Your numbers aren’t in the Wikipedia page you linked.

You gave me percentages. I took the total numbers from Wikipedia and did basic math. Took less than five minutes, dude. Anyway, nothing in the rest of this comment that I haven’t already addressed, so I guess we’re done here. Good luck.

But the crime bill did not increase the number of Blacks incarcerated

Boy, I know I said I was going to stop, but you’re just so wrong all the time and I just can’t stop dunking on you. The crime bills of the 80s and the 1994 bill absolutely did increase the number if incarcerated black men. Even when the percentage went down, the population went up. Let’s look at those statistics in terms of real numbers:

1970: 328,020 prisoners, 134,488 black

1980 503,586 prisoners, 231,650 balck

1990 1,148,702 prisoners, 608,812 black

2000 1,937,482 prisoners, 697,494 black

2020 1,675,400 prisoners, 536,128 black

Source

So, even if you see the percentage going down, the actual number of black men being thrown in prison was increasing until the end of the Trump years. It’s also worth noting that we’re only looking at the racist implications of mass incarceration, but all in all, mass incarceration itself is a terrible, right-wing policy that has increased under Democratic and Republican administrations.

Funny enough, the only significant fall came during the Trump years, when the prison population fell 500,000 between 2018 and 2020. I highly doubt that had anything to do with Trump, and imagine it had more to do with Covid than anything else (and potentially state-level legalization of Marijuana), but it again shows that Democrats did little to curb mass incarceration.

OK, I’m really done now. I know I said it before, but I’m really done this time. I’ll stop spreading all this, “Russian propaganda,” that I became aware 20 fucking years ago when I was in college (damn, those Russians play a long game, huh?). I’m out. Good luck.

LOL, you’ve not proved me wrong, I just don’t care to debate, “It can be racist with if black politicians supported it,” with a guy who needed me to explain the crime bills to him. I said 5 comments ago that I shouldn’t bother with someone so ignorant of American politics, and I wish I’d stuck to that, because this is a waste of my fucking time. I’m out.

It’s probably easier to count the ones where the DNC didn’t have their thumb on the scale. First, it’s been way less than 100 years since voters even determined who the candidate was; before 1976, primaries were basically just opinion polls, and delegates picked who they wanted regardless of voter input. Also, after the Carter team blamed Ted Kennedy for their loss, the DNC started ostracizing candidates that made primary challenges, so they definitely put their thumb on the scale for incumbents. So off the bat, we’re looking at less than 50 years of primaries, and only in non-incumbent years.

Then the party definitely put its thumb in the scale for Clinton in 2016, Biden in 2020, and they literally just picked Harris in 2024. So, that means that the unbiased primaries would be Carter in '76, Mondale in "84, Dukakis in 88, Clinton in 92, Gore in 2000, Kerry in 2004 (though personally I think they kinda did a hit-job on Howard Dean) and Obama in 2008. Out of 12 primaries in over 48 years, 7 have been open and fair contests. About 58% successful in keeping their thumb off the scale.

Yeah, I’m not really interested in your thoughts on the legislation you just learned about from me a few hours ago, but thanks anyway.

Should have kept reading:

But one thing is clear: the 1994 bill interacted with—and reinforced—an existing and highly problematic piece of legislation: The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which created huge disparities in sentencing between crack and powder cocaine. Under this bill, a person was sentenced to a five-year minimum sentence for five grams of crack cocaine, but it took 500 grams of powder cocaine to trigger the same sentence. Because crack is a cheaper alternative to powder cocaine, it is more prominent in low-income neighborhoods. These neighborhoods are more likely to be predominately Black and in urban areas that can be overpoliced more easily than suburban or rural areas. While the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, enacted under the Obama-Biden administration, reduced the crack/powder cocaine disparity from 100:1 to 18:1, the damage had been done, and its effects continue to this day.

Do you see how this demonstrates the Ratchet Effect yet? Conservatives (and Joe Biden) pass a piece of legislation during the Reagan years that causes mass incarceration of black men. Clinton doesn’t move us back to the left, but passes legislation that reinforces the conservative legislation. The closest the Democrats get to, “turning the dial to the left,” is when Obama gets legislation passed that makes the problem 18 times worse for the black community instead of 100 times worse for the black community, and only after the bulk of the damage is already done. Do you see how even, even when the Democrats, “move us to the left,” things are still worse than where they started? That’s the Ratchet Effect.

“We can’t give everyone a trial!”

Smash cut to 250 years of giving everyone a trial.

That minorities are over represented in prison isn’t written into the crime bills.

It is. It created disproportionate mandatory minimum sentencing surrounding powdered and crack cocaine, and since crack cocaine was affecting the black community at much higher rates than the white community, this led to a huge increase in the incarceration of black Americans. To be blunt, this is common knowledge, and you should be embarrassed to be missing it.

I have given you multiple examples of the Ratchet Effect in American politics, but you lack the basic background to engage with them properly. You should start by looking into the Crime Bills of 1984 and 1994. Good luck.

Johnson, Democrat 1963. Too long ago to be relevant which is why I mentioned something newer.

