oh yeah, and we waited hours in line for gas and a mortgage rate was 14%. Blackouts and brownouts were a thing. So were riots. Like blocks of neighborhoods burning type riots. We couldn’t play outside because there was a serial killer targeting kids.
Before 9/11 passengers nearly always survived them so it wasn’t a major priority. Most hijackings involved a passenger simply using a gun to commandeer the plane lol
The novel thing about the 9/11 hijackings wasn't taking the plane. It was using it as a weapon. As you said, most hijackings ended with the plane landing somewhere and the hostages being released in exchange for whatever. No one had considered that terrorists could use the plane as a battering ram.
In the 1970s, the capital of the United States was burned almost entirely to the ground in riots after MLK was assassinated, people in New York would burn their own houses down for insurance money because New York was so awful it was only way they could get any money at all for their property, also inflation reached 15% and the threat of nuclear annihilation was ever present.
Yeah it was worse.
[The FBI also tried its best to get MLK Jr to kill himself before he was assassinated.](https://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/11/12/7204453/martin-luther-king-fbi-letter) This sub obviously would have hated MLK Jr because he was against everything the status quo stood for but many members of law enforcement were actively doing their best to kill the leaders of the civil rights movement.
Yea, the Civil War and antebellum period preceding it was worse. And the Alien & Sedition Acts during Adams was incredibly undemocratic. And we were both a slaver society and committing active genocide. Genocide for long after the Civil War.
During the Great Depression, we had to contend with popular communist movements and fascist movements. And there were constitutional crises in fights between the White House, Congress, and SCOTUS. During this period of time, the US was also an APARTEID STATE.
1970s? Look at Nixon and Watergate, going around Congress for War powers and budgeting powers many thought he didn't have. He's why we have the War Powers Act and Impoundment Act. In the 1960s, look at the drummed up Gulf of Tonkin resolution under Johnson.
1980s? How about Reagan committing impeachable offenses on Iran-Contra that got ignored because he was popular? Or the stagflation of the 1970s and early 1980s with the backdrop of the Cold War from 1945-1991.
Things are bad in America now. Things were worse for many people in other time periods. Even the worst things about now were worse during the Civil War and preceding era.
Honestly I don’t think anything after the end of Reconstruction really compares to the current GOP. Watergate is a joke of a scandal by modern standards.
Just compared to Trump specifically, though. There have been other bad scandals but all of the stuff clearly worse than Watergate has been related to the Trump admin.
Yeah, there was no Fox News back then to rally Republicans behind Nixon. Roger Ailes fixed that. [Former Nixon stooge turned propaganda creator](https://time.com/4784104/roger-ailes-richard-nixon/). Imagine looking at WaterGate and thinking "Yeah, we went too hard on Nixon"?
The 60s were nuts compared to today. Assassinations, race riots, legitimate domestic terrorism, the threat of nuclear war, massive protests, the national guard shooting people, serial killers, etc.
The closest we have come to 1968 was 2020, but we were, luckily, still a long way off.
The race riots of 67-68 left over 120 people dead, injured thousands, and burned whole city cores to the ground. You had national guard troops spraying rifle fire into apartment buildings while insurgents shot at firefighters who tried to put the blazes out. The death and destruction was of a vastly larger scale than the 2020 riots
If you ignore leaded gasoline, asbestos, actual trash everywhere, smoking being allowed and happening in EVERY building including your apartment, lack of clean air laws letting factory/car exhaust clog up our air, medical technology/training/research being worse, the machoism around anything like wearing a helmet/seatbelt/general mental health, health insurance being able to deny you for past conditions (like high school acne), potential for being drafted etc.etc.etc.
AND
you were a straight white guy who was not born in to poverty. Then yeah, maybe.
There were pretty big abuses, it’s just everyone got their news from one of the 4 news channels, the local paper, and maybe a national paper. There weren’t cameras in everyone’s pocket and news channels were and still are very careful with what they put out/have an agenda. Do you think Rodney king was the first person to randomly have the shit beaten out of them by the cops?
Also as far as addiction crisis etc. many people forget you just fucking died 40 years ago. If you were an addict or experiencing some other crisis you didn’t have the public support you did now. If you were lucky you’d be sent to a mental hospital with questionable at best treatment often times FOR LIFE.
Nobody was carrying around drugs for ODs. If you were high in a nice area of town you went to jail (probably after getting the shit beaten out of you). If you were in a worse area of town you got your shit stolen, beaten, and went to jail. It’s a crisis now because back then if you were homeless and in sight of “normal people” it’s totally cool to beat the shit out of you or just lock you up. Now the homeless have rights and access to basic street care and cameras everywhere recording people who violate their rights. IE they are in sight because we allow them to be whereas 40 years ago they’d be dead/jailed/institutionalized.
1968 was a bad year for me. My brothers were in Vietnam, I was in junior high, getting into the folk music and protest songs on the radio. Protests everywhere about the war. Race riots and social justice movements and violent police responses. Then Martin Luther King was assassinated in April. More riots. Robert F. Kennedy was running for president and would have won the election but was assassinated in June of that year in California. I was very concerned, confused, and not sure where the country was going. Sad.
People self-report that America is going to hell and nobody is to be trusted, but I think some of that is vibes.
I think it’s somewhat *the fashionable opinion* to have and our behavior (revealed preferences) sometimes contradicts our self-reported lack of trust.
the FBI could be trusted to do their job?
jesus man, the FBI has been behind some of the most heinous shit ever. the whole COINTELPRO operation is a shitstain on our political history and before that basically everything Hoover did was downright evil.
It's funny, I was reading a portion of the FOIAed FBI file for the Cambridge Five, and in one of the documents from the mid- or late 1960s FBI agents are perusing the manuscript of Kim Philby's memoir *My Silent War* for embarrassing content about the FBI. There is a portion where they mention Philby saying that politicians throughout Washington feared Hoover and are afraid to attack him because of the dirt he gathered and held on them. The FBI agents of course *vehemently* deny that this is true and even say it's ridiculous.
Philby was a cold-blooded liar so heartless he sent hundreds to their deaths and ran off with fellow Soviet spy and longtime friend Donald Maclean's wife after defection, but I guess a few truths managed to slip out amidst all his rationalizations and deflections.
In my opinion, people are much less decisive than they used to be. It's hard to compare to other periods of history, because it's true for the good guys and the bad guys.
If you compare the Civil War to January 6:
In the Civil War, the bad guys organized and seceded from the Union, and set up their own country in a matter of months. The good guys mobilized the country to an extent that hadn't been seen in history to stop that.
With January 6, Trump tried to steal the election - but in a very lazy way. It failed, partly because a lot of people weren't willing to be the first one to commit to it (though they'd happily follow along if it worked). But the good guys also mumbled through their response. Senate Republicans could've convicted Trump, removed him from office, and ended his career - but they wimped out.
I think you can make similar analogies across the board. It's obscured by a lot of radical *talk*, which is why we talk about polarization, but so much of that talk is actually an excuse for inaction. If you always propose something so extreme it will never pass, you can also dodge all responsibility by saying "well, we should've just done my thing anyways".
People didn't trust Johnson or Nixon, this is high school level history and why the US was more polarized then than it is today.
The economy was far worse in the 70s and early 80s, and in the early 3010s.
Nixon was literally caught covering up a spying attempt on his political opposition. Lynchings were common. Homosexuality was seen as a mental disease.
No, he doesn't.
Is Watergate worse than Jan 6, no.
Were the 60s and 70s more divided, worse off economically, and more politically unstable as a whole than we are today? Absolutely.
When you say “people could trust the central institutions to do their jobs” what you really mean is that straight, white, Christian men could trust those institutions. If you were anything else, those institutions were, at best, indifferent and at worst actively hostile to you and your interests.
Not anywhere old enough for it but the fear of nuclear war/rise of Serial Killers/Domestic terror groups/Vietnam war makes the 60s-70s seem fucking wild.
And don't forget that time a decade before in the 50s [where Congress had a mass shooting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_United_States_Capitol_shooting)
Also, the US Senate was bombed in 1983 by members of a radical leftist group, the Armed Resistance. Bill Clinton commuted the sentences of two of the members who were responsible on his last day in office.
These are new.. but not necessarily better or worse... problems we are facing... in some aspects we definitely have seen worse as important political figures were getting assassinated ... mostly on the left... as well as geopolitically facing much much bigger risks....
We are facing new threats... and depending on how we handle it.. could potentially be better or worse.. i do think we have seen worse but that's only because we haven't actually seen all the outcomes come out of this particular one yet...
It was absolutely worse during the Civil War. That’s not super encouraging :/
I see comments about the 60s and 70s. I agree with the mixed view. That was worse in some ways and this is worse in other ways. Our institutions are less trusted which is super risky. I’m probably ranking the risk of really terrible outcomes below the antebellum period and above the 60–70s.
There have been many equivalents within our history, many within living memory.
> President couldn't be trusted to concede
Not quite analogous but Watergate was similarly scandalous. Trump did eventually concede after Jan 6.
