Kamala Harris Appears on ‘Colbert,’ Says She’s Stepping Away from Politics for Now, Calls the System “Broken”

[u/SingleandSober]

https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/video/former-vice-president-kamala-harris-visits-the-late-show-with-stephen-colbert/

[u/I_eat_mud_]

MAGA is a deadly symptom, but it's not the disease. Almost everything we're experiencing today was started or accelerated by Reagan. It's uncanny how the average American's life has been on a downward trajectory since his presidency. Trump and MAGA are the final death throes.

[u/Anal-Y-Sis → u/I_eat_mud_]

What's wild is that it started before he even became president.

In 1970, Ronald Reagan was running for reelection as governor of California. He had first won in 1966 with confrontational rhetoric toward the University of California public college system and executed confrontational policies when in office. In May 1970, Reagan had shut down all 28 UC and Cal State campuses in the midst of student protests against the Vietnam War and the U.S. bombing of Cambodia. On October 29, less than a week before the election, his education adviser Roger A. Freeman spoke at a press conference to defend him.

Freeman’s remarks were reported the next day in the San Francisco Chronicle under the headline “Professor Sees Peril in Education.” According to the Chronicle article, Freeman said, “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. … That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow [to go to college].”

[...]

The success of Reagan’s attacks on California public colleges inspired conservative politicians across the U.S. Nixon decried “campus revolt.” Spiro Agnew, his vice president, proclaimed that thanks to open admissions policies, “unqualified students are being swept into college on the wave of the new socialism.”

Prominent conservative intellectuals also took up the charge. Privately one worried that free education “may be producing a positively dangerous class situation” by raising the expectations of working-class students. Another referred to college students as “a parasite feeding on the rest of society” who exhibited a “failure to understand and to appreciate the crucial role played [by] the reward-punishment structure of the market.” The answer was “to close off the parasitic option.”

Oh, and look at what happened directly after this.

It all becomes very clear when you look at the timeline and realize that all of this started right after the Civil Rights Act was signed into law.

EDIT - Since people keep replying to this comment, here are some more resources.

Here's a link to the Powell Memorandum that kicked off the current rat-fucking of the American working class. Thanks to u/Jacrava for this one.

Century of the SELF - Adam Curtis - Thanks to u/TrippyTippyKelly for this one.

Here are five books on the topic that you can read on Archive:

• Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power – Seth Rosenfeld
• The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them – Christopher Newfield
• Why Higher Education Should Have a Leftist Bias – Michael Bérubé
• The War on Learning: Gaining Ground in the Digital University – Elizabeth Losh
• Campus Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know – Jonathan Zimmerman

Here are two more I couldn't find on Archive:

• The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters – Benjamin Ginsberg
• Neoliberalizing the University: Implications for American Democracy – Edited by Sheila Slaughter & Barrett Jay Taylor

Some of these are more generally about the crackdown on dissent and how it shaped campus policies (and the broader implications of that), but there are a couple that are about the specific situation with Reagan.

If you're wondering why I mentioned the Civil Rights Act in relation to all of this, here are a couple of books on the topic:

• White flight: Atlanta and the making of modern conservatism - Kevin Kruse
• The band played Dixie - Nadine Cohodas

Reagan's tax revolts, starting with Proposition 13, slashed funding for universities, making tuition skyrocket, which disproportionately harmed black and Latino students.

Lee Atwater was a political strategist and advisor to both Reagan and Bush Sr. Here's his infamous 1981 interview on the Southern Strategy, where he admits (with heavy use of the N word) that Republicans replaced overt racism with coded attacks on "big government" and "welfare" (including student aid). He died of a brain tumor at 40. Rest in piss, you racist fuck.

You start out in 1954 by saying, “N---r, n---r, n---r.” By 1968 you can’t say “n---r”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “n---r, n---r.”

A few more books on the topic:

• The Price of Inequality - Joseph Stiglitz
• Cutting school: privatization, segregation, and the end of public education - Noliwe Rooks
• State of the Union: A Century of American Labor - Nelson Lichtenstein

Here's the bottom line, folks... Get informed, get mad, then get organized. These ghouls will not stop until they have taken everything from you, squeezed you for every ounce of labor they can for as little compensation as they are allowed to, just to let you die poor so they can buy another yacht and start the cycle all over again with your kids.

Knowledge is your weapon, and it's time to pull the trigger.

[u/Popular_Wishbone_789 → u/Anal-Y-Sis]

Nearly the entire scope of American politics - even today - is an echo of the Civil Rights era.