I could keep going, but I just don’t have the time to keep going over nine administrations worth of legislation, only for you to say, “nuh-uh, here’s a single piece of legislation a Democrat passed once.”

??? Stopping crime is right wing?

If you don’t even know about the racist crime bills of the 80s and 90s then I shouldn’t continue this conversation. There are clearly large gaps in your knowledge regarding recent American history. It’s not my place to fill those gaps, but I also shouldn’t be berating you for them. Good luck.

OK, first off:

Both sides are NOT the same.

LITERALLY NO ONE SAID THAT. EVEN THE MEME SHOWS THAT THEY ARE DIFFERENT. IT’S NOT THAT THEY ARE THE SAME, IT’S THAT ONE IS SHIFTING RIGHT WHILE THE OTHER ONE IS NOT SHIFTING BACK.

OK, now that that’s out of the way…you think Biden was great for the environment because he limited (not banned, limited) Arctic drilling? Then why did oil production go up under him?

American oil production has reached its largest volume in recorded history—more than 13.2 million barrels per day in October, official figures show—outpacing its highest point under Donald Trump’s presidency, 13 million barrels daily in November 2019.

Environmentalists say that the levels of oil production seen at present in the U.S. are not necessary to facilitate the transition to renewable energy, and that it is within the president’s power to curtail it.

While domestic oil production has soared to new heights under Biden, figures produced by the Bureau of Land Management suggest his administration has not significantly reduced the number of drilling permits on public lands, despite the president saying in February 2020: “No more drilling on federal lands, period.” Newsweek

There’s tons more I could say; the BEACH Act is good, but it’s just amends the Clean Air Act to add testing for recreational waters. H.W. Bush did the same thing with the Clean Air Act Amendment in 1990, which effectively eliminated Acid Rain. Reagan and Bush were still both shit compared to their predecessors, but Clinton wasn’t significantly different.

You can see it in almost every issue. Crime? Biden championed the crime bill in the 80s that led to mass incarceration. The Clinton’s were even more zealous on incarceration (remember Hillary’s Super Predators?). Obama did speak out against mass incarceration, but he did little to curb it, and he started giving the police surplus military equipment. The economy? Carter was the one that started distancing Democrats from the New Deal, while Clinton deregulated Wall Street and paved the way for the 2008 crash; Obama response to that was basically the exact same bank bailouts that Bush had been doing, plus some weak regulation that was nothing compared to what Clinton repealed.

I could keep going, but I just don’t have the time to keep going over nine administrations worth of legislation, only for you to say, “nuh-uh, here’s a single piece of legislation a Democrat passed once.” I don’t know what to tell you. Look up Overton window, I guess.

Holy shit, I don’t know when I started misspelling Reagan’s name, but now I feel like I need to go through thousands of replies and figure it out, because this has definitely been going on for months.

It really isn’t that right-wing, especially economically, but there’s a lot of factors that make it seem that way. First is that it did go through a large, neoliberal shift in the 80s during the Regan years. When the economy crashed in the early 90s, the Democrats decided that, instead of returning to their New Deal roots, they would also run on neoliberal policies. The Republicans moved further right because of that, especially on social issues, and then the Rachet Effect described in the meme really started to ramp up.

Couple this with a lot of political illiteracy among the public in general, and you get a lot of people who actually don’t know what they believe and default to partisanship. If you poll people if they support gun control, you will get a very negative response, but if you break gun control into individual measures (longer waiting periods, mandatory background checks, magazine capacity limits, etc.) you get much more support. It’s the same on almost every issue; people don’t support a, “big government takeover,” of the healthcare system, but they broadly support Medicare for all. There’s a somewhat famous picture of a guy holding a sign that says something like, “Get Your Government Hands Off My Social Security,” that I think sums up this ignorance pretty well.

This attitude isn’t limited to the right, either. If you asked a Democrat “Who deregulated Wall Street?” they’d probably tell you Regan, Bush, or the other Bush. In actuality, the most significant deregulation, which lead directly to the 2008 financial collapse, was Clinton’s repeal of Glass-Steagal. Liberals think that Obama made significant progress on regulating Wall Street, but what he put in place was nothing compared to the deregulation that proceeded it.

Citizens United and the rise of mega donors also plays a pretty significant role in moving the parties away from policies that the general population want and towards the goals of a few oligarchs, but this reply is already way too long, so TL;DR: the country got pretty right-wing under Regan, both parties became more right-wing as a result, the population has become much more left-leaning since income inequality/cost of living went way up, but the parties are still both right-wing and most people are too ignorant to understand that.

If it’s a straight line from Nixon to Trump as you say, then why claim Republicans are environmentalists with Nixon as your example?

I’m not claiming Republicans are environmentalists, but if you want to know why they got so much worse on the environment, the answer is the Ratchet Effect. The thing you misinterpreted as, “both sides bad,” explains exactly how we got here. In Nixon’s era, environmental issues weren’t considered particularly partisan. Nixon, Ford, and Carter all had generally the same outlook on using the federal government to regulate corporations on the environment.

