Wow I never even knew that. As if their voters werenât ignorant to so much alreadyâHOW DO THEY CONVINCE THEMSELVES THESE BORN-RICH, IVY LEAGUE, COUNTRY CLUB WASPS ARE ON THEIR SIDE???
Sorry for yelling. It just always plunges way lower than simply âdoesnât make senseâ.
To be faaaiiir, Dubya had been doin the oil baron thing and ruining the Texas Rangers (baseball team, not the LEOs) for years before they elected him to the governorship⌠but heâs about as elite as they come, blue blood New Englander to the bone. The accent is also fabricated, take a listen to Jeb! to hear what he âshouldâ speak like.
Funny thing is, theyâve done it for decades. Trump is a rich kid from Queens that literally lived atop a golden tower on 5th Ave, the Bushes are multi-generational American royalty, Reagan was a (shitty) Hollywood actor. Ya gotta go back to Nixon to find a working class Republican president (and he was still a Californian lawyer, certified âcoastal eliteâ by the time he rose to national prominence).
Meanwhile ya gotta go back to Kennedy to find a Democratic president from the real deal upper crust⌠and I partially blame them (and the Roosevelts) for instilling the modern myth of the gregarious rich in the minds of Americans. Note: the Kennedys (not you Joe or Jr) and Roosevelts were great, but they left an imprint on older generations especially, regarding the intent of the elite.
True, but the Kennedys and FDR never put on a plaid shirt, baseball cap and a Carhartt barn coat to try to convince everyone they were just ordinary working class folks.
If I remember right, there was a mini scandal in the twenties when Coolidge was photographed fly fishing, but was still wearing a pair of expensive, shiny black dress oxfords along with the rest of his fishing garb.
No, for the most part they were honest with themselves and the public about the privilege they had been born into (back before privilege was a four letter word). Funny ya left off Teddy tho, who very much did play up his rough riding everyman persona (tho to be fair, he actually was bout that life⌠just VERY wealthy while bein bouttit).
Thing is, before Reagan, it was considered uncouth, if not patently gauche to be so blatantly, visibly self-serving as a blue blood. Funny enough, Trump was pretty much the poster boy of the decadent 80âs nouveau riche. Inna way, his presidency is the ultimate culmination of the mindset⌠poetic⌠and tragic⌠poegic.
TR and FDR both got to see, hear and smell real poverty, up close. They knew that Americans should never have to live that way and were determined to use their wealth and status to make a difference.
People called FDR both a fascist and a communist (!) and called both of them "traitors to their class"
Prescott Bush (HWâs pops/Dubyaâs gramps) was VERY vocally opposed to FDR, and mightâve even played a role in The Business Plot, a foiled military coup to oust him. At the very least, he was a Nazi sympathizer and generally uncool cat.
Yeah I remember hearing that as well. As popular as FDR was in hindsight, a lot of people don't realize that he was also very very veryveryvery controversial.
O, you still run into folks that hate him, waaay more often in the last decade. Arguably the most popular president of all time, four successful elections, most landslides (obviously that canât be repeated barring an amendment or repeal of the 22nd). That said, far from perfect, Japanese internment camps being the one everybody loves to bring up (and usually by people that wouldâve LOVED Japanese internment camps if they lived back when).
Personally donât see how you keep him out of the top three with Lincoln and Washington (tho the whole owning humans as property thing is kinda hard to get over with Washington). Dealt with The Great Depression, instrumental in the Allied victory in WWII, oversaw the creation of the modern American welfare state leading to the biggest explosion of the middle class ever seen on earth (this is a good thing), basically created global American hegemony (this is a debatable thing hah).
Landscape entirely different these days tho, and I mainly blame the media being captured and conglomerated by the aforementioned new breed of nouveau riche. AM radio, Fox News, totally uncurated but targeted social media algorithms⌠blatant editorialism if not outright bullshit masquerading as journalism. Know it gets harped on incessantly, but the downfall of professional journalism and how itâs delivered to people has been catastrophic. Led to the erosion of trust in many of our institutions, academia, science, and the arts specifically.
But I digress⌠FDR⌠pretty solid cat that one.
I am also soo sick of hearing about the Kennedys being these great people! JFK was not this great Person they made him out to be...typical im rich and ill do what I want no matter the hurt it causes others
People said that about FDR because of his collectivist politics, because communism and fascism are collectivist. They also called him commie because of his anti-business class rhetoric and policies. It's the same thing as today when people call trump a fascist or Biden a socialist. It's just to score political points by exaggerating.
Despite some of FDR's political achievements the fact of the matter is he presided over 90 months of unbroken disaster unemployment and failed to get us out of the Depression, which was abated ultimately by the reorientation of the world economy to war followed by American economic hegemony, not by New Deal policies, which came to an end with US entrance to WW2 (when aspects of the Depression began to abate). It's not a coincidence the two things happened in concert.
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u/MoonSpankRaw 21d ago
Wow I never even knew that. As if their voters werenât ignorant to so much alreadyâHOW DO THEY CONVINCE THEMSELVES THESE BORN-RICH, IVY LEAGUE, COUNTRY CLUB WASPS ARE ON THEIR SIDE???
Sorry for yelling. It just always plunges way lower than simply âdoesnât make senseâ.