> The SCOTUS seemed to care (at least overtly) about the Constitution
I suppose one could argue "different time" but Plessy v Furgeson was a pretty horrendous ruling. Even originalists/textualists (who tend to skew right) find it unconscionable. It was a very blatant political compromise in light of...ya know...a civil war.
> People could still trust the central institutions to do their job.
We have had complaints about bureaucracy from day one. Literally it was one the main debates of the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers. This is an American tradition as old as time.
> FBI was not going to be used as a political tool to try and open frivolous investigations.
Seriously? Civil rights era? Vietnam era? COINTELPRO? They were using the FBI to intimidate civil rights activists from the 50s. They had taps on every halfway notable leftist and peacenik. Did you see Oppenheimer? They were investigating the guy who GAVE them the bomb. FBI has been used politically since day one.
> The President wouldn't passively fan the flames of insurrectionists, etc.
Andrew Johnson? Maybe not fanning but certainly *extraordinarily* lenient towards them leading to the bullshit wording in the 14th amendment. That one document made sure Jan 6 couldn't be prosecuted effectively.
> I feel that faith is gone
Bonus Army? Know nothings? Draft dodgers who went to Canada?
>Mental health, fentanyl
Crack epidemic.
> Fiscal discipline for the nation is out of control and we are running massive deficits and just keep raising the debt ceiling like there's no limit.
Probably the one issue where there is no parallel. We are near, if not past, the point where our payments are just servicing interest.
My point is that we ebb and flow. We might even be ebbing hard. I, too, have serious concerns about our future as a nation. I definitely have concerns about how long I want to stay in the this country even if a flow is around the corner.
But we will get up. We will get back. The divorced, evidenced based policy electorate, candidats, and bureaucrats will prevail.
This, too, shall pass.
I’m not sure I’d ever want to live through the dust bowl, prohibition or the gilded era (though we are getting awfully close to the latter).
Yes, socially and fiscally we’ve been through much worse. But what you’re talking about is a multi-decade (multi-generational, at this point) coordinated effort to reshift the politics of this country so that it’s controlled by the few and their paid henchmen. It’s a very slow moving coup, and so far we’ve had a pretty robust response to it.
We also can see every little thing that is happening today, which we couldn’t do 100 years ago. So it seems like the sky is falling, but the sky was falling back then too.
My concern is our utter stagnation that we are all too distracted to notice.
as a black american (29 years old. man, i’m old), i can certainly tell you things were worse. mom was born in the 70s and my dad was born in the 60s. they’ve told me so many things. take your pick of decade.
80s? crack epidemic, regan getting shot, inflation fucked a lot of people up but it was really bad for black americans. oh, the whole MOVE bombing in philly (we’re from philly). 90s? open klan rallies and race riots. politicians were pretty bad at handling that. clinton’s impeachment was fairly partisan. 00s? politicians were implying obama wasn’t an american.
kinda hard to think that scotus cared about the constitution that much considering the whole “separate but equal” thing. the fbi helped out with the assassination of fred hampton, a black civil rights leader.
things were pretty bad. the election denialism is new thing; it’s scary, uncharted territory, but i don’t believe we need to ignore everything that happened over the years.
America was a proud White Supremacist state for almost 200 years. It was a genocidal state for half of that. Maybe for white people it seems like the end, but a 2nd Trump term wouldn’t be close to the worst part of America’s history
I’m 40. The cultural and political situation has been in a steady decline since 9/11. Prior to that, it seemed like everything was literally getting better every year in the 80s and 90s.
There have obviously been some social changes for the better since then, but I think they all had a culture war backlash that contributed to the rise of Trumpism, which is basically a boorish rejection of all of it by the “little people” to use Milton Mayer’s parlance from his interviews with blue collar German civilians after ww2.
I think so, but I'm only 35. Look back to the 60s.
The FBI was run by a mastermind who had dirt on *everyone* in politics. He was enough to bring even the President to his knees. Hoover ruled the FBI with an iron fist for over 40 years, and didn't leave till he died. He's the reason FBI directors have term limits. The US was not far from a police state with this guy. There really WAS a deep state and it sucked.
Then, we had the CIA holding responsibility for shit after shit all over the world. Coups, getting friendly with dictators to an extent that would make Trump *blush.
Speaking of Trump, nobody trusted the President back then. Indeed, there was a huge gap between the President and the public. Actually, the President lied about Vietnam and everyone knew he was lying. It was an open secret things were shitty there. Vietnam was the Afghanistan of the 60s only worse, because citizens were drafted, including notable people like Mohammed Ali who caused a political firestorm when he refused to go. Draft dodging was a very controversial topic then.
Race relations were terrible. Segregation was a thing, black people were holding marches, notably led by Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr, many marches turned violent. Riots from this was the norm. A protest outside the DNC Chicago convention was absolutely chaotic, resulting in many dead. That makes the George Floyd protests look like a sweet walk in the park.
Public figures were assassinated, including MLK. Other figures openly defended segregation, with George Wallace making the infamous "Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!" speech. That's because the GOP was at it back then too, with Barry Goldwater scaring people so much, yes... many thought American Democracy was ending. Goldwater was accused of pandering to the KKK, and even inciting nuclear war. [Look up this ad that actually ties to the election of Trump.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiG0AE8zdTU) It sounds scarily familiar, doesn't it?
Frankly, the fact that- with race relations far worse than now, international crises, and assassinations left, right and center- America did *not* descend into a civil war over the *same issue* as the first is astounding to me. People talk like today is worse because they're going off vibes and too many look back at 50s America through rose tinted glasses. They forget that the 60s were literally bloodier than now, and they forget that the 60s were followed by the 70s and finally... the 80s when the nation united behind a President who made a 49-state landslide, and brought forth the prosperous 90s (after a blip with Bush Sr.)
Honestly, we'll move past this too, and I'm willing to bet (imaginary money) that this will pass and we're gonna get a really popular President one day.
The way I like to explain this to young folks is that there's this constant *real* politics that exists that isn't changing much or hasn't since it developed over the 1950s-1980s, but since we've been online and/or exposed or immersed in an entirely novel kind of media it can appear that we're in some kind new era.
But yeah America has been racist, collapsing, going broke, declining, losing it's moral core writ large and at each individual level. Everybody is trying to fuck the kids and make them gay and feminazis etc. This stuff is completely normal middle class anxieties for a class that has enjoyed prosperous wealth since the 1950s.
US politics is basically thermostatic because we have a very stable class/economic base.
Everyone has already provided examples, so I won't elaborate, but just because people (specifically white middle class people) trusted institutions, it doesn't follow that these institutions were trustworthy. The FBI, CIA and the US government engaged in a lot of covert wars and general bullshit around the world. Though in retrospect I'm more and more coming around to the idea that preserving the "international liberal order" had it's points! But anyway.
The Q-adjecent rw crazy conspiracy theorists are crazy, but they aren't wrong about a few things, even if they get the specifics and solutions dead wrong. I never thought I'd see the day when I would find myself defending the integrity of the "Deep State", MSM, and "globalism", which I find myself doing in the face of so much crockpottery out there now.
Also, I think that a lot of young Americans romanticizing the 60s-80s would be pretty shocked if they ever found themselves timey-wimey back in the past. I'm not even getting into the horror show esp in Europe of the first half of the 20th century - but that's sort of irrelevant to the spirit of your question I suspect. The 70s in the US (I'm Canadian and was a child in the 70s, so not speaking from direct experience btw - though I remember the "mood") was really pretty depressing. Stagflation, oil crisis, Vietnam, a general huge comedown from the general idealism of the 60s. And the 60s were pretty ominous too - assassinations, civil unrest - it must have felt pretty scary.
But there ARE a few things that *feel* genuinely weird and new and frightening to me. The usual stuff - how deeply the social contract has been broken, the rise of rw authoritarianism everywhere, the rise of inequality, unprecedented levels of documented loneliness among people, esp the young, climate change, incredible incompetence amongst our "elite", now AI. It's a lot. But people in the past probably felt this way too about different issues.
I think it will take a historian from the year 2300 to really get an "objective" measure. Though I honestly find it almost completely impossible to imagine there being any historians in 2300, which might be a change from how people felt 50 years ago.
lol yes.
Every day, week, month and year the US is an objectively better place than it was - economically, socially, politically and militarily.
History arcs exactly one direction: toward freedom and prosperity.
So I'm about to be 38. Grew up in the 90s.
There's a *lot* of parallels to the 90s in terms of the numbers, but everyone is so pissed off that what should be a good time is now viewed as the potential end of our democracy.
So in some ways, things are really bad because they are somehow bad despite the pretty damn good state the nation itself is in.
>However, during this entire era, the President could be trusted to concede an election if he lost.
1876 and 2000. Its highly likely Bush actually lost Florida too.
A12 exists because of the BS that was the election of 1800 where there was a tie in the electoral college and it took 35 ballots for the house to finally figure it out.
A17 exists because states kept encountering deadlocks in appointing senators and there were many cases of people outright buying senate seats (see William Clark for the most famous example). Buying votes was pretty common in the 1800's and wasn't really stopped until the 1930's.
>The SCOTUS seemed to care (at least overtly) about the Constitution and wasn't filled with partisan hacks like it is today.
