don't leave out his destruction of the media as a balanced source of information when he signed the veto that killed the Fairness Doctrine. fuck that guy so hard.
Don't forget trickle down economics, we can also thank Ronnie R for that too! And ignoring the AIDS epidemic for years, because that only hurt "the coloreds and gays".
My understanding is that it only applied to broadcast networks and without serious reworking, we'd still have the misinformation we have on cable networks and the internet. I could see them maybe extending it to cable networks by now, had it stayed in place, but good luck policing it across thousands of websites putting out the tripe they do.
The Fairness Doctrine seems like it was potentially the right tool for the job at the time it was implemented, and perhaps killed way too early, but I'm not sure it would fit comfortably in the modern world.
(Oh, but yeah - fuck Reagan for nuking it when he did and the mountain of other shit he did to drag us onto this miserable fucking timeline, of course.)
I lived in a rural area in the the 80s and 90s, and much of the evil we have today began with Rush Limbaugh. We would be in such a better place today if the law had stopped that bastard.
I always hate the "time traveller kills Hitler" stchick.
Killing Reagan does not change the political climate that allowed him to rise to power. In fact killing him could have made things worse for the USA. See 9/11 for a recent example.
I wouldn't have killed Regan had I gone back in time, I would've gone a bit further back and after Rockerfeller got forced to sell standard oil, I would've offed him just before he was able to use the money he gained to form Chicago University and it's dreaded Chicago school of economics.(home to the ludicrous idea that the free market will regulate itself) Which I think had even worse consequences than Reganomics, if not directly influencing it.
At the very least, it would've likely extended the 30 years worth of post Roosevelt economic prosperity that decreased wage gaps, and actively created the middle class at least a bit longer before some other rich butthole got the same or a similar idea as Rockerfeller.
It's called the University of Chicago. And yup, it continues to be a vicious pile of shit to this day, fucking over the vulnerable communities around it, providing substandard health care and sitting on a 10 billion dollar endowment that they refuse to use to either raise employee wages or lower tuition. (Fun fact: They're projected to become the first university in the country to have six-figure tuition.)
The problem isn't even free market concepts, it's the idea that you can advocate for a free market in a highly regulated country. When the definition of corporation is controlled and liability is removed from individuals you can't have a free market.
That assumes you're only pulling off one time-travel assassination. What if you just keep doing them until the lack of the relevant people shifts the political climate by itself? Like in the "go back and kill Hitler (or just push him onto a different life path at a young age, if you have time travel, you can probably remove someone as a leader without just killing them), sure, maybe a different fascist rises in Germany instead, but if you take out that one too, and the next one, and the next, eventually someone who isn't a fascist will manage to get into office, or if you keep it up long enough, the german fascist movement will run out of viable leaders, and cease to be a major factor in the political climate of the time.
Killing Reagan does not change the political climate that allowed him to rise to power
You're both right and wrong. While it wouldn't change the circumstances that led to his election directly, he himself played a big part in CREATING those circumstances and perpetuating them to the point of the Trump cult eventually becoming all but inevitable.
Who knows? Maybe if we got rid of Reagan early enough, Bush the elder would work towards the "open borders" he argued for during the primary debate against him.
That's just one of dozens if not hundreds of issues where Bush the elder becoming potus earlier would, while not great, be much preferable to 8 years of Reagan. Hell, who knows? Might have made a more left wing candidate than Clinton the next president!
PS: everyone seems to be forgetting that, on top of his OWN bad policy choices, the country was pretty much run by the throat goat drug demonizer Nancy and his favorite astrologer towards the end where the dementia had made him incapable of doing much himself.
I just had the same thought, then went down an entire rabbit hole of who would actually be too blame. You're basically looking at social evolution, over millions of years, and trying to find the "start". It's impossible. Pick a spot, and pull.
That or talk Taft into conceding the Republican nomination in 1912 so that Roosevelt would have overseen WWI, rather than one of the guys that literally wrote Southern Revisionist bullshit, among many other things.
He did a lot of shitty things, but IMO the biggest was that between him and Thatcher in the UK, they shifted the western world economy towards neoliberalism. The biggest problem with that, amongst many other problems, is that it prioritised short term gains over long term sustainability.
That bit about it not being sustainable is why everything has been getting gradually shittier since about 2010. It's hard to look back on the last 40 years and not see the ideology as being much more than an asset strip of our public sectors and a carte blanche for bankers to fuck about without consequence.
One visited the Romans and saw what wonders the first Western Empire wrought. The other fella fully sold out everyone to the wealthy. Guess who gets shot!
Nah, I'm with the ladies here. Rome had it's pros and cons, but Reagan should have been catapulted into some lava the first time he said he was getting into politics.
To be fair.. as a boy.. this is my time machine hitlist..
Deliver the metric standard to the united states. Worth noting, the reasons and story of how america stuck to imperial is pretty crazy. Politics as usual, but also ships lost at sea and pirates.
Regan
Roberson. He invented the square drive screw head, but wouldn't license it out, so it was eventually overtaken by phillips head screws. Due to this, humanity has been cursed to stipping screw heads and having drivers pop out for centuries.