Another old one
Posting this here primarily because I miss my dad. This was from the night of or day after the November 5th, 2004 federal elections in America – an absolute debacle for sense and right:
My father fairly nailed it: "Sure they already have an agenda. Republicans have been planning for this since FDR. Remember that when Roosevelt came into office he had to break the stranglehold the rich had on the country to keep people from starving to death. Everything he managed to do with the New Deal will be reversed or relaxed. What we're going to see is the Anti-New Deal. {…} There are two basic views of governance. They can overlap in places but their extremes are perfectly opposed. One is the view that governments have a responsibility to soothe the brutality of nature; that the reason we form governments is to provide a safety net and for that we agree to pay taxes. The other view is that governments should be limited in their abilities and the market should be left to function on its own. The second extreme - pure monetary greed - will now be allowed to function freely. Workers' ability to unionize will be limited; punitive damages will be arbitrarily limited (as has already happened in this activist Court, regarding, for example, a person's ability to sue over first-time excessive discrimination {long example excised}); tax-laws for companies, which are already anemic, will be further relaxed; and everything will be commercialized, including and especially Social Security - which will disappear as we know it. You're right McAuliffe doesn't get it; Bush's handlers now have no limits. And they all agree so there's no hope of repeating Clinton's first two years. Bush is better than Coolidge for the Rightist elite - well, that's redundant - for the elite in this country. Coolidge at least had an understanding of economics. Bush knows nothing, so he'll do and say whatever Cheney et al. want. He's too stupid to think things over first."
Call it the Old Deal, watch the country slip back into our ugly plutocratic past, and remember: What's good for the market, is good for Americatm.
This may be overwrought and dire, but we were only saved from it, insofar as we were saved from it, by incompentence. In fact, it's all that's saved us in the years of conservative dominance since. The 2000 election was consequential to a degree none of us realistically thought possible.