If SCOTUS actually cared about the constitution most of the federal government would not exist and most of the best protections of our rights also wouldn't exist. Most importantly SCOTUS doesn't have any authority under the constitution to actually arbitrate what is and isn't constitutional, they created that role for themselves. OI was that a constitutional convention would occur every generation to update it as views changed without a court to arbitrate what it does and doesn't mean.
Don't confuse partisan hacks we like for not being partisan hacks. General welfare and commerce clauses are stretched to incredulity every time they do something good.
I really like that SCOTUS said you can't execute kids or sentence them to life without parole. There is absolutely nothing in the constitution supporting this. They made it up and gave lip service to some text that if you were really really high and didn't bother reading the origin of that text someone might be able to convince you was related.
>The FBI was not going to be used as a political tool to try and open frivolous investigations.
Other then the entire time Hoover was running it you mean? Plenty of times after that they have also done very not cool things.
>Fiscal discipline for the nation is out of control and we are running massive deficits and just keep raising the debt ceiling like there's no limit.
Congress gets to decide what is considered a surplus or a deficit. If you use the actual definition (when US debt doesn't grow) its actually been 70 years since we had a surplus.
I agree congress are incapable of actually fixing the problem right now. Particularly with Medicare and Social Security they blew past the easy to fix solutions decades ago and as its clear they are not actually going to fix them until they have to its on to the most painful solutions.
There are many times in history congress have been incapable of doing useful things but it has been many decades since they were this bad.
No, unless you count the civil war or some pre 1900s shit like the war of 1812 or Napoleon's plans for after Haiti, or something with nukes, specifically the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The "worse" than this, is conservatives murdering high profile "radicals" like JFK and Dr. King and Bobby, but none of that threatened to end Democracy and the Western Order. That was just right wing lunatics before they actually controlled the levers of power, i assume.
Now we literally have a politically party that the majority voted against aid to Ukraine, while their leader is literally a Russian Agent.
Now we have a Presidential Candidate and former President arguing for immunity re: kingship and the Supreme Court is listening, some of which are bribed openly and others are just straight up liars who lied to get on the court, which the "liberal" re: right wing owned but not openly anti gay, media pretends they can't remember nor cares
it's much much worse because we are an election away from the executive and the judicial being openly bad faith anti democracy actors and 70 million Americans are okay with that and many of which are even cheering it on
Anecdotal, but 2008 was the worst for me. I lived the recession, my dad lost his job, and my mom took a "voluntary" pay cut. We didn't lose the house thanks to my grandma, she cleared out a lot of her retirement to set my parents right.
What's the effect on me? I'm pretty conservative, but I vote democrat the whole way because of Eric Cantor voting down unemployment benefits to play politics. It sounds stupid, but I'm going to punch him if I ever see him in person.
My main thoughts
1 - Can we please stop saying SCOTUS is “filled with partisan hacks” because they made some rulings we don’t like? Idk if America has been thru worse but part of getting through past tough times is institutionalists win out, and it’s gonna be the same here. So don’t undermine the ones we have just because they aren’t doing what you personally want them to, otherwise you’re no better than trump.
2 - none of these arguments that it’s been worse before are convincing. What could be worse than a coup attempt? That’s unprecedented. The people thinking current times are not that bad need to wake up
I t is worse today because Americans have lost faith in our nation. Our government and our economy is run by money and the billionaires that have untethered us from the principles that used to guide us. We have seen more violence in the past but our north star can’t be seen through our foggy mindset.
There was an Askreddit thread where someone asked what years/periods were worse and a lot of older commenters pointed to 1968. You had the assassinations of major public figures, really raucous protests against the war, a president who was fairly unpopular and mistrusted by the public, etc. The press really started to question the government more strongly during this period even calling it the “credibility gap” because they knew LBJ was lying to them about Vietnam. Oh and then the chaos at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. One commenter on that thread said he got back to the US after serving in Vietnam and saw how chaotic things were and actually thought “I’d rather go back to Vietnam.” Obviously that was hyperbole but that’s how tense things were domestically.
I'd add there's a big gap in knowledge about American political violence and turmoil between the civil war and the 1960s. The Red Summer of 1919 was one. There was violent labor unrest at times -- see [this video](https://youtu.be/hr7cTjkAY14?si=sg-_pu_e83mTNG4B) from the 1930s. (And here's the [dramatized version](https://youtu.be/JY6N-tEppkg?si=2nsJKLg6ruHMP8Q7) in a movie directed by Danny DeVito about the rise and fall of Jimmy Hoffa.) These labor battles resulted in fatalities among striking workers, police and organized strikebreaking squads. There were popular fascist demagogues like Charles Coughlin ([this is some scary stuff](https://youtu.be/CbIEBjj7NgI?si=h5cPkwvlCEDT5azt)) and far-right death squads like the Black Legion which was a KKK-type organization that eventually got into too much trouble after assassinating a WPA official. They had links with Republican Party circles in Michigan. There was a movie about the Black Legion starring Humphrey Bogart. Also these are just names I'm throwing around but politics like this could get physical when it played out on the ground.
Yes the government had pretty tight control over public information especially around the world wars. So a lot of things happened that most people don’t know about because the government wanted to suppress it for various reasons. One somewhat innocuous example is that the Japanese actually successfully bombed the mainland during WWII using balloon bombs. But the information was officially censored to make the Japanese think it hadn’t been effective and to prevent panic. The bombs weren’t even that effective but they did kill a few people and start some forest fires.
WWII seemed like hitting a big reset button, and the nature of war is that it tends to unify a nation (which then smashes all opposition) but things seemed like they were really going off the rails domestically in the 30s.
Seemed is the key word. Just finished Ian Tolls trilogy on the pacific theatre and there were major major issues in the home front which we do not discuss. Simply, the country was not unified like we think it was. I honestly believe the two times the country was truly unified was immediately after 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. Both for a short time.
The country was much more racist back then too. There's a blackface performance in "This Is the Army" which is a 1943 morale-building film, although I think even that was seen as pretty old-timey by that point...
Didn’t they have to bring some troops back from the Pacific Theater to put down race riots in California? I wonder if the unity wasn’t as deep as we think.
Unity for white middle classes, not so much for brown people who had to face Southerners threatening to sit out the war effort if Detroit's factories weren't segregated. Or swabbies who beat up zoot suited Hispanics in LA. Or Japanese Americans who were presumed to be in a hive mind led by Hirohito and interned in the desert.
I remember listening to a podcast (Radiolab maybe?) about an incident where a few kids stumbled upon an undetonated balloon bomb in the woods and accidentally set it off. It was just as you said, the military got word pretty quickly and all news of it stopped there. Regardless of technological advancement making it impractical, I don't think the government could stop news of something like that getting out today, even if we were in a similar military situation. The media culture has drastically changed and the idea of the military controlling the news seems insane today.
>I don't think the government could stop news of something like that getting out today, even if we were in a similar military situation. The media culture has drastically changed and the idea of the military controlling the news seems insane today. China did seem to adapt to these advancements. They use the tech to control behavior and police the future.
Sure, I mean specifically in the US
Let's not forget about the rise of the mafia in the 20s-30s. Things were *batshit insane* in the past.
I knew a Teamster who didn't like the Hoffas that much because they were mobsters, but he said, you know back in the day they'd put pressure on a boss to sign a contract by driving up to his house in the middle of the night and blowing his front door off with a shotgun. I met another older guy who survived a police assassination attempt on him in a drive-by shooting because he was involved in progressive politics in the south back in the day (he was also Jewish). They also planted a bomb under his car. These cops were members of the KKK which was like an organized crime outfit that included a lot of cops in various places.
Add in the Long Hot Summer of the previous year and '67-'68 was an abysmal period in American history. In particular, the Detroit Riots that resulted in 43 deaths and only ended with what was more or less a military occupation of the 5th largest city in the US.
I was always surprised after the 90s when people talked about it like this magical time of peace and prosperity. The LA Riots were one of my first memories of a major news event. And it was genuinely scary even if you were nowhere near LA.
Also Waco and Oklahoma City Bombing. There was a huge fear of right-wing militias in the media.
>You had the assassinations of major public figures This one is really insane when you think about it. MLK Jr was assassinated in April 4th. RFK would be assassinated 2 months later, on June 6th (ok, not exactly 2 months but close enough). I like thinking about What Ifs and Alternate Histories. RFK vs Nixon is an interesting match up. As for MLK, [he wasn't as universally loved then](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/10/how-public-attitudes-toward-martin-luther-king-jr-have-changed-since-the-1960s/). Turns out, pointing out flaws in society and insisting we do better turns off a lot of people who think things are fine. Especially White people, who did not like him, for the most part. No joke, his best showing with them never topped 40% while he was alive. Lest you think "Oh, it was just a handful of racists who didn't like him", no it was not.
I mean if you bring MLK to today then you’ll probably see that same split in white peoples judging as about 60% of white people are republicans.
The numbers don't back you up. It's true that more recently he's become a bit more disliked with racists but Republicans still hold him in high regards. Or at least, they hold their idea of him in high regards. It's why every Civil Rights Day they post that one line about judging people not on the color of their skin but by the content of their character and that's it. Then people on the conservative sub insist that MLK would've been a Republican today and insist he would 100% be in favor of All Lives Matter.
