After seeing a lot of apocalyptic sentiment, I have to ask: when were things better?
At what point in the past were things better than now? In what ways, and for whom?
I keep seeing things like "we can't go on like this" or "we need a revolution" or whatever, but I feel like we have gone on like this, more or less muddling through, making incremental compromises with existing power structures, evolving existing systems to solve new problems, since day 1 of the Republic. The one real attempt at a revolution, at starting completely over, was a fiasco (1861).
With historically low crime rates, unemployment at what we roughly thought was "normal" until 1995 or so, improved student performance, a growing consensus on LGBT rights... I'm curious what in a concrete sense people really think is going off the rails here.
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Emphasis on "still". Wealth inequality is worse than 30 years ago (though better than 90 years ago), and happening in the context of increasing standards of living everywhere (which is, I suppose, " the deal"
. Is racial equality better or worse than, say, 30 years ago?
Free or very low cost state and city colleges
I went to college in the late '70s and the state schools certainly weren't "low cost". The BEOG (later Pell Grant), NDSL, etc., were in full effect to assist - and were not just for "private" colleges.
This is probably true - the PIC took off under Raygun, with the swelling of the existing prisons that could not handle the extra load.
THIS I disagree with. Nixon appointed 4 justices including the lunatic Rehnquist who went on to seal the fate of the nightmarish Supreme Court of today. Hell - Plessy v Ferguson took almost 60 years (1896 - 1954) to be invalidated by Brown vs Board of Education. I.e., that court has ALWAYS been "politicized" against someone, punctuated by brief periods of lucidity.
There most certainly WERE idiotic RW talk radio hosts in various cities in the '70s (including a few ilk here in Philly). However what changed was the elimination of the "Fairness Doctrine", the introduction of the "syndication model", and general broadcast media deregulation, allowing the RW to buy bundles of stations to spread their vile message on without any balance. This provided a "cheap" solution for station operation, but was something that the left neglected to take advantage of, and when they finally did (e.g., Air America), it was too late.
????? So the legacy of J. Edgar Hoover didn't exist? The dossiers on a myriad of Civil Rights & anti-war activists and left groups just vanished in the 1970s? No wiretapping (phone bugs), mail interception, etc.?
This has an interesting timeline - http://www.historycommons.org/timeline.jsp?nixon_and_watergate_tmln_watergate_campaign_conspiracy=nixon_and_watergate_tmln_illegal_wiretapping___surveillance&timeline=nixon_and_watergate_tmln
Except that "Negroes were inferior" and other nonsense that resulted in having to force "Health Classes" to teach how a baby is conceived. And don't let me get started on the LAWS requiring that a woman's husband must consent to her medical procedures (including hysterectomy).
This was definitely true. Raygun made sure that this would be ended.
The use of "preservatives" started full force after WWII and much of it was never on the label. So you STILL had no idea what you were eating. In fact, the 1970s began a long and winding road in discovering, testing, and banning much of this stuff, but it was often still there. The Nutrition Labeling and Education Act" didn't come about until 1990 to require some sort of more comprehensive standardized labeling of foods.
Unless you were violently raped?