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Post 2016??? What?? America's nowhere close to unique in this case, but even the most rose -tinted views of American society should understand that the "fuck you, got mine" attitude is endemic in the country and the people who don't hold that view are consigned to being victimized by those who do.
The 2016 commons "breaking down" didn't come out of nowhere and didn't start in 2016. It comes out of many reasons, among them a long line of short term decisions being made to solve problems and kicking the can down the road; even a relatively short term view that only considers federal governance alone can be dated back to the LBJ Great Society, the chain from Ford-Carter-Reagan, Dubya 1, the Clinton corporatization consolidation years, Dubya 2's action and then the Obama-era expansion of the surveillance state. That's without talking about money, the economy, the labor and mortgage markets. America is a country where there are outsized, stratospheric rewards for playing defectbot.
Somewhere, FDR is pulling a sad Pikachu face because he was left out of this line.
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I am sorry you feel this way and sorry you grew up around people who think this way. It is not the America I experienced.
I don’t believe we “kicked the can down the road”. The Great Society was an attempt to end poverty. Reaganism was a mostly successful attempt at improving American prosperity.
Why does Harvard have a $50 billion endowment? It’s because a lot of people donated money wanting to give something back for (unrelated) people who come after them. Why did so many people sign up for the military when those towers fell? Or those boys who died on those beaches in Normandy? Why did Carnegie give all his money away?
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