I think Reagan has just been the most successful. I was just in single digits when he was president, but he seems to have had the charisma all the people wish they had. He seems to have accomplished a lot while still carrying on a positive legacy to anyone that doesn't dig too deep, which is sadly the majority of adults in the US. If someone supported the things he did, I can see why they would think very fondly about this era.

We can also look back to the pardoning of Nixon as the beginning of the end, as the right got to see what they did wrong and therefor remove most of those obstacles in the future. This is where we can really trace back their solid control over the media narrative to. Roger Ailes, Roger Stone, and numerous other began laying the groundwork for enabling what future conservative could get away with.

Rewind more and we have Andrew Johnson and company going weak on the South. The path to becoming a progressive and inclusive nation was really screwed up by sweeping so much of the war under the rug and giving rich racists a do-over.

I'm slowly learning more about the event before that as well, and there are numerous periods we could pick as being the moment, but no matter when or where you look, you'll find a bunch of rich and/or powerful bastards trying to horde resources for themselves. We just seem to have a mental flaw as a species or something that we have a high enough percent of people that would rather burn everything down than to help someone they don't like. It's like some kind of universal limiter put on us from the plot of a sci-fi book .

But I try not to get all fatalistic about it. I'm here for fun and to share things I've learned and cheer people up with hundreds of owl pictures. The political news scene on Lemmy is not the greatest, so I try to comment where I can avoid getting people more riled up while still showing them more details about a situation in a nonconfrontational way, but that's a thin path to walk on...