Make no mistake, my whole life has just been me watching america circle the drain.

America ended with Reagan. It only got worse after him. The 1950s/60s were the last period in which America could be considered the greatest country on Earth.

No, it started with Reagan
No, it started with Nixon
No, it started with Prescott Bush
All of history is built on what came before. I think if we really want to get to the root of America's collapse, we have to look way back. Doing so, I can only conclude that the Agricultural Revolution was a mistake.
- Death by a thousand cuts. No single event led to the Nazis seizing power, no single even led to the Conservatives enacting their fascist regime in the US. Yeah, some steps were bigger than others, the likes of Reagan, W, and Trump shoving things faster and further right than others, but none of them singlehandedly achieved the coup d’etat. Trump benefitted from all the groundwork laid before along with the hard work of the likes of McConnell that did everything they could to prevent democracy from working.
- My God damn great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandpa wanted to distill more grain so now here I am, working a god forsaken 9-5 :(
- Also it was because we didn't do reconstruction, which was because the landowners were too strong.
  And the landowners were too strong in the 1860s because of compromise in the 18th century, on account of their ancestors being too strong.
  Actually, come to think of it, aren't those the same people that elected Nixon, Reagan, and Bush?
  Perhaps it's not so much that history repeats itself as that we have had the same intractable problem for hundreds of years: aristocrats.
  
  Feed all oppressors to the Almighty Meat Grinder!

You could argue that Regan was the spark. 9/11 was the fire. Trump is the ashes.
- if it wasn't regan, it was the great depression. if it wasn't the great depression it was the civil war.
  we didn't start the fire. it was always burning since the world's been turning.
  
  Thank you. People upset about the present often have little idea how much worse the past was. When WW1 hit, people thought god was dead and humanity had arrived at hell on earth. WW2 exceeded anyone’s notions of what savagery was possible, beyond even industrial scale into the atomic era. Many believed they were witnessing the end of the world.
  We have real problems today. But if you think wealth inequality, racism, and sexism are problems now, all of them absolutely go to hell during wartime along with everything else, and the damage takes decades to move past.
  I do believe America is under fire from within right now but I also believe that most of what we have lost are our illusions about it. Many are suffering, and I don’t discount that. But what we’re trans rights like back in the wonderful 1950s?
  
  Truth is?
  Game's been rigged from the start.
  
  We got the new deal it of the great depression though. It took Republicans many decades of dedication to dismantle what we gained from that.
- Or Nixon.
  9/11, horrible as it was, just gave them a good reason to put into law some truly undemocratic shit they probably already had waiting in a drawer for a while.
- It was the stagflation in the seventies. That's when the rich managed to switch the economy ~~back to exploitation mode~~ to neoliberalism, and Reagan was their tool.
- Trump is the fallout making us sick.
- Who is the Phoenix?
  
  Either socialism or barbarism
- An era of oil abuse.

The end began with the Lewis Powell Memo in 1971

"All men are created equal"
Is slave state
Always has been
- Don't forget about the genocide of the natives.
- I think this is the right place to look.
  At the bare minimum, back then the founders wrote a constitution designed AND INTENDED to be amended, if not rewritten every once in a while.
  As of like 80 years ago people started to get it in their head that the USA was somehow the greatest nation to ever exist and could never be better. Maybe because of how it helped out in WWII? Maybe because of how the economy boomed following the war? Who knows. But Nationalism has certainly put the nails in the coffin.
  
  They were slave owners, who fought a violent war against a democratic country. They could have asked for representation in parliament, but they decided to go to war. Why, because England, was about to clean up the colonies and eliminate slavery. With peace between England and France in the 1760s, England's attention was once again on domestic issues, and people in England were getting sick of slavery in the colonies. The rich slave owners, most educated in law, knew slavery was about to end when the ruling of Somerset v Stewart (1772) was handed down.

Interesting no one has mentioned the 2000 election shenanigans yet. That was some real stolen election shit
- That's exactly where the timeline jumped the tracks. if Gore's election is properly counted, there's potentially no 9/11, but certainly no Iraq and probably no Afghanistan as we know it. And without Bush and the whiplash against him and those events, there's no Obama. And without the mouth breather whiplash to Obama, there's no Trump.
  So yeah, I would say that the republicans fucking around in south Florida is what caused the rift.
- Florida? Yeah I heard a podcast about this, eerily similar to all that's been happening around the last 2 elections.
  