Then comes Regan with a lurch to the right. He tries to de-fang the EPA and hundreds of employees resign en mass. But he’s not all bad; he is instrumental in passing the Montreal Protocols, which effectively fixed the hole in the ozone layer, but he’s much worse than his predecessors. H.W. Bush was a little worse than that. He continued Regan’s deregulation campaign, and while he held several climate summits, he made no substantial moves on the climate.

With Clinton, we can see how the Democrats stopped the Party from moving back to the left on environmental issues. Clinton was, economically, very similar to Regan and Bush, and placed the corporate profits above the environment. He tried to make some progress with the Kyoto Protocols, but it was mostly ineffective, relying on cap-and-trade policies that did little to reduce emissions. Then it was the next Bush, who pulled us back out of Kyoto and was generally worse on all fronts for the environment. Next came Obama, who certainly has a mixed history on the environment. He put us in the Paris climate accords, but also went heavy on coal and fracking, plus approved the Keystone Pipeline. Finally we get Trump, who is a climate change denier and Captain Planet villain, which was interrupted by a brief interlude from Biden, who put us back in the Paris accords for a few years but also expanded American oil production.

Do you see how, over time, the Republicans move farther and farther to the right on the environment? Do you see how the Democrats fail to bring us back to the left when the retake power? That’s the Ratchet Effect. Democrats aren’t nice environmentalists that just want to fight the evil Republican polluters, they’re constantly shifting right with the Republicans. This is true for immigration, the economy, crime, and if guys like Gavin Newsom get their way, it will soon be LGBTQ rights as well. Your binary, black-and-white view on these issues just doesn’t reflect history or reality.

Well, there are a couple of differences there. First, Trump is an excellent media manipulator. Every moment that pundits thought would be a campaign-ending gaffe became free publicity. He got the equivalent of $2 billion in free media coverage from CNN alone.

Second, Trump didn’t actually say or do anything that would upset the donor class like progressives do. He was more vulgar and crass, and the RNC was certain he would cost them the election, but he wasn’t an existential threat to billionaires the way Bernie was.

However, if you want an example of how the RNC behaves when someone like that is running, look at the 2012 Republican Primary. Mitt Romney was the frontrunner, but the base was unenthusiastic about him and looking for someone different. Ron Paul polled in second place literally the entire campaign cycle, but the pundit class gave him no coverage. They wrote endlessly about Chirs Christie, Rick Santorum, and even Herman Caine, all of whom had brief moments as the frontrunner, but they completely ignored Ron Paul. His staunch libertarian beliefs threatened the defense industry and Wall Street, so the media and the party just pretended he didn’t exist. (For the record, Ron Paul was a wack-job and I’m glad he never became president, but the Bernie parallels are strong).

…except the centrists and neoliberals went to Trump. Hillary and Harris both spent their campaigns courting them, and they both lost. Biden, for all his faults, had Bernie help him craft a progressive policy agenda and won. The Democrats undermine the progressive wing of their own ostensibly left-leaning party in primaries and other intraparty conflicts, then get to the general elections and get wrecked because neoliberals would rather vote for the Republicans than pseudo-Republicans.

Democrats didn’t flip on gay rights until Obama

And Obama didn’t flip on gay marriage until the end of his first term. Biden came out in favor of it, which forced Obama’s hand, but it wound up being the right move; it energized the base when enthusiasm was starting to wane. Then, under Obama’s leadership, they continued to do nothing to establish gay marriage at the federal level.

No, dude…just…no. You tried to claim that saying, “a Republican founded the EPA,” and, “Republicans ended slavery,” were the same, even though there was a century of history between those events. More importantly, Nixon is exactly the person you don’t want to make that argument about, since Nixon is the very person who pivoted the party towards its modern strategy of using the politics of racial aggrievement to get working-class whites to vote against their self-interests. Going back to the Civil War, or even the early Civil Rights era, things get ideologically murky, but you can draw a straight line between Trump and Nixon.

First reply: “Giving Nixon credit for the EPA means you support Republicans and therefore Trump.”

Second reply: “NIxon was so long ago he doesn’t count.”

You can’t have it both ways. You can’t claim pointing out a good thing Nixon did means I support modern Republicans while also claiming Nixon happened so long ago that he’s not connected to modern Republicans.

It’s also just factually wrong to say, “it was so long ago, its like saying they’re the anti-slavery party.” Nixon represents the turning point for the Republican party, where they abandoned their support for Civil Rights and embraced the Southern Strategy. He’s basically the turning point for where the Republicans became the party we know today. He’s the reason it’s bullshit to point out Republicans are the party of Lincoln.

If you’re talking about the Respect for Marriage Act, that was passed a decade after the Supreme Court established gay marriage as the law of the land. The overturning of Roe made Democrats decide that they should codify gay marriage, since they saw how badly failing to codify abortion rights turned out. It also reopens the door for Civil Unions and passed with large Republican support, so I wouldn’t exactly call it a huge win for Democrats.

As for the EPA, I’m not sure what you’re talking about, but you are absolutely incorrect. Nixon proposed the EPA and NOAA through executive order, and it was later ratified by Congress. It’s possible you’re referencing some sort of dispute Nixon had with Congress on how they intended to create the EPA, but he absolutely supported it; it was his idea.