cross-posted from: https://lemmit.online/post/5566633
This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/todayilearned by /u/MechCADdie on 2025-04-04 08:19:11+00:00.
cross-posted from: https://lemmit.online/post/5566633
This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/todayilearned by /u/MechCADdie on 2025-04-04 08:19:11+00:00.
Jim Crow
Japanese Internment
Religious revivalism
The Wars on Crime / Drugs / Terror / Immigration, leading to the highest incarceration rate in the world
Two major Red Scares and a collapse in union membership
Intercontinent Ballistic Missiles with nuclear warheads
Some progress.
You really picked random negatives from a bunch of different decades?
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No they’re not. Those two things were caused by far greater international factors. Like, you know, the 2nd World War.
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The comment you’re responding to really doesn’t seem to be condoning those things; the thing being argued here is whether there was a push in a progressive direction, you said these events are evidence against that, which they countered with the idea that war has a regressive influence, something your quote is supporting.
Exactly: total failure of reading comprehension. Acts like bro saying that bad thing doesn’t support a conclusion means bro now endorses bad thing. Wut?
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If what you meant by “legitimate criticisms” was to say that criticism of these policies themselves is legitimate, that’s an extremely confusing way to say it given the context (both previous comments and the first part of your own comment), it very much sounds like you were saying something entirely different. I don’t think it’s fair to assume that someone objecting to your statement is objecting to that meaning of it.
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I think you’d have a really hard time finding someone on Lemmy genuinely trying to argue Japanese internment was a good thing, there’s no need to immediately jump to the conclusion that people are saying that especially if it makes way more sense that they were saying something else.
My apologies, I guess I wasn’t clear enough. My point was that it’s unfair to blame those things as results of progressive policies.
But hey, thanks for the gross mischaracterization of my perspective.
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Please allow me to clarify my perspective on this discussion.
This commenter associated a bunch of effects with the progressive era.
You then replied with a thoughtful response that questioned most of their points.
But then you wrote
At this point, I read that as you acknowledging those two points as legitimate criticisms against the progressive era. This is what I disputed. I think those are unfair criticisms, as far as I understood the words you wrote.
This is all I said. I’ve jumped to no other conclusions. I’ve said nothing against you or your character. I’ve made no other assumptions. I simply wrote a response based off the words you used.
I see you’ve further clarified your perspective as well, and understand that we’re of the same perspective on the matter. You have no need to be so defensive anymore, my dude.
Edit: the other commenter essentially proved that they were just baiting people into inflammatory discussion. They kept resorting to personal attacks and flip-flopped on their position solely to continue arguing. This behavior is not tolerated here. Please report such trolls in the future.
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I mean yeah. That’s the cyclic nature of politics, we learn a lesson and get a bit better, forget that lesson, get away worse, only to overcorrect and end up better than the first. We move pretty consistently leftward politically globally but only as a reaction to incredible periodic swings to the right.
This is simply not true. We advance technologically and we often mistake the mass media that comes out of these advances as social progress. But what we have historically endured over the last two centuries has been liberal rhetoric whitewashing much more reactionary and authoritarian policy than what our ancestors endured.
The long march has not been towards progress, but towards progressive pastiche.
There is no legitimate argument that we haven’t moved leftward over the last thousand or so years.
So progress that only seems like progress but progress is progress boss. I’m not sure what exactly you’re arguing but so far it seems… Outlandish and removed from reality.
The colonial era of the 1400s to 1900s resulted in an industrial scale enclosing, enslaving, and extermination of entire ethnic cohorts. This was not a leftist move by any definition. It was 500 years of settler colonialism which resulted in some of the most abysmal living conditions in recorded history.
We have not yet recovered from this massive global reconfiguration of human society. While we enjoy more advanced tools and industrial scale infrastructure, we remain both socially and physically less independent of our authoritarian oligarchs than we were prior to the European Imperialist Era.
We have a modern economic system that produces more homes than people, while guaranteeing a certain population will remain homeless their entire lives. We have a system that produces enormous surpluses of food, but guarantees a segment of the population will remain malnurished. We have a system that produces vast excesses of professional expertise, but guarantees only a fraction of the population can access professional services.
All of our shortages are manufactured. Trump’s latest tariff wave is the most blindingly obvious example of how these shortages are imposed - not even via some convoluted market mechanism, but through the whims of an authoritarian madman.
This is not progress in a social sense. It is a huge regression from our historical roots. We are prisoners of the state and of the economy, subject to arrest, torture, and execution at the whim of the local leadership. And the only reason you and I are not personally under a boot right now is because we haven’t been targeted yet.
Horseshit opinion.
You described literal progress only to say it’s the illusion of progress. You aren’t even making logical sense.