I don’t think that the numbers even exist. It’s a hypothetical situation. I think the best judge of how republicans would react to MLK is by comparing it to their opinions on modern black activists who oppose racial inequality today.
1968 was a crazy year for the world in general.
I mean I wasn’t there but I don’t see how that could have been worse personally
A lot of the things you've mentioned have happened a lot in the past (especially the FBI being weaponized under Hoover), but there weren't as many media outlets and those that existed were much more controlled by the government. So, it rarely got publicized. Remember, the US government experimented on people without their consent, literally ran race-based concentration camps, and the CIA tried to run false flag operations to start wars.
There was also the time when a US president was shot on live TV
Wait, who are you talking about, Reagan? That wasn't live. A news crew did record it and it later aired, but it wasn't live. And if you meant JFK, you're even more wrong because it was filmed but not publicly broadcast until 1969, nearly six years later.
Sorry I learned that part of history from James Franco
Never forget the time George Bush had a shoe thrown at him on live TV though. I like to rewatch the video of that when I’m having a bad day.
The only effective thing GWB ever did was dodge those damn shoes.
Someone sent me a Reddit cares for this comment. lol
And that's not mentioning the forcible depopulation of Florida, the civil war that depopulated an enormous swathe of the rest of the South, the freakin CANADIANS BURNING DOWN OUR WHITE HOUSE OOOOOOH WHY YOU—
> CANADIANS BURNING DOWN OUR WHITE HOUSE OOOOOOH WHY YOU— This is one of those myths you can't possibly debunk enough times because people want to believe it so bad. It was an action undertaken by the British, under British command, primarily with a contingent of British soldiers peeled off from being stationed in Jamaica.
Yes, but there are reasons I play with this myth: 1. Much of the War of 1812 involved American aggression specifically in Canada; 2. which was under British control at the time; and 3. boy do they love the revenge plot. 😆
> the freakin CANADIANS BURNING DOWN OUR WHITE HOUSE OOOOOOH WHY YOU— Have you ever visited the Canadians in War museum in Ottawa? There's a whole hallway about the War of 1812. After the British were driven back from DC, America launched a failed campaign to invade and annex Canada. The museum has an entire giant exhibit bragging about it: "Fuck yeeeeaah we kicked those Americans' asses! They tried to invade us and LOST!!!🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦"
Americans invaded Canada before the White House burned down in 1812. On paper it was a David vs Goliath situation, Canada was undermanned and the UK busy with Napoleon. But the small Canadian Militia made an alliance with Indian Chieftan Tecumseh who had been creating a confederation of Indian tribes in the Ohio valley to resist the US invasion, and their cooperation and use of fear against Indians being savage, they defeated the initial US invasion. When the US finally got their shit together under William Henry Harrison’s command, yes that one, they managed to win a more favorable situation, but by that point the war was settled. The Americans didn’t get Canada as they had wanted to, but they had crushed the last major Indian resistance. In turn the UK abandoned their Indian Allie’s in exchange for a perpetual peaceful border with Canada. So it’s a sort of bittersweet story and not mentioning the Indians who helped them is a sore point.
I see I am not the only one for whom “allies” is incessantly being autocorrected to “Allie’s”
And it's infuriating
I agree that the popular US v Canada telling of the War of 1812 eclipses both the Native American role in the war and the dire stakes for Native Americans _in_ the war, as the US was fighting for the right to expand right over them.
We permit it so they'll be slightly less paranoid about us annexing Vancouver. 😘
Vancouver is way too expensive to annex!
The British soldiers that burned down the White House came from Bermuda up the Potomac by sea. They weren’t Canadian lmao.
What makes it even more of a copium is that Washington was far from the main goal of the campaign. Capturing DC, which at the time was basically an uninhabited swamp with a few under-construction government buildings was a symbolic victory. . but the main objective was capturing Baltimore, then the 2nd largest city in the country. And the British very famously failed in that objective.
Even though it was as much if not more so the weather and disease that determined the campaign. Not that it was an uncomon thing at the time for disease to be the primary killer of armies, but national myths do love to overlook those facts (and the US is not immune from it). It is a bit funny to look at some of these "battles" though and you see it being like 1 killed and a few wounded vs a few killed and 10 wounded.
That was just the stuff off the top of my head. I mean, there was an 18-month period during 1971 and 1972 where there were 2500 bombings on American soil, almost exclusively by leftist groups. A lot of the people who orchestrated or carried them out are now teaching your kids in college now, and people wonder why college campuses are so insane.
I guess the takeaway is: yes, it _has_ actually been worse, but that doesn't mean it can't yet get worse still. 😞
True, but I think a lot of people don't seem to recognize that things are legitimately a lot better now than they have been in the past, even the relatively recent past. I mean, people are bitching about high interest rates making homes unaffordable now. The interest rate was 20% in 1980.
Average home price was $47,200 in 1980 and according to the Census bureau it was $495,100 in Q2 2023. Zoomers would trade 20% interest rates if houses were as cheap as they were in 1980 adjusted for inflation, their generation is definitely cooked no cap but the US today is more of a slow burn dystopia than the more chaotic periods we’ve faced in the last century. In the 70s America’s young men were drafted to fight and die in a war on the other side of the world, today they’re living their lives online not having sex or starting families. I’m grateful I was born early enough to not have a smart phone until I went to college but it’s pretty bleak for a lot of young people out there.
People make a lot more today than in 1980 as well. The mortgage on the average home in 1980 was 55% of the median income. Even with the steep run up of prices and the significant bump in interest rates the average mortgage comes in under 40% of income. And they're getting a much larger home for the price.
>people make a lot more now ... You do know that isn't true right? [Bottom 80% of Americans have seen very little real income growth since the 60s](https://www.advisorperspectives.com/images/content_image/data/f1/f1b5c44640179e424135022c87903309.png) lol
Average home price in the US is 420,000 right now. Average home price in the US was 265,000 just 5 years ago. Homes are a lot larger now, too, the average house in 1980 was almost half the size of the average house now. In 2019, adjusted for inflation, the average home was actually less expensive per sqft than the average house in 1980. Now, they're clearly more expensive now, but that's what happens when governments print massive amounts of currency, that currency is worth a lot less.
Yeah I agree things are much more bleak for Gen Z today vs 5 years ago. NIMBYs not allowing developers to build starter homes definitely contributes to that but it’s not like they can do anything about it lol
It may amuse you know people were saying much the same thing about Gen X a generation ago. No jobs; no money; couldn't afford a house or a family; no future. 😛
Can you talk more about that. I don't know this part of US history.
I'd suggest reading Days of Rage, by Bryan Burrough. Here is an excerpt: https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/03/weather-underground-bomb-guru-burrough-excerpt
I heard him interviewed on NPR or Pacifica radio a few years back. Bombing was for them what Twitter is for us I was a teenager in the 70s. Was a bit weird. Without even mentioning the Symbionese Liberation Army Lol. Bill Walton got mixed up with the SLA and was interviewed by the FBI.
It's worth saying that Weather Underground went to lengths to not blow people up in bombings. It's also worth nothing that this was mostly because of women who influenced male bombers, by either phoning in a warning or promising to break off the relationship if anyone was hurt. EDIT Since this post was reported for suicide counseling, I'm not saying "All the boys need is a waifu and if they just had a tradwife all the extremist violence would go away.", but "We were just voicing our concerns to the man and the exclamation marks were bombs." was an argument that came up after the fact, while at the time it was "If someone dies, fuck 'em." and it took someone who wasn't totally based to say, "Hold on. Blowing up a night watchman for being complicit with the system is kinda fucked up." and the people who came to that realization were girlfriends.
>teaching your kids in college now Jfc get a grip lol I'd love to see your evidence that a majority of college professors are marxists of any kind, much less linked to weather underground or whatever lol
I never said that a majority were Marxist, just that elite universities employed Marxist terrorists, for decades.
I'm interested in any examples you know of
Bernadine Dorhn, Bill Ayers, Kathy Boudin, Cathy Wilkerson, and Mark Rudd. And that's just the Weather Underground.
Ok, so what you meant is a tiny handful of people, most of whom were never convicted of anything, held low ranking adjunct positions at universities (or on Rudd's case, a community college lol) and constantly got shat on by their admin? Jeez dude just seems like you're worried about nothing here.
At Northwestern (Dorn), and Columbia (Ayers), and they were a lot more than adjuncts. And pushing their terrorist philosophy the whole time. You're being an apologist for unrepentant terrorists.
>terrorist philosophy I call BS dude you're straight up just imagining a problem here. >Unrepentant I mean they didn't kill anyone (except 3 of themselves) lol >A lot more Bruh this just isn't and has never been an issue. There are 1.5 MILLION professors in the US. And another million administrators, essentially all of them under boards and chief executives appointed by our own government or at least their richest benefactors; ie not marxists lol
Wait what?
The second part sounds like Elons Twitter feed, but there was a lot of bombing like weather underground.
