Why is One Man Always Blamed For Everything Wrong With America?

0:00 If you spend long enough looking at the financial and economic data,

0:03 you would be forgiven for thinking that almost

0:05 everything is getting worse all the time.

0:07 Our national debt has become an almost unsolvable issue.

0:10 Inequality has reached guilded age levels.

0:12 Union membership has collapsed.

0:14 Wages have stagnated even as productivity soared.

0:16 People are saving less of the money they do make.

0:19 Corporate bankruptcies are up over a,000%.

0:21 Our life expectancy has fallen behind almost every other advanced economy.

0:25 and our incarceration rates have more than

0:27 quadrupled in the last 40 years alone.

0:30 It's pretty bleak stuff, but if you look closely enough,

0:33 you might notice that these numbers all started moving

0:35 in the wrong direction at around about the same time.

0:38 Depending on who you ask, Ronald Reagan was either one of the best presidents

0:42 in history or one of the worst presidents in history.

0:44 And it's that disconnect that makes a candid recount

0:47 of his achievements and failures so hard to find.

0:49 This split of opinions is not helped by the fact

0:52 that political polarization is at its highest level since the Civil War.

0:56 Ironically, another trend that started right

0:58 here with the election of Ronald Reagan.

1:00 No matter what side of the fence you sit on, one thing nobody can take

1:04 away from him is that more so

1:06 than perhaps anybody else in modern American history,

1:08 his marks can clearly be seen in almost any metric you might look at.

1:12 For better or worse,

1:13 no other president has altered the course of the economy this significantly.

1:17 But it is possible that old Ronnie gets a lot

1:20 of credit and or criticism that he wasn't directly responsible for.

1:24 Before blaming all of our problems on just one man,

1:27 it's important to understand the circumstances

1:29 that made him possible in the first place.

1:31 What really compelled so many people to vote against their own best interest?

1:34 And why haven't we been able to undo these changes in the last 40 years since

1:39 now in violation of the laws that one

1:42 supervisor referred to with regard to his children?

1:44 And I am hoping that they will

1:46 in a sense remove themselves from the lawb breakaker.

1:49 We'll protect the needy while it triggers

1:51 a recovery that will benefit all Americans.

1:53 It is no coincidence that our present

1:56 troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention

1:59 and intrusion in our lives that result

2:02 from unnecessary and excessive growth of government.

2:04 It is time for us to realize that we are too great a nation.

2:09 Tear down this wall.

2:12 Ronald Reagan had one of the most

2:14 unusual origin stories in American political history.

2:16 A story that he was able

2:18 to leverage very effectively throughout his entire career.

2:21 Reagan was born in Dixon, Illinois, the son of a struggling shoe salesman

2:24 and a mother who by most accounts was emotionally distant.

2:27 She reportedly raised him with a lot of religion but not a lot of warmth.

2:32 He moved to Hollywood with the hopes of becoming a movie star.

2:35 And while he succeeded in getting roles,

2:37 he was never particularly good at filling them.

2:39 Over the next two decades, he appeared in dozens of forgettable bee movies,

2:43 mostly supporting roles that nobody remembers today.

2:45 But what he lacked in talent, he more than made up for in other assets.

2:50 The man was handsome, charismatic, and genuinely believable on screen in a way

2:53 that had nothing to do with his ability to act.

2:56 More importantly, Reagan was a joiner.

2:58 In the 1940s, he became politically active in Hollywood,

3:02 joining various progressive and left-leaning organizations,

3:05 eventually resulting in him becoming elected

3:07 president of the Screen Actors Guild,

3:09 a body representing film actors in negotiations with the studios.

3:12 For the next 8 years,

3:14 Reagan would negotiate contracts, fight for better conditions,

3:17 and defend the rights of his members against studio

3:19 executives who wanted to pay them as little as possible.

3:22 During this entire time, he insisted he was a committed Democrat

3:25 and a friend of the people making the movies.

3:27 Now, the Hollywood studios were not particularly thrilled about any of this.

3:31 Organized groups of performers demanding higher pay

3:33 was a threat to their profit margins, so they pushed back.

3:36 While he was still on the board of the union,

3:39 Reagan was given a job hosting General Electric Theater.

3:43 The rule paid a reported $125,000 a year in 1950s dollars,

3:47 which was extraordinary even by Hollywood standards at the time.

3:51 The only problem was that General Electric was one

3:54 of the most aggressively anti-UN companies in the country.

3:58 Reagan's politics began to change.

