[timacles]

The politics in this country have been intentionally broken going back to Clinton and Obama. It is impossible to make meaningful change anymore.

Add in the propaganda convincing 2/5th of the country to consistently vote against their own interests and fundamentally misunderstand core issues, and it is difficult to see what can be done in the next 10 years.

The USA has had a hostile takeover by oligarchs. We are a country who serves only corporations and those who own them. Regular people have been almost completely removed from the process

[p-o]

It's interesting how you elect to name two presidents in an era that were democrats while conveniently omitting the republican president in between. With all his baggages, I find this quite convenient.

[pstuart]

It's an interesting point. With Clinton, l'affaire de bj was a willful attempt to take the president's private life public as a means of congressional focus. It should be noted that until then, this was effectively off limits. It was an open secret in DC that his predecessor, Bush the 1st, kept a mistress for years and that was never discussed publicly.

In the case of Obama, the GOP noted that their top priority was to make him a 1-term president and that meant attempted sabotage of any legislation that might make him look good.

Neither man were perfect presidents, but compared to the current regime it is night and day.

[nickff]

The Lewinsky Affair got traction because Clinton used his position of power (literally in the Oval Office) to take advantage of a young subordinate, in a time when ‘sexual harassment’ was becoming a hot topic. Then lying about the affair made it much worse (as cover-ups often do). It was definitely used against Clinton by his opponents, but the way he abused his position, then perjured himself was truly shameful.

[UncleMeat]

Clinton as a sex pest is a more recent narrative. At the time the media coverage was not about how he was abusing an intern. It was about how he was debasing the office and how Lewinsky wasn't even that hot. It was certainly not the narrative from the right that Clinton was an abuser.

[pixelatedindex]

Ironic because Trump said (and did) far worse things in 2016 and didn’t affect him one bit

[nickff]

I purposely avoided any comparison between Clinton and other presidents, as many have done bad things, and it is difficult to rank them all. I just wanted to address the parent comment's minimization of Clinton's wrong-doing, as evidenced by this quote: "l'affaire de bj was a willful attempt to take the president's private life public"

[pstuart]

What Clinton did was absolutely wrong, but that was a personal affair.

In life and the law, intentions are foundational for evaluating people's actions.

The scandalizing of Clinton's behavior was only about political slander, mud slinging. Your pearl clutching is performative and partisan.

There's so much to not like about the Dems, and it's primarily in the fact that DNC leadership is corrupt and they are only interested in serving themselves and their patrons. But the party members as a whole do work on trying to do good governance. They often fail, but on the intentions front, it's not disagreable.

Counter this to the modern day GOP -- they've been coopted by the evangelicals and white nationalists, and the only thing they want to govern is demanding that their theology is the law of the land. No thank you.

I have respect for old-school conservatives who cared about limited government -- I totally agree with that concept but differ on how those limits are set.

I have no party affiliation and loath partisan politics, but with the two-party system one has to choose the least worst.

[psadauskas]

This didn't start with Clinton or Obama (interesting you skipped over a much larger contributor). As usual, "Reagan made everything worse".

When he was governor of California, he ended free college tuition for the UC state schools, because some hippies at Berkley were protesting the Vietnam war.

When he was campaigning for president, he popularized the idea of the "welfare queen", and got poor white people to vote against their own interests because there were some hypothetical single black mothers abusing the system.

When he got into office, he cut taxes, mostly for the wealthy, but also a bit for the middle class. He expected that he could use that as an excuse to then cut social programs to keep the budget reasonably balanced, but once people have benefits they don't want to give them up. He was forced to not go through with the cuts, doubling the federal budget deficit, and kicking off the trend of deficit spending (except for a brief period under Clinton in the late 90s that W then squandered in Iraq and Afghanistan).

Reagan also perfected the process of:

1. Complain that government programs are bad or inefficient. 2. Use it as an excuse to cut their funding. 3. Government programs get worse as a result. 4. Goto 1.

He didn't start any of these trends, but he did ramp them way up, and we've been on that trajectory ever since.

[JumpCrisscross]

> We are a country who serves only corporations and those who own them. Regular people have been almost completely removed from the process

Regular people removed themselves when we chose cultural flashpoints over material wealth.

[piva00]

Even though the forever pursuit of more material wealth is exactly what brought the USA to this point.

[JumpCrisscross]

> though the forever pursuit of more material wealth is exactly what brought the USA to this point

I disagree. It’s the corruption of democratic politics with money. And rage-based content providers (on cable TV and social media) who take any consumer/worker surplus and ram it into invented culture wars.

[piva00]

I don't think we are disagreeing, expanding my point: the forever pursuit of more material wealth narrowed whatever was the USA's vision as a nation.

More material wealth showed other good indicators for society being correlated to it, culminating in the misguided ideology with Reagan that only caring about advancing material wealth is enough to advance society.

Since then the whole point of the USA is to further material wealth, and the belief that societal benefits will inevitably trickle down from this advancement. My firm belief after 40-50 years of empirical data about this experiment is that it was completely misguided and missed the forest for the trees.

Within this ideology all the issues you brought up branched from: corporations and moneyed interests got even more power; to keep power those moneyed interests need to corrupt democratic processes.

Rage-based content providers is just another facet of power maintenance mechanisms, if you have capital and want to push your agenda you need the media for it, and since your main purpose is to have an audience to push this agenda you will, inevitably, rely on content that is easy to churn out while keeping this audience, hence the rage-based content landscape that is very prevalent in the USA.