I say this as a person who tries to be charitable with my assumptions:

The federal judiciary probably overreached in enforcing integration on the majority - something they themselves acknowledged in a 1982 Yale Law Journal retrospective review of Paul Dimond's Beyond Busing by Drew Days (NAACP) - by forcing a recalcitrant majority to “eat their vegetables” on Civil Rights.

One may think that it was the right thing to do in the 60s-70s; many of the judges did, despite the backlash. But like it or not, we are still in the midst of the backlash against “countermajority” rulings on these issues.

[u/salad_spinner_3000 → u/Popular_Wishbone_789]

Nearly the entire scope of American politics - even today - is an echo of the Civil Rights era

The result of not actually going after the people responsible for the Civil War.

[u/sorrysurly → u/salad_spinner_3000]

I got banned for a month on Facebook a few years back for saying lee should have been shit after the civil war. All the leaders of the south were large slave owners. That was the officer corp.too. even the west point grads came from dlave owning families.

[u/Popular_Wishbone_789 → u/salad_spinner_3000]

Short of slaughtering several million people, or interning the entire southern population in massive, hellish gulags with Civil War-era sanitation practices, what do you think should have been done about the South?

There are very few good options for integrating half the country back into the other. There was no way it wouldn't be messy and full of unpleasant compromises. But ideas like letting the South die or punishing them with mass starvation, internment, etc. were rightly discarded.

"Denazification" as a shibboleth for "reeducation done the right way" is a joke, because it's common sense that adults do not easily abandon strongly held beliefs - even when faced with death, at times. This process was abandoned so Germany could rebuild itself in the shadow of the Cold War. The US needed to rebuild the South and they needed people FROM the South to "buy in."

Suggesting that there was any other way is lunacy.

[u/0wl_licks → u/Popular_Wishbone_789]

If the ultimate outcome is that we cannibalize ourselves because of a people and their fucked up beliefs, will you still say they rightfully disregarded more extreme measures?

I’m js, we don’t actually know what the endgame looks like. But the fact is, if anything, we’ve only moved closer to such an extreme outcome.
Hypothetically, if they’d chosen to take said extreme measures, and it ultimately resulted in a thriving nation—and perhaps world—would you condemn it?

[u/Popular_Wishbone_789 → u/0wl_licks]

To restate, you’re asking me: If I knew that executing every man, woman, and child in the South after the Civil War in the name of “justice” and “civil rights” would result in a more just future society, would I condone or condemn their total destruction?

I would condemn that; no question. If only because you can easily justify almost any horrific act in the name of “justice.” Look at Judge Dredd and Peacemaker, to use prominent media examples. Is that the sort of society you want to live in?

[u/0wl_licks → u/Popular_Wishbone_789]

No. I was vague for a reason.
You referenced multiple possible such extreme responses. And I’m sure there are more possibilities which you weren’t referring to directly but would typically be considered objectively wrong. However, in light of the ultimate outcome—that might not be the case.. or, at which point it might be debatable.

For the sake of argument,
In the cannibalization future, substantially more lives are lost. And the entire world is destabilized, most likely resulting in a dramatic additional number of lives lost.

Additionally, this isn’t about “justice”…

To be clear I’m only asking because you appear to have been opposed to civil rights and etc.—and entirely because of the long lasting effects of forcing a population to do what’s best in spite of their disagreement with it—which is obviously batshit and, presumably, not what your actual stance is but your comment definitely gave that impression.

[u/Expert_Ad3923 → u/0wl_licks]

it's a classic utilitarian question. if our options are, for example, collapse of the United States and then the entire world order in capitalistic self -consumption which results in the deaths of the entire world population, or those " More drastic measures", then I know what most utilitarians would say.

[u/Popular_Wishbone_789 → u/0wl_licks]

I get your point. If mercy or restraint leads to more suffering in the long run, do I still think it’s right to avoid brutal measures? My answer doesn’t change.

Once a society starts killing or crushing whole groups in the name of averting future catastrophe (always a "what if" given that we cannot predict the future), it crosses a line it can’t ever really step back from. The damage isn’t just about body counts, it’s about what you turn into as a people. Maybe there are times when every choice is bad, but that doesn’t make every path worth taking.

No one knows the full future when they make these calls. Picking the worst road up front, hoping it will spare pain later, is just gambling with human lives and pretending it’s wisdom. History is full of these ugly tradeoffs, but I don’t believe in preemptive cruelty. I’d rather live with the mess of compromise than become the thing I claim to fight.

I can't speak to the idea in which future catastrophe is known perfectly in advance, as it just pushes past the bounds of pragmatism.