4:00 By the late 1950s, his speeches sounded distinctly different.

4:03 The man who had spent a decade

4:05 defending performers against exploitations was now warning

4:08 that organized groups demanding better conditions were

4:10 the real threat to the American economy,

4:12 leaning on messaging about communist sympathizers in the ranks.

4:15 Throughout history, these kinds of political flip-flops have not been unusual.

4:19 It's easy to fight for the working man until it becomes profitable not to.

4:23 Just last month, we explored how Mousolini went from a staunch

4:26 socialist to the father of modern fascism within the span

4:28 of a few months as it became more advantageous

4:30 to align himself with the industrialists that could support his messaging.

4:34 Now, hopefully it should go without saying

4:36 that Reagan's messaging was never that extreme.

4:39 But this behind-the-scenes flip-flop would actually later become the centerpiece

4:42 of his political messaging as he could simultaneously present himself as a man

4:46 of the people union leader and at the same time also

4:48 being a wealthy friend of business depending on who was listening.

4:52 To complete the transition,

4:53 Reagan formally switched parties and became a Republican in 1962,

4:56 just one year after leaving his second term

4:59 as the president of the Screen Actors Guild.

5:01 The interesting part though was how he sold it.

5:04 He was very hard to debate over his anti-worker stances because he could

5:08 always fall back on the gotcha factoid that he was a union president,

5:11 something that none of his political opponents could challenge him on.

5:14 What he rarely mentioned were the 15 years spent

5:17 working against those same interest once the right check arrived.

5:21 Rean ran for governor of California.

5:23 Back then, California was a solidly Republican state.

5:26 The deep blue liberal stronghold we know today was at that time

5:30 governed by Republicans and voting Republican in nearly every election.

5:34 Reagan's campaign was simple.

5:35 The government was too big.

5:37 Taxes were too high.

5:38 California needed someone who believed in business,

5:40 but somehow also still had the best interest of the little guy in mind.

5:44 As governor, Reagan proved radical in his ambitions.

5:47 He cut social spending,

5:48 reduced benefit eligibility, and fought environmental regulations.

5:51 He also became an early champion of what would later be called the war on drugs,

5:56 an approach that treated substance abuse as a criminal problem rather than

5:59 a medical one and would eventually

6:01 lead to mass incarceration on unprecedented scales.

6:03 But before that, there was the matter of becoming president.

6:07 By the late 1970s, America's economy was in serious trouble.

6:11 Inflation had risen to nearly 14%, interest rates were astronomical,

6:15 and the average American's purchasing power was declining steadily.

6:18 Families who had felt secure were now struggling to pay their bills.

6:22 Jimmy Carter was widely blamed for these problems.

6:24 Whether fairly or not, Carter had become associated with weakness, humiliation,

6:28 and a country that felt like it was losing its way.

6:31 Americans were hungry for change in whatever form it would take.

6:35 Ronald Reagan promised that change.

6:37 Lower taxes, deregulation,

6:38 the removal of rules governing how businesses could operate,

6:42 strength abroad, and prosperity at home.

6:44 The core of his economic message was that if

6:46 we just got out of the way of business, everything would improve.

6:49 Reagan won the 1980 election in a landslide carrying 44 states.

6:52 He had a mandate.

6:54 He had the charisma to sell almost anything, but he did not have Congress.

6:59 The Senate flipped Republican,

7:00 but the House of Representatives stayed firmly Democrat by a significant margin.

7:05 Now, this was actually one of the most interesting parts of the story because it

7:09 showed that split ticket voting was far more common back then than it is today.

7:13 Millions of Americans voted for Reagan as president and then

7:16 turned around and voted Democrat for their local representative.

7:19 It arguably showed that Reagan's landslide was just as much about

7:22 people liking his messaging as it was about people hating Carter.

7:26 And it also meant that to get anything done,

7:28 Reagan would have to convince Democrats to vote with him, which he did.

7:32 Within his first year,

7:33 Reagan signed one of the largest tax cuts in American history.

7:37 The top marginal rate dropped from 70% to 50% overnight.

7:40 Lower earners got smaller cuts.

7:42 And that was just the tax policy.

7:44 At the same time, he began gutting

7:47 regulations across every sector of the economy.

7:50 Banking, environmental protection, workplace safety, all of it.

7:52 When the air traffic controllers went on strike for better conditions,

7:56 Reagan fired all 11,345 of them and banned them from the profession for life.

8:01 And that was just the first year.