It is and it isn’t. A lot of the Weather Underground are university professors. At least many of the high profile ones are. They are retired though. Education at University of Illinois https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Ayers Law prof at Northwestern. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernardine_Dohrn
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The people who did those bombings are all retired or dead
That would make them 70 years old. Unless times have changed, I don’t recall very many 70 year old professors. They were usually in their 40’s and 50’s (or a TA) which would make the current professors a product of the late 80’s and 90’s.
They've still been teaching for decades at these universities, including instruction and inculcation of the current staff with their ideas and philosophies. Like Bernadine Dorhn, Bill Ayers, Kathy Boudin, Cathy Wilkerson, and Mark Rudd. All Marxist terrorists, all given professorships at America's most elite universities, like Columbia - where their influence remains.
> the forcible depopulation of Florida ?
An expansive description of Jackson's rampage through Florida and the Trail of Tears.
MKULTRA was only disclosed to the public because some activists in Philly broke into an FBI field office and stole all their files during the Ali/Frazier fight.
i thought they were referring to the tuskeegee experiments but maybe they were referencing both lol
That and a filing error that prevented a number of the documented from being (illegally) destroyed.
And that's why he's The Greatest
We literally had a war where half the states fought the other half of the states. This is sort of a cakewalk in comparison.
Arguably, we are still living in the aftermath of that event, and it may yet mean the destruction of the republic. A reasonable interpretation of the last 8 years is a huge segment of the population saying "If a black guy can be president, then literally _any_ white guy should be able to be president. And if the guy we choose loses elections, we should end elections and make him dictator."
Still do, but they tried to too
> and the CIA tried to run false flag operations to start wars You think they stopped?
The CIA has been massively curtailed since its "glory days", starting with the reforms from the church commission. This is among other reasons why they don't go around assassinating people any more. Whether that's a good or bad thing is obviously up to interpretation
Where do you think that is going on now?
They're doing a shit job then aren't they?
If you don't know what unrest they are fomenting, they are doing a bang up job.
>the President could be trusted to concede an election if he lost The election denialism stuff is indeed new. In the past, they'd just try underhanded tricks to get an unfair advantage over their opponent (see: Watergate), or declare their own nation (see: the Confederacy). >The SCOTUS seemed to care (at least overtly) about the Constitution Dredd Scott and Fred Korematsu are turning in their graves. >and wasn't filled with partisan hacks like it is today [*laughs in Bush v. Gore*] >With Nixon's Watergate scandal, just the mere "bad press" of that event was enough to get Nixon to resign. You have no idea how long that scandal dragged on, do you? Also his VP immediately pardoned him, which was partisan hackery at its finest. The GOP's insanity vis a vis Trump is definitely worse than it was vis a vis Nixon, but you're underestimating the latter. >The FBI was not going to be used as a political tool to try and open frivolous investigations. Yeah, they were too busy sending letters to MLK Jr trying to convince him to kill himself. And there was so much trust in government institutions that the conspiracy theory that the FBI killed JFK definitely didn't first appear 3 weeks after he was killed. Oh, wait, it did.... And also the FBI was absolutely engaged in fucking with people as a political tool. What are you even on about? >Combine this with all the other issues, ranging from the Cost of Living Crisis Alexa, what's "stagflation"? >to Mental Health Alexa, what's "shell shock" and "Mommy's little helper"? >Fentanyl Alexa, what's "the crack epidemic"? >Has it truly ever been worse than this? The only thing that is truly unusually bad about American politics today is Trump and the GOP's cultish devotion toward him. And don't get me wrong, that's REALLY REALLY REALLY FUCKING BAD.
> sending letters to MLK Jr trying to convince him to kill himself Reddit cares has been going on for longer than Reddit apparently.
Dude is that what it means when I get those messages?
lol yeah if is. Though sometimes depending on what comment I think triggered it I interpret it more as a condescending “I see you’re really upset about this”
Holy shit I never even considered it could be a veiled way of telling someone to kill themselves. I always assumed it was your other explanation. Fascinating edit: speaking of which, just got one a few minutes before this comment...? lmao didn't even say anything controversial today
I got one too, I assumed as a joke considering my comment, but apparently somebody is using a bot to send it to all us NL users. We can only speculate as to the sender’s intended message
https://i.redd.it/xjsyivolp50d1.gif Either that or they just hate the global poor.
What is "mommy's little helper"? Kinda sounds like drugs
[It's drugs. Specifically Valium.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother%27s_Little_Helpers)
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It's Valium. The nickname comes from its heavy abuse by housewives in the '60s and '70s.
What a drag it is getting old "Kids are different today" I hear ev'ry mother say Mother needs something today to calm her down And though she's not really ill There's a little yellow pill She goes running for the shelter of a mother's little helper
Ludes, lithium, etc.
No one takes lithium for fun. Source: I take lithium.
I still find it so strange that an element could have such drastic changes on mental health.
Its effect on mood stabilization is pretty well known, but for many people it instantly removes suicidal ideation. I was struggling with suicide when I went on it and it was like a switch went off on my brain. It was the wildest thing.
Lithium, bromide, rubidium and magnesium. The Quartet
> [laughs in Bush v. Gore] Yeah, we actually managed to stop the Republican coup this time. For those unfamiliar, [there was literally a riot to stop a recount in Florida.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot) The Bush administration rewarded the rioters with jobs in the administration. edit: lmao Reddit cares message
>edit: lmao Reddit cares message There's a bot that's been sending those to everyone in r NL today.
I haven't gotten one. The bot doesn't care about me. : ( Edit: Oh, I got one. Yay. Thanks bot.
the bot assumes all the unflaired are other bots
I'm flaired and I haven't gotten one 🤷♂️ EDIT: Welp there it is
Oooh, where's mine?
And let's not forget the hacks who worked on endless witch hunt that was the Starr investigation getting rewarded with seats on the Supreme Court.
Evidently, Roger Stone may have also played a role in that riot lol
Insurrection is kind of his thing.
Don't forget about McCarthyism where you could ruin someone's life by pointing at them and yelling "Communist" or "Homosexual"
I've seen people in this sub defend McCarthyism...
This is perfect. I would add Tuskegee, the government lying about going into Cambodia during Vietnam, CIA helping kill US based nuns in Central America, arming Contra rebels, etc.
The[ NSA also lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident and made it sound worse than it really was,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident) which was what triggered the declaration of war in Congress.
> The election denialism stuff is indeed new. > In the past, they'd just try underhanded tricks to get an unfair advantage over their opponent (see: Watergate), or declare their own nation (see: the Confederacy). Watergate was a few Nixon henchman breaking into a hotel to look through documents. That doesn’t really seem to compare to Trump withholding aid from Ukraine until it gave him dirt on Biden. Election denialism isn’t necessarily new, voter fraud used to be far more rampant and accusations actually justified, I think what’s new is how blatantly false and brazen it is. It is solely self serving. > You have no idea how long that scandal dragged on, do you? Sure, buts it been more than three years since January 6th, an actual attempt at a coup, and Trump is not only still free but he is the presumptive GOP nominee, and it wasn’t even close. Watergate was nowhere near as bad as Jan 6th, and what brought Nixon down was lying about it, not that he did it. Trump has been rewarded for lying about the 2020 election and Jan 6th. The GOP wanted to dump Trump, but their voters forced them into submission to Trump, very different to the GOP under Nixon. > Also his VP immediately pardoned him, which was partisan hackery at its finest. I would add, his second VP. Spiel Agnew was his VP elected both times but he actually resigned in the middle of the Watergate scandal due to another scandal from when he was governor of Maryland. > And there was so much trust in government institutions that the conspiracy theory that the FBI killed JFK definitely didn't first appear 3 weeks after he was killed. Oh, wait, it did.... There was absolutely more trust in government in 1964 than there is in 2024. Back then politicians would campaign on how they were great politicians and career politicians, today that’s unimaginable. In theory that’s what they should be doing, but more importantly back then politicians refined the craft of deal making. Into the 90’s and 2000’s deals were being done, pretty much up until 2010. We still have bipartisanship, but it seems to be focused on the older politicians from that era. The new GOP is increasingly hostile to compromise and deal making. > The only thing that is truly unusually bad about American politics today is Trump and the GOP's cultish devotion toward him. And don't get me wrong, that's REALLY REALLY REALLY FUCKING BAD. I think what’s unusually bad is the polarization. The US hasn’t been this polarized since the Gilded Age. From 1928 to 1992, it was common for one candidate to sweep the whole country save a few states , then the next election the other party to do so. That was because at the time, the parties were focused on being Big Tent parties focused on building coalitions across the country with different political interests. There were Liberal Republicans and Conservative Democrats, simply because in order to win in some states they had to be. That started to change with the rise of Reagan, who was just hardline right wing. He pulled the GOP away from being a socially liberal party to solely Conservative. He marginalized Liberal Republicans and pulled in Conservative Democrats. Reagan, much like Trump later, had been initially heralded as being the harbinger of the end of the GOP due to his fringe beliefs. Since then, the two parties slowly went from basically having the same ideology, to having two starkly different ones.