  I lived through it - in Florida - and it was every bit as shady and disgusting as you would think, and then some.
  Especially that Brooks Brothers Riot of “concerned citizens” who were actually GOP operatives demanding a recount. That fucking sickens me to this day.
  (I showed my spouse an article about that a few years ago and he was horrified. He’d had no idea, although I don’t fault him for that since he was on float at the time)

I think the dawn of neoliberalism under Reagan and the 2008 crisis are essential. 9/11 was just a great sensation to focus on
- 9/11 was a catalyst for forces that were already in play.
- Casus belli* 😅
  
  What does that mean? Without looking it up I would say, "pretty case", so a good example?

If we’re being honest with ourselves it goes back much further than that. It has never, at any point, been what it set out to be or what it claimed to be.
- Kinda hinted toward it in another post but its more about my own personal perspective. At a young age my life was mostly devoid of politics and america seemed like an ok place. Since the attack on the twin towers, for me personally, america has only gotten worse. To me, 911 marks the end of america, as an idea.
  
  I was an adult when 9/11 happened. After growing up in cold wars, Gulf wars, recessions, etc. that day was extremely horrible, but also felt like just the latest big symptom of an ongoing downfall.
  My parents' generation had the Vietnam War as their One Big Important Thing, their parents had WW2, etc. Like other commenters are saying here, what seems like the One Big Important Thing to you is really just a matter of where on the running timeline you happen to be. I find the best way to gain perspective is to examine and understand the entire thing, that's the only way I think anything constructive can be done about any of it.
  
  Another American here, I think it's important to be aware that those attacks happened as a direct result of evil -empire level shit the US is responsible for in the 20th century.
- I disagree with the last sentence. I think we made an attempt. But everything after WWII has been headed this direction without much checking.

I thought we all agreed it was the gorilla.
- That was but a symptom, a healthy society wouldn't have let that happen to our boi Harambe in the first place

The day america ended:
picture of Christopher Columbus
- The day Earth ended: The day when the first Eukaryotic Organism was evolved
  
  This is prokaryote erasure
- This is more of a political commentary on that fact that when I was politically activated, preteen, its been nothing but down hill.

I blame mitochondria

That awkward moment when terrorists win.

I think the assassination of JFK was the first kill shot that signal the end of America. Nixon and Regan becoming president was the cancer that inflicted the backbone of the working class. And 9/11 helped kick off anew wave of white hatred that had been boiling since the 90s. And now we are where we are now to the point of no return. I’m 42 years old and have seen and lived through some terrible and crazy times and we are all about to head straight into a country wide car crash and idk what will happen after it or if this country will survive it.
- Let's throw some wild cards to keep your world entertaining

Did this attack really cause a change in trajectory though?
I think capitalism has been leading the US down this path since the second world war.
- Is it a change of trajectory If instead of going down a long slope you turn down a road leading toward the edge of a cliff? Because while I agree about capitalism leading to inevitable horrific consequences there's really no way to argue against 9/11 ushering in an age of utter Horrors when it came to civil rights.
  Of course you could also make the argument that the turn towards that Cliff was actually caused by the Supreme Court picking George W bush to be our president.
  
  Yeah that's fair.
  These types of events are always used as an excuse to dial up invasive powers of government.
- It didn't change the trajectory, but those attacks were much more effective than even Al Qaeda thought they would be. They provided the excuse the American fascists were looking for to further their own plans without much push back.
- I think it delayed the inevitable. By the 90s, right wing American extremism was on the rise. 9/11 put up a facade of unity (as long as you didn't look middle eastern). The right wing movements went quiet for 15 years. America returned to trajectory in 2016.
- I'd argue neoconservativism started with WW2, but neoliberalism is probably better tied to Nixon. So I agree, 9/11 was just a continuation of neocon power grabs, but invoking post-WW2 "capitalism" doesn't make much sense to me; the New Deal was comparatively great for workers. Neoconservativism isn't really an economic movement like neoliberalism is.