[s1artibartfast]

I think people have different connotations for the word wealth. For some that means people being able to afford housing, Healthcare, or taking a day off to spend with their children.

I think it is simply wrong on the facts that the national government has been primarily focused on raising national GDP and material well-being, or that it has done a good job.

The topic of growth is almost absent from campaign messaging, and investment in infrastructure for the future is a minuscule part of budgets.

If economic growth was the priority, we would see streamlined code and legislation throughout the country and focus on improving them. Politicians would be spending their time trying to figure out how to lower the costs of High-Speed Rail or Bridges or houses.

[timacles]

Don’t blame regular people when billions were spent on lies, disinformation campaigns and rug pulls. We are being systematically manipulated.

I know plenty of good honest people who simply don’t know what’s going on and cannot navigate today’s political landscape

[s1artibartfast]

In the attention economy I think there is still plenty of blame to assign to the voters.. they are the ones that care more about culture war topics then the peace and prosperity of their children.

[timacles]

OK sure go blame them. Now what do you have?

[s1artibartfast]

The idea that the policially interested should focus on their attention on their priorities and vote for them. Reward politicians with your values.

Also, the federal government should return more political footballs to the local level to stop distracting from their actual jobs

[virgildotcodes]

I mean, I also have times where I find myself blaming people for being so stupid.

That said, you have to realize that this has been a very intentional propaganda effort by the most powerful actors in society spanning decades. Disorganized masses are largely powerless against that sort of effort and the outcomes are predictable.

[JumpCrisscross]

> this has been a very intentional propaganda effort by the most powerful actors in society spanning decades

There is no evidence it was highly coordinated and many reasons to believe it’s emergent. Cable TV and then social media created systems competing for attention. The content originators became increasingly decentralized, increasing both diversity and ruthlessness.

> Disorganized masses are largely powerless against that sort of effort

Historically untrue. Starving, uneducated masses are easy to repress. Distracted masses only so long as they look away. And I think we’re seeing signs the American voter isn’t looking away.

[virgildotcodes]

> There is no evidence it was highly coordinated and many reasons to believe it’s emergent. Cable TV and then social media created systems competing for attention. The content originators became increasingly decentralized, increasing both diversity and ruthlessness.

Hmm, not sure how you could conclude this given the abundance of evidence regarding the activities and influence of people like the Koch Brothers, Rupert Murdoch, Peter Thiel, the fossil fuel industry in terms of the global warming discourse, the general corporate and wealthy forces shaping Republican/Democrat policy over the last ~50 years.

The media influences alone that fuel the sensationalization of these issues are transparent, as are the threads that bind these media groups and those in power over them.

Look at what's happening to CBS and will soon happen to CNN due to the Paramount merger and the Ellisons/Bari Weiss for example.

> Historically untrue.

What? In what part of history have disorganized masses shown themselves to be powerful against "the intentional propaganda efforts made by the most powerful actors in society spanning decades" that I'm referring to?

Almost by definition the successful grassroots movements of the past that have created change were organized, no? I also don't believe there's ever been as effective a media (social and conventional) apparatus in human history as we've had the last half century.

> Starving, uneducated masses are easy to repress. Distracted masses only so long as they look away. And I think we’re seeing signs the American voter isn’t looking away.

I mean, this conversation started over the culture war bullshit that seems to have about as good a grip on Americans' attention as ever, although I agree that the material economic conditions are degrading so badly that they are more and more becoming the priority consideration.

That said, channeling that anger towards scapegoats like immigrants or jews etc is an old and effective playbook and I don't see why we wouldn't call that distraction.

[JumpCrisscross]

> not sure how you could conclude this given the abundance of evidence regarding the activities and influence of people like the Koch Brothers, Rupert Murdoch, Peter Thiel, the fossil fuel industry in terms of the global warming discourse, the general corporate and wealthy forces shaping Republican/Democrat policy over the last ~50 years

Because for each of these there are a hundred other monied interests, and they're all in covert or open conflict with each other.

> Look at what's happening to CBS and will soon happen to CNN due to the Paramount merger and the Ellisons/Bari Weiss for example

Yes, that's one group overtly taking over a platform. The fact that they're behaving differently after Weiss should give pause to the hypothesis that this is all already co-ordinated from the shadows.

> what part of history have disorganized masses shown themselves to be powerful against "the intentional propaganda efforts made by the most powerful actors in society spanning decades" that I'm referring to?

Every regime fighting survivial deploys all means available to it in its fight. That includes the media. Disorganised groups have overturned concentratios of power far more pronounced than what we have in the U.S. (We have high inequality. But our elite is still usefully fractured.)

> channeling that anger towards scapegoats like immigrants or jews etc is an old and effective playbook and I don't see why we wouldn't call that distraction

Here I agree. But there are also powerful immigrant-born Americans and Jewish Americans who obviously don't want to be part of that, and who have influence over money, power and media.

Everyone is trying to consolidate power. But that's an exclusionary imperative. Hence, political competition.

[lossolo]

Seems like free speech didn't help Americans avoid becoming economic slaves.

[khriss]

> The politics in this country have been intentionally broken going back to Clinton and Obama.

Ahh yes, the presidents from the other party, including the one currently in office, who runs arguably the most brazenly corrupt administrations in US history, having tripled his family's net worth in a single year is of course entirely blame free /s.