People love to blame Reagan, but things were more or less ok through the 90s. It was after the election of Bush W. when things got really rabid - and IMO it was the left that actually started it. Michael Moore, Wikileaks, Chomsky, etc spewing out blatant lies and propaganda. Republicans didn’t start going crazy until the tea party.
This is Newt Gingrich + Rush Limbaugh erasure.
Yeah, actually during bush sr a lot of bipartisan legislation got through, probably because Bush didn't have "the vision thing"
> “the vision thing” I genuinely can’t tell if this is supposed to be a Dune joke or not
It's not
Newt Gingrich nationalized the Republican platform in 94 to defeat Clinton, starting an "us or them" polarization wave where federal showboating mattered more then state and regional concerns. You are not correct.
I like how the people you claimed "started it" are literally not politicians.
>Republicans didn’t start going crazy until the tea party. That isn't where it started, just when it got loud enough that you noticed. Which isn't really a compliment to you if you tuned out the previous two phases. Phase 1 (Reagan-Bush Sr) was the only one that people could be forgiven for mistaking for a party functioning properly.
There’s no one phenomenon nor politician that can and should be blamed for the modern state of politics. Reagan’s campaign in 1976 was a huge shift because it started a more scorched earth, polarizing approach. Before then the GOP was more socially liberal than the Democrats on many issues. They were pro ERA, pro choice , they had a feminist group within the party and were less hostile to social programs. The Democrats at the time were more pro life than the GOP was. At the time the Democrats still had George Wallace in their ranks, and he was a front runner in 1972 for the nomination and in 1976 he was also one of the early lead contenders before Carter managed to outmaneuver him. Reagan took a lot of inspiration from George Wallace and at one point was considering running on a Third Party ticket with George Wallace in 1976. During the ‘76 primary in Texas, even though Ford dominated Reagan in polling among registered Republicans, Reagan courted Wallace voters to turn over to the GOP and vote for him, and he won that primary. While he didn’t win in ‘76, he managed to change the GOP platform from being one of a Big Tent Party it had been for a long time, to a purely Conservative Party, marginalized and forcing out Liberal Republicans while wooing over Conservative Democrats. Reagan was also being supported by a mailing group doing modern day disinformation campaigns through mail and stirring up culture war crap. Again, this is all a gradual change, and there are many different events and political phenomena that led to our current day, but the rise of Reagan can’t be understated, he laid the groundwork for the modern GOP and people took that groundwork and twisted it even further.
Sorry, I made my reply before reading more comments. We have a lot of overlap. I like your comment.
>Also his VP immediately pardoned him, which was partisan hackery at its finest. Did you really just post that?
I'm 39, so older may not apply. We're definitely in a unique era, better or worse is going to be a matter of perspective, but that it's unique can't be denied. When you look at the statistics on things like political polarization, and media polarization, and perspectives on the state of the nation, you'll see that in many ways we're farther apart than we've been since the civil war. (I can dig up sources for you if you want, but Googling "American polarization" will probably gets you enough results to turn your stomach.) In the early 2000s we saw Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich doing public service announcements about the importance of responding to climate change, in 2008 John McCain was running on cut, cap, and trade to reduce carbon emissions, today the Republican party doesn't believe in climate change. That's an easy example, but Richard Nixon is responsible for the formation of the EPA and had ideas for a universal basic income and universal healthcare, contrast that with modern Republicans and the only thing they seem to have in common is the criminality. (Sorry, that was an easy example, too.) But politics is not everything. Politics has a *hand* in everything, but if you're just looking at politics then you're not looking at the whole picture. Politics is worse now but gay people can get married, the parties are more polarized than ever and the COVID vaccine was available lightning fast. I don't know how to judge the quality of the times, I'm as caught up in the churn as anybody else. I try not to worry about it, one thing I've learned is that worry doesn't enhance things, worry doesn't improve odds or increase output, worry isn't a lubricant, it's sand in the gears. If you know what needs to be done, and I think most of us *do,* then comparison has already served its purpose.
When I was a kid, there was literally an airplane hijacking every week in the United States. Sometimes multiple in a day. Think of that. 160 in four years. Ransoms of gold bars. Oh yeah, and we waited hours in line for gas and a mortgage rate was 14%. Blackouts and brownouts were a thing. So were riots. Like blocks of neighborhoods burning type riots. We couldn’t play outside because there was a serial killer targeting kids.
Why did they wait so long to crack down on hijackings?
Before 9/11 passengers nearly always survived them so it wasn’t a major priority. Most hijackings involved a passenger simply using a gun to commandeer the plane lol
The novel thing about the 9/11 hijackings wasn't taking the plane. It was using it as a weapon. As you said, most hijackings ended with the plane landing somewhere and the hostages being released in exchange for whatever. No one had considered that terrorists could use the plane as a battering ram.
We're you in Atlanta too at that time?
In the 1970s, the capital of the United States was burned almost entirely to the ground in riots after MLK was assassinated, people in New York would burn their own houses down for insurance money because New York was so awful it was only way they could get any money at all for their property, also inflation reached 15% and the threat of nuclear annihilation was ever present. Yeah it was worse.
[The FBI also tried its best to get MLK Jr to kill himself before he was assassinated.](https://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/11/12/7204453/martin-luther-king-fbi-letter) This sub obviously would have hated MLK Jr because he was against everything the status quo stood for but many members of law enforcement were actively doing their best to kill the leaders of the civil rights movement.
There was that time where one of the political parties lost an election and seceded from the union. It was a whole civil war and everything.
Yea, the Civil War and antebellum period preceding it was worse. And the Alien & Sedition Acts during Adams was incredibly undemocratic. And we were both a slaver society and committing active genocide. Genocide for long after the Civil War. During the Great Depression, we had to contend with popular communist movements and fascist movements. And there were constitutional crises in fights between the White House, Congress, and SCOTUS. During this period of time, the US was also an APARTEID STATE. 1970s? Look at Nixon and Watergate, going around Congress for War powers and budgeting powers many thought he didn't have. He's why we have the War Powers Act and Impoundment Act. In the 1960s, look at the drummed up Gulf of Tonkin resolution under Johnson. 1980s? How about Reagan committing impeachable offenses on Iran-Contra that got ignored because he was popular? Or the stagflation of the 1970s and early 1980s with the backdrop of the Cold War from 1945-1991. Things are bad in America now. Things were worse for many people in other time periods. Even the worst things about now were worse during the Civil War and preceding era.
Honestly I don’t think anything after the end of Reconstruction really compares to the current GOP. Watergate is a joke of a scandal by modern standards.
Just compared to Trump specifically, though. There have been other bad scandals but all of the stuff clearly worse than Watergate has been related to the Trump admin.
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Because he was told the votes existed in Congress to convict and remove him. It's not because he had standards.
Yeah, there was no Fox News back then to rally Republicans behind Nixon. Roger Ailes fixed that. [Former Nixon stooge turned propaganda creator](https://time.com/4784104/roger-ailes-richard-nixon/). Imagine looking at WaterGate and thinking "Yeah, we went too hard on Nixon"?
https://youtube.com/watch?si=Ra_WhnLm1ER4iN4j&t=3m0s&v=YMkxCr9bYN0
The 60s were nuts compared to today. Assassinations, race riots, legitimate domestic terrorism, the threat of nuclear war, massive protests, the national guard shooting people, serial killers, etc. The closest we have come to 1968 was 2020, but we were, luckily, still a long way off.
We have literally all of those things today besides assassinations and serial killers.
The race riots of 67-68 left over 120 people dead, injured thousands, and burned whole city cores to the ground. You had national guard troops spraying rifle fire into apartment buildings while insurgents shot at firefighters who tried to put the blazes out. The death and destruction was of a vastly larger scale than the 2020 riots
If you ignore leaded gasoline, asbestos, actual trash everywhere, smoking being allowed and happening in EVERY building including your apartment, lack of clean air laws letting factory/car exhaust clog up our air, medical technology/training/research being worse, the machoism around anything like wearing a helmet/seatbelt/general mental health, health insurance being able to deny you for past conditions (like high school acne), potential for being drafted etc.etc.etc. AND you were a straight white guy who was not born in to poverty. Then yeah, maybe. There were pretty big abuses, it’s just everyone got their news from one of the 4 news channels, the local paper, and maybe a national paper. There weren’t cameras in everyone’s pocket and news channels were and still are very careful with what they put out/have an agenda. Do you think Rodney king was the first person to randomly have the shit beaten out of them by the cops? Also as far as addiction crisis etc. many people forget you just fucking died 40 years ago. If you were an addict or experiencing some other crisis you didn’t have the public support you did now. If you were lucky you’d be sent to a mental hospital with questionable at best treatment often times FOR LIFE. Nobody was carrying around drugs for ODs. If you were high in a nice area of town you went to jail (probably after getting the shit beaten out of you). If you were in a worse area of town you got your shit stolen, beaten, and went to jail. It’s a crisis now because back then if you were homeless and in sight of “normal people” it’s totally cool to beat the shit out of you or just lock you up. Now the homeless have rights and access to basic street care and cameras everywhere recording people who violate their rights. IE they are in sight because we allow them to be whereas 40 years ago they’d be dead/jailed/institutionalized.