I’m describing the systematic roll-back of free travel, free trade, and freedom of individuals to co-mingle absent legal barriers.
We need paperwork to cross borders. We need documentation to legally accept offers for work. We need licenses from the state to formalize marriage. We can be arrested, detained indefinitely, and subject to physical and psychological abuse without so much as an official reason by state officials. We can be conscripted into war, extorted for our wages, and deprived of our homes and personal effects at the whims of state officials.
And to top it all off, we have an entire industrial education establishment that compels us to repeated the dogged lies that this is progress. We have state-sponsored celebrations intended to lionize our enslavers. We have parades of security service workers through the center of our townships, paid for with wealth looted from our own pockets, to drive home how occupied we all are.
How the fuck is that progress?
Yes, periodically we just went over this and you seem to be intentionally missing the point and spouting random unrelated bullshit.
Permanently. We’ve been on this road for decades.
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The Caribbean Islands, a lifetime before Columbus arrived, were as close to Utopia as anything dreamed up in fiction.
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Thanks to modern technological innovations, sure. Clean air/water, safer public transit, vaccines, etc go a long way towards improving quality of life for everyone, including the bottom of the social hierarchy. But has a black person in 2025 enjoyed the same degree of prosperity as a white peer over the intervening years? Absolutely not, and for the same reasons. They’re more predisposed to experience tainted air/water, they are comparatively less safe traveling, they have diminished access to modern medicine like vaccines and prenatal care, etc, etc.
And this is a deliberate function of public policy. The sky-high arrest rate of African Americans (particularly while traveling) is the result of a Nixon Era campaign to over-police black and brown neighborhoods that every subsequent executive and governor seems to have endorsed. The higher rates of cancer, the higher rates of obesity and malnutrition, the higher rates of disease transmission and mortality from preventable illness or injury all stem from eugenics policies pioneered in the OG Progressive Era. Even some of the pseudoscientific theories around mental, physical, and social aptitudes have endured.
The arrest rates of black men peaked in the 90s, during the height of the Reagan War on Crime. They’ve fallen off somewhat in comparison to arrests and harassment of hispanics and east asians, but are nowhere close to comparable to white peers. This is downwind of the reactionary media hijacking progressive language and ideology and weaponizing it against a population that its leadership believes is subhuman.
What we have in the modern era is rationalization of reactionary policy in progressive terms. The propaganda we experience is caped in progressive language. But the goals are the exact opposite.
For what it is worth, Jim Crow predated and outlasted the Progressive Era in the US. I wouldn’t so much apply causation there.
But it also ended in the 20s. It mainly achieved Women’s suffrage in the US.
Okay, so you’re talking about the 1890s-1920s “Progressive” Era of Prohibition and Sufferage.
Not the 1930s-70s New Deal / Great Society period of progressivism that was great for middle class white people and maybe a little less great for African Americans, East Asians, and American Natives who had to claw their way into a post-industrial standard of living against all the best efforts of the settlers.
Again, I might suggest you look back at the history of the T.Roosevelt to Wilson administration and reconsider whether this is the benchmark for progress you’ve been sold on.
Yeah, as that’s what that time period is called: “Progressive Era”.
No, I am not referring to the period following Prohibition Era and the Great Depression which was an intermediate (1920s-1930s) before New Deal.
If you’re taking issue with the ‘Progressive Era’ being called ‘Progressive’ then sure. I get you then. It mostly just achived women’s suffrage as a meaningful milestone, as I said.
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Before Jim Crow was Reconstruction, which was the real Progressive Era for African Americans. The Freedman’s Bureau, elections overseen by the Union Army where black citizens were guaranteed a vote, mass migration out of southern plantations and into the industrialized north, and real (abet fleeting) economic progress for the millions of newly liberated peoples.
The Federal War on Drugs began with the Smoking Opium Exclusion Act of 1909, squarely in the thick of the Roosevelt/Wilsonian Prohibitionist period. You could argue that prohibition wars were going on decades earlier, at the state level. Similarly, the War on Terror was an outgrowth of the War on Crime, which has its roots back to the post-Reconstruction South and the prison exclusion of the 13th Amendment.
The liberal/conservative tug-of-war over popular support for government is a tug-of-war. But the underlying policies have a strong through-line going back over a century. Policing, surveillance, and the administrative state bloat with each new administration, following different rhetorical lines but always moving towards the same effective end.
Monarchies rose and fell for thousands of years prior. They did not end, they only changed their form. Regional and sectoral dictatorships are alive and well in the modern era, from explicit Kingdoms in the Middle East to vertically integrated monopolies governed by tyrannical CEOs in the West.
The only exceptions are where popular movements have successfully revolutionized the government, democratized capital, and hedged out foreign financial parasites.
The United States is not one such place.