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Tay Zonday
@tayzonday
SOME things, like neoliberalism, you can blame on BOTH American political parties. But the “War On Drugs” is a Republican child. Richard Nixon’s domestic policy advisor confessed in 1994 that it targeted rights-seeking blacks and anti-war hippies, their political enemies: https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ Should Jimmy Carter have done more with his supermajority to end the drug war? Sure. Carter’s key legacy is actually neoliberal deregulation. Reagan caught the drug culture-war pass from Nixon and the neoliberal pass from Carter like a champion wide receiver. I grew up in the 1980s. Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign was ubiquitous. Drug abuse has *never* varied with race or income-level. Reagan’s super-severe crack VS powder cocaine punishment caused decades of black family separation and federal handouts to corporate prisons. Marijuana prosecution also depopulated disproportionately black areas. This is partly why today’s black family wealth 1/8 that of whites.
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Andi
@0xandi
I'm taking the liberty to fully blame Reagan for Neoliberalism
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Tay Zonday
@tayzonday
Milton Friedman acolytes infiltrated Democrats from 1976-1980 and they took the bait hook, line and sinker with aggressive policy. Populists and progressives actually believed that “liberating” capital would have humanist outcomes. I seem to recall Matt Stoler’s book “Goliath” deep-diving this history. Since American foreign and domestic policy didn’t have a spectacular Keynesian human rights record in the 1950s and 1960s, it was easy for progressives to be gullible.
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