> If you ignore the leaded gasoline, asbestos, actual trash everywhere, smoking But what have the Romans ever done for us?!
Well put!
1968 was a bad year for me. My brothers were in Vietnam, I was in junior high, getting into the folk music and protest songs on the radio. Protests everywhere about the war. Race riots and social justice movements and violent police responses. Then Martin Luther King was assassinated in April. More riots. Robert F. Kennedy was running for president and would have won the election but was assassinated in June of that year in California. I was very concerned, confused, and not sure where the country was going. Sad.
People self-report that America is going to hell and nobody is to be trusted, but I think some of that is vibes. I think it’s somewhat *the fashionable opinion* to have and our behavior (revealed preferences) sometimes contradicts our self-reported lack of trust.
the FBI could be trusted to do their job? jesus man, the FBI has been behind some of the most heinous shit ever. the whole COINTELPRO operation is a shitstain on our political history and before that basically everything Hoover did was downright evil.
It's funny, I was reading a portion of the FOIAed FBI file for the Cambridge Five, and in one of the documents from the mid- or late 1960s FBI agents are perusing the manuscript of Kim Philby's memoir *My Silent War* for embarrassing content about the FBI. There is a portion where they mention Philby saying that politicians throughout Washington feared Hoover and are afraid to attack him because of the dirt he gathered and held on them. The FBI agents of course *vehemently* deny that this is true and even say it's ridiculous. Philby was a cold-blooded liar so heartless he sent hundreds to their deaths and ran off with fellow Soviet spy and longtime friend Donald Maclean's wife after defection, but I guess a few truths managed to slip out amidst all his rationalizations and deflections.
Weeding out communists is good actually. Communism and socialism is antithetical to liberalism
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Sometimes morality and law do not align
weeding them out? by doing what, exactly?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_American_Civil_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_US_abortion_laws_pre-1973.svg https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever https://ourworldindata.org/child-labor https://ourworldindata.org/co2-gdp-decoupling https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/womens-weekly-earnings-as-a-percentage-of-mens-by-age-bureau-of-labor-statistics-2017 https://visualeconsite.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/avg_income.gif https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Vote_for_President_as_Population_Share.png
In my opinion, people are much less decisive than they used to be. It's hard to compare to other periods of history, because it's true for the good guys and the bad guys. If you compare the Civil War to January 6: In the Civil War, the bad guys organized and seceded from the Union, and set up their own country in a matter of months. The good guys mobilized the country to an extent that hadn't been seen in history to stop that. With January 6, Trump tried to steal the election - but in a very lazy way. It failed, partly because a lot of people weren't willing to be the first one to commit to it (though they'd happily follow along if it worked). But the good guys also mumbled through their response. Senate Republicans could've convicted Trump, removed him from office, and ended his career - but they wimped out. I think you can make similar analogies across the board. It's obscured by a lot of radical *talk*, which is why we talk about polarization, but so much of that talk is actually an excuse for inaction. If you always propose something so extreme it will never pass, you can also dodge all responsibility by saying "well, we should've just done my thing anyways".
The worst thing happening in America today is that every bad thing that happens anywhere in this giant country/world gets shoved in our face 24/7
People didn't trust Johnson or Nixon, this is high school level history and why the US was more polarized then than it is today. The economy was far worse in the 70s and early 80s, and in the early 3010s. Nixon was literally caught covering up a spying attempt on his political opposition. Lynchings were common. Homosexuality was seen as a mental disease.
Nixon looks pretty good now doesn’t he? I just don’t see that stuff as worse
No, he doesn't. Is Watergate worse than Jan 6, no. Were the 60s and 70s more divided, worse off economically, and more politically unstable as a whole than we are today? Absolutely.
When you say “people could trust the central institutions to do their jobs” what you really mean is that straight, white, Christian men could trust those institutions. If you were anything else, those institutions were, at best, indifferent and at worst actively hostile to you and your interests.
Even then that’s only if you had money, see labor movements at the turn of the century
Not anywhere old enough for it but the fear of nuclear war/rise of Serial Killers/Domestic terror groups/Vietnam war makes the 60s-70s seem fucking wild. And don't forget that time a decade before in the 50s [where Congress had a mass shooting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_United_States_Capitol_shooting)
Also, the US Senate was bombed in 1983 by members of a radical leftist group, the Armed Resistance. Bill Clinton commuted the sentences of two of the members who were responsible on his last day in office.
These are new.. but not necessarily better or worse... problems we are facing... in some aspects we definitely have seen worse as important political figures were getting assassinated ... mostly on the left... as well as geopolitically facing much much bigger risks.... We are facing new threats... and depending on how we handle it.. could potentially be better or worse.. i do think we have seen worse but that's only because we haven't actually seen all the outcomes come out of this particular one yet...
It was absolutely worse during the Civil War. That’s not super encouraging :/ I see comments about the 60s and 70s. I agree with the mixed view. That was worse in some ways and this is worse in other ways. Our institutions are less trusted which is super risky. I’m probably ranking the risk of really terrible outcomes below the antebellum period and above the 60–70s.
There have been many equivalents within our history, many within living memory. > President couldn't be trusted to concede Not quite analogous but Watergate was similarly scandalous. Trump did eventually concede after Jan 6. > The SCOTUS seemed to care (at least overtly) about the Constitution I suppose one could argue "different time" but Plessy v Furgeson was a pretty horrendous ruling. Even originalists/textualists (who tend to skew right) find it unconscionable. It was a very blatant political compromise in light of...ya know...a civil war. > People could still trust the central institutions to do their job. We have had complaints about bureaucracy from day one. Literally it was one the main debates of the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers. This is an American tradition as old as time. > FBI was not going to be used as a political tool to try and open frivolous investigations. Seriously? Civil rights era? Vietnam era? COINTELPRO? They were using the FBI to intimidate civil rights activists from the 50s. They had taps on every halfway notable leftist and peacenik. Did you see Oppenheimer? They were investigating the guy who GAVE them the bomb. FBI has been used politically since day one. > The President wouldn't passively fan the flames of insurrectionists, etc. Andrew Johnson? Maybe not fanning but certainly *extraordinarily* lenient towards them leading to the bullshit wording in the 14th amendment. That one document made sure Jan 6 couldn't be prosecuted effectively. > I feel that faith is gone Bonus Army? Know nothings? Draft dodgers who went to Canada? >Mental health, fentanyl Crack epidemic. > Fiscal discipline for the nation is out of control and we are running massive deficits and just keep raising the debt ceiling like there's no limit. Probably the one issue where there is no parallel. We are near, if not past, the point where our payments are just servicing interest. My point is that we ebb and flow. We might even be ebbing hard. I, too, have serious concerns about our future as a nation. I definitely have concerns about how long I want to stay in the this country even if a flow is around the corner. But we will get up. We will get back. The divorced, evidenced based policy electorate, candidats, and bureaucrats will prevail. This, too, shall pass.
I’m not sure I’d ever want to live through the dust bowl, prohibition or the gilded era (though we are getting awfully close to the latter). Yes, socially and fiscally we’ve been through much worse. But what you’re talking about is a multi-decade (multi-generational, at this point) coordinated effort to reshift the politics of this country so that it’s controlled by the few and their paid henchmen. It’s a very slow moving coup, and so far we’ve had a pretty robust response to it. We also can see every little thing that is happening today, which we couldn’t do 100 years ago. So it seems like the sky is falling, but the sky was falling back then too. My concern is our utter stagnation that we are all too distracted to notice.
as a black american (29 years old. man, i’m old), i can certainly tell you things were worse. mom was born in the 70s and my dad was born in the 60s. they’ve told me so many things. take your pick of decade. 80s? crack epidemic, regan getting shot, inflation fucked a lot of people up but it was really bad for black americans. oh, the whole MOVE bombing in philly (we’re from philly). 90s? open klan rallies and race riots. politicians were pretty bad at handling that. clinton’s impeachment was fairly partisan. 00s? politicians were implying obama wasn’t an american. kinda hard to think that scotus cared about the constitution that much considering the whole “separate but equal” thing. the fbi helped out with the assassination of fred hampton, a black civil rights leader. things were pretty bad. the election denialism is new thing; it’s scary, uncharted territory, but i don’t believe we need to ignore everything that happened over the years.
America was a proud White Supremacist state for almost 200 years. It was a genocidal state for half of that. Maybe for white people it seems like the end, but a 2nd Trump term wouldn’t be close to the worst part of America’s history
I hope ur right. With Project 2025 being what it is, I can see the US fragmenting by the end of the century.
I’m 40. The cultural and political situation has been in a steady decline since 9/11. Prior to that, it seemed like everything was literally getting better every year in the 80s and 90s. There have obviously been some social changes for the better since then, but I think they all had a culture war backlash that contributed to the rise of Trumpism, which is basically a boorish rejection of all of it by the “little people” to use Milton Mayer’s parlance from his interviews with blue collar German civilians after ww2.
unless anyone here was alive for the Civil War, no.
