@Kethianna @Remittancegirl
America has been authoritarian for generations.

Don't get me wrong - Americans must the current full-on assault on the rule of law, human decency, and literally truth and logic!, by all means necessary.

But the office of the President has simply gotten stronger and stronger over the years, decades and centuries.

Nixon, Reagan and W Bush were outright authoritarian; Clinton, Obama and Biden did nothing to roll back these extra powers.

And now here we are.

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@Kethianna @Remittancegirl

Now Trump has those sparkling new nuclear weapons that Obama started to build for him to terrorize the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renovation_of_the_nuclear_weapon_arsenal_of_the_United_States

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The idea that something just recently went off the rails is entirely false. America has been sprinting toward this precipice for over fifty years.

When the Republicans ruled, the pace accelerated to a fast run; for the Democrats, it slowed to a walk; but never did America turn around and walk away from the precipice.

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@Kethianna @Remittancegirl

Please remember that free speech was sharply restricted in World War 2; in the Second Red Scare (1947-1957) in the United States thousands of people had their lives destroyed simply because they had leftist beliefs; then America had a brief, o so brief period of enlightenment where civil rights were codified in law, where much pollution was made illegal, where demonstrations by Americans stopped an unjust war.

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@Kethianna @Remittancegirl But after just two decades, Reagan came in, and anti-authoritarian America never recovered.

While the majority of the blame is of course with the Republicans, all hope was lost when the Democrats starting with Clinton moved sharply to the right on everything except identity politics (which isn't actually left or right, anyway).

When I moved to the US around 1984, both parties were promising what was essentially socialized medicine.

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@Kethianna @Remittancegirl

I left in 2016, when neither party was talking about it. In 2008, the Obama administration banned the mention of single payer from any of the discussions about the ACA, and also refused to allow any comparisons with any foreign healthcare systems, and I knew the game was up.

Why am I telling you this?

Because if we don't understanding our history, we're going to repeat our mistakes over and over again.

We've been fighting and losing for generations.

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@TomSwirly @Kethianna @Remittancegirl

Tom, but I remember people arguing that they voted for Trump in 2016 because they opposed Obamacare. Wasn't Obamacare some sort of socialized medicine then?

(and I agree with you, we have to understand history to not repeat it. That's also the reason why I ask you so many questions, sorry :) Just learning new things with you.)

@hadon @Kethianna @Remittancegirl

Obamacare isn't socialized medicine.

Obamacare forces you to buy US health insurance or you get a nasty fine; if you're very poor, it's subsidized.

The trouble is that a lot of US insurance is unbelievably bad - like United Healthcare - so you often get no real value out of it.

And if you're working poor, you don't get the subsidies.

Here in France (where we now live), if you're in the system, you pay zero for everything.

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