In overthrowing FDR's New Deal politics and economics, Reagan's era:
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Destroyed most of the American labor movement
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Shifted trillions in both income and wealth from the middle class to the top 1 percent
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Consolidated business and the wealth it creates into the hands of monopolies in every sector of our economy
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Moved over 60,000 factories and tens of millions of good-paying jobs to low-wage countries
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All while fattening the money bins of the morbidly rich with the Reagan, Bush and Trump tax cuts.
Reagan, of course, had what he thought was a good rationale: he was holding back a growing tide of social change that intimidated wealthy older white men like himself and, he believed, threatened "The American Way."
It started back in 1951, when Russell Kirk electrified a small coterie of conservatives like William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater with his prediction that the middle class was growing too rich, and the inevitable result would be massive and widespread social upheaval in this country.
This little band of conservatives predicted that if the middle class continued to gain income and wealth faster than the top 1% (which was the case in 1951), soon "the rabble" of working class people would be so wealthy that they'd feel safe challenge the institutions and social norms of America.
Racial minorities would demand parity with white people, these conservatives warned us, women would disobey their husbands and leap into competition in the nation's workplaces, and young people would openly defy their elders.
The result, they predicted, would be social chaos and out of that chaos would come a new and perhaps even communist - certainly more socialist - America, unrecognizable to the John Wayne-loving white men of America.
Few in America took Kirk's warnings seriously at the time, as I laid out in detail in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. Buckley was sidelined to public broadcasting and Goldwater lost the 1964 election in an historic landslide.
But then came Jane Fonda, Tim Leary and the Beatles:
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By 1968 the birth control pill was in widespread use and the women's movement was well underway.
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Martin Luther King was leading marches across America even as cities kept erupting in violence in response to white police beating and murdering unarmed Black people (which triggered literally every single one of the "race riots" of the '60s and '70s).
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And young people were smoking pot, exploring spirituality, joining SDS, and refusing to go to Vietnam.
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