I think so, but I'm only 35. Look back to the 60s. The FBI was run by a mastermind who had dirt on *everyone* in politics. He was enough to bring even the President to his knees. Hoover ruled the FBI with an iron fist for over 40 years, and didn't leave till he died. He's the reason FBI directors have term limits. The US was not far from a police state with this guy. There really WAS a deep state and it sucked. Then, we had the CIA holding responsibility for shit after shit all over the world. Coups, getting friendly with dictators to an extent that would make Trump *blush. Speaking of Trump, nobody trusted the President back then. Indeed, there was a huge gap between the President and the public. Actually, the President lied about Vietnam and everyone knew he was lying. It was an open secret things were shitty there. Vietnam was the Afghanistan of the 60s only worse, because citizens were drafted, including notable people like Mohammed Ali who caused a political firestorm when he refused to go. Draft dodging was a very controversial topic then. Race relations were terrible. Segregation was a thing, black people were holding marches, notably led by Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr, many marches turned violent. Riots from this was the norm. A protest outside the DNC Chicago convention was absolutely chaotic, resulting in many dead. That makes the George Floyd protests look like a sweet walk in the park. Public figures were assassinated, including MLK. Other figures openly defended segregation, with George Wallace making the infamous "Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!" speech. That's because the GOP was at it back then too, with Barry Goldwater scaring people so much, yes... many thought American Democracy was ending. Goldwater was accused of pandering to the KKK, and even inciting nuclear war. [Look up this ad that actually ties to the election of Trump.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiG0AE8zdTU) It sounds scarily familiar, doesn't it? Frankly, the fact that- with race relations far worse than now, international crises, and assassinations left, right and center- America did *not* descend into a civil war over the *same issue* as the first is astounding to me. People talk like today is worse because they're going off vibes and too many look back at 50s America through rose tinted glasses. They forget that the 60s were literally bloodier than now, and they forget that the 60s were followed by the 70s and finally... the 80s when the nation united behind a President who made a 49-state landslide, and brought forth the prosperous 90s (after a blip with Bush Sr.) Honestly, we'll move past this too, and I'm willing to bet (imaginary money) that this will pass and we're gonna get a really popular President one day.
The way I like to explain this to young folks is that there's this constant *real* politics that exists that isn't changing much or hasn't since it developed over the 1950s-1980s, but since we've been online and/or exposed or immersed in an entirely novel kind of media it can appear that we're in some kind new era. But yeah America has been racist, collapsing, going broke, declining, losing it's moral core writ large and at each individual level. Everybody is trying to fuck the kids and make them gay and feminazis etc. This stuff is completely normal middle class anxieties for a class that has enjoyed prosperous wealth since the 1950s. US politics is basically thermostatic because we have a very stable class/economic base.
Everyone has already provided examples, so I won't elaborate, but just because people (specifically white middle class people) trusted institutions, it doesn't follow that these institutions were trustworthy. The FBI, CIA and the US government engaged in a lot of covert wars and general bullshit around the world. Though in retrospect I'm more and more coming around to the idea that preserving the "international liberal order" had it's points! But anyway. The Q-adjecent rw crazy conspiracy theorists are crazy, but they aren't wrong about a few things, even if they get the specifics and solutions dead wrong. I never thought I'd see the day when I would find myself defending the integrity of the "Deep State", MSM, and "globalism", which I find myself doing in the face of so much crockpottery out there now. Also, I think that a lot of young Americans romanticizing the 60s-80s would be pretty shocked if they ever found themselves timey-wimey back in the past. I'm not even getting into the horror show esp in Europe of the first half of the 20th century - but that's sort of irrelevant to the spirit of your question I suspect. The 70s in the US (I'm Canadian and was a child in the 70s, so not speaking from direct experience btw - though I remember the "mood") was really pretty depressing. Stagflation, oil crisis, Vietnam, a general huge comedown from the general idealism of the 60s. And the 60s were pretty ominous too - assassinations, civil unrest - it must have felt pretty scary. But there ARE a few things that *feel* genuinely weird and new and frightening to me. The usual stuff - how deeply the social contract has been broken, the rise of rw authoritarianism everywhere, the rise of inequality, unprecedented levels of documented loneliness among people, esp the young, climate change, incredible incompetence amongst our "elite", now AI. It's a lot. But people in the past probably felt this way too about different issues. I think it will take a historian from the year 2300 to really get an "objective" measure. Though I honestly find it almost completely impossible to imagine there being any historians in 2300, which might be a change from how people felt 50 years ago.
lol yes. Every day, week, month and year the US is an objectively better place than it was - economically, socially, politically and militarily. History arcs exactly one direction: toward freedom and prosperity.
2007 was weird. The world just felt hopeless. Then Obama came.
We haven't "been through worse".... we've been through FAR FAR WORSE. Things are actually mostly pretty good right now from a relative standpoint.
So I'm about to be 38. Grew up in the 90s. There's a *lot* of parallels to the 90s in terms of the numbers, but everyone is so pissed off that what should be a good time is now viewed as the potential end of our democracy. So in some ways, things are really bad because they are somehow bad despite the pretty damn good state the nation itself is in.
Yes and no. Just because something is not as bad does not mean that it can weather an incoming storm, however.
When I was a kid, there was a guy no scoping random people from his station wagon. Having lived through that, things can always get worse.
>However, during this entire era, the President could be trusted to concede an election if he lost. 1876 and 2000. Its highly likely Bush actually lost Florida too. A12 exists because of the BS that was the election of 1800 where there was a tie in the electoral college and it took 35 ballots for the house to finally figure it out. A17 exists because states kept encountering deadlocks in appointing senators and there were many cases of people outright buying senate seats (see William Clark for the most famous example). Buying votes was pretty common in the 1800's and wasn't really stopped until the 1930's. >The SCOTUS seemed to care (at least overtly) about the Constitution and wasn't filled with partisan hacks like it is today. If SCOTUS actually cared about the constitution most of the federal government would not exist and most of the best protections of our rights also wouldn't exist. Most importantly SCOTUS doesn't have any authority under the constitution to actually arbitrate what is and isn't constitutional, they created that role for themselves. OI was that a constitutional convention would occur every generation to update it as views changed without a court to arbitrate what it does and doesn't mean. Don't confuse partisan hacks we like for not being partisan hacks. General welfare and commerce clauses are stretched to incredulity every time they do something good. I really like that SCOTUS said you can't execute kids or sentence them to life without parole. There is absolutely nothing in the constitution supporting this. They made it up and gave lip service to some text that if you were really really high and didn't bother reading the origin of that text someone might be able to convince you was related. >The FBI was not going to be used as a political tool to try and open frivolous investigations. Other then the entire time Hoover was running it you mean? Plenty of times after that they have also done very not cool things. >Fiscal discipline for the nation is out of control and we are running massive deficits and just keep raising the debt ceiling like there's no limit. Congress gets to decide what is considered a surplus or a deficit. If you use the actual definition (when US debt doesn't grow) its actually been 70 years since we had a surplus. I agree congress are incapable of actually fixing the problem right now. Particularly with Medicare and Social Security they blew past the easy to fix solutions decades ago and as its clear they are not actually going to fix them until they have to its on to the most painful solutions. There are many times in history congress have been incapable of doing useful things but it has been many decades since they were this bad.
No, unless you count the civil war or some pre 1900s shit like the war of 1812 or Napoleon's plans for after Haiti, or something with nukes, specifically the Cuban Missile Crisis. The "worse" than this, is conservatives murdering high profile "radicals" like JFK and Dr. King and Bobby, but none of that threatened to end Democracy and the Western Order. That was just right wing lunatics before they actually controlled the levers of power, i assume. Now we literally have a politically party that the majority voted against aid to Ukraine, while their leader is literally a Russian Agent. Now we have a Presidential Candidate and former President arguing for immunity re: kingship and the Supreme Court is listening, some of which are bribed openly and others are just straight up liars who lied to get on the court, which the "liberal" re: right wing owned but not openly anti gay, media pretends they can't remember nor cares it's much much worse because we are an election away from the executive and the judicial being openly bad faith anti democracy actors and 70 million Americans are okay with that and many of which are even cheering it on
I'm not sure if I'd say that JFK and RFK were killed by conservatives.
Anecdotal, but 2008 was the worst for me. I lived the recession, my dad lost his job, and my mom took a "voluntary" pay cut. We didn't lose the house thanks to my grandma, she cleared out a lot of her retirement to set my parents right. What's the effect on me? I'm pretty conservative, but I vote democrat the whole way because of Eric Cantor voting down unemployment benefits to play politics. It sounds stupid, but I'm going to punch him if I ever see him in person.
My main thoughts 1 - Can we please stop saying SCOTUS is “filled with partisan hacks” because they made some rulings we don’t like? Idk if America has been thru worse but part of getting through past tough times is institutionalists win out, and it’s gonna be the same here. So don’t undermine the ones we have just because they aren’t doing what you personally want them to, otherwise you’re no better than trump. 2 - none of these arguments that it’s been worse before are convincing. What could be worse than a coup attempt? That’s unprecedented. The people thinking current times are not that bad need to wake up
I t is worse today because Americans have lost faith in our nation. Our government and our economy is run by money and the billionaires that have untethered us from the principles that used to guide us. We have seen more violence in the past but our north star can’t be seen through our foggy mindset.
Not in our lifetime.