8:03 So, it's time to learn how history works and to find out what happened when one

8:07 of the most charismatic presidents in American history got

8:10 everything he asked for and why 40 years later, nobody has been able to undo it.

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9:31 Now, behind the headlines about tax cuts and deregulation,

9:34 something much larger was quietly taking shape.

9:36 The rules governing how wealth was distributed, how information was consumed,

9:39 and how ordinary people could push back against

9:42 those in power were all being rewritten at the same time.

9:45 The economy recovered, markets climbed, inflation fell,

9:47 and nobody paid much attention to what else was

9:50 changing because things felt like they were getting better.

9:53 By the time the consequences became visible,

9:55 it was far too late to reverse them.

9:57 Now, at the time, Reagan's ideas were not entirely wrong.

10:01 The economy was genuinely broken.

10:03 Inflation was destroying savings.

10:05 Productivity was stagnant, and many economists, including left-leaning ones,

10:08 believed something radical had to be done.

10:11 Tax cuts and deregulation seemed like

10:13 potentially reasonable responses to an economy

10:15 that had been suffocating under the weight of its own bureaucracy.

10:18 The problem is what came after.

10:19 Remember those House Democrats who kept their seats?

10:22 Many of them held views that would

10:24 be considered quite conservative by modern standards.

10:26 They believed in cutting social programs and strengthening the military.

10:29 This mattered enormously.

10:31 When Reagan came into office,

10:33 many of them were willing to negotiate and many of them agreed to.

10:36 Reagan used a budgetary mechanism called a reconciliation bill

10:39 to bundle massive policy changes into a single legislative package.

10:43 Instead of debating each tax cut, each regulation change,

10:46 each spending decision individually, it all went through at once.

10:50 Congress passed the Economic Recovery Tax Act.

10:52 The wealthy got massive tax cuts relative to the lower earners.

10:56 By 1986, Reagan had cut the top rate again to just 28%

11:00 which meant it had been reduced by more than 60% in 5 years.

11:05 Simultaneously, the government removed rules governing everything

11:07 from banking to environmental protection to workplace safety.

11:10 The theory behind all of this was called supply side economics.

11:14 Tax the wealthy less and they will invest more,

11:16 create more jobs, and grow the economy faster.

11:19 The extra growth will then generate more tax revenue,

11:21 which will ultimately balance the budget.

11:23 Now, whether or not you think that sounds too

11:25 good to be true is kind of besides the point,

11:27 because in the short term, it kind of worked.

11:30 Inflation began to fall.

11:31 The economy started recovering.

11:33 unemployment dropped.

11:34 It looked like Reagan had fixed what Carter could not.

11:37 So far so good, right?

11:38 But the short-term success of these policies

11:40 was used to justify maintaining them forever.

11:42 If someone is having a severe allergic reaction,

11:45 the correct response is adrenaline.

11:47 Adrenaline works.

11:48 It is life-saving, but you should not administer

11:51 it every day for the rest of their life.

11:54 Once the emergency passes, the same treatment becomes counterproductive.

11:57 Reagan and his successors never grasp that distinction or chose not to.

12:01 Tax cuts and deregulation worked in the crisis of 1980 to 1983.

12:05 They continued these same policies for the next

12:08 four decades and the consequences are still unfolding today.

12:12 Now remember that air traffic controller strike?

12:14 Well, the full story gets much worse.

12:16 These were people guiding planes in and out of airports.

12:19 One of the most stressful jobs in the country.

12:22 Long hours, dangerous conditions, and relatively modest pay at the time.

12:26 Patco, the union representing them,

12:28 had been negotiating for better compensation.

12:30 management had refused to budge, so they went on strike.

12:33 Reagan declared the strike illegal and gave

12:35 the controllers 48 hours to return to their posts.

12:38 When they did not, he fired every single one of them.

12:42 Sounds pretty bad, right?

12:43 Well, after they didn't go back to work,

12:46 he banned them from working in the profession

12:48 and government ever again for life.

12:50 Reagan replaced them with non-members and military personnel.

12:53 The message to every organized body in America was unmistakable.

12:56 If you try to bargain, if you challenge your employer, you will be destroyed.

13:01 Across the country, the threat

13:03 of collective action effectively disappeared overnight.

13:05 For decades, the ability to withhold services had been

13:08 the primary tool available to people negotiating for better pay.

13:12 Now, the government had demonstrated it would simply crush anyone who tried.

13:16 Membership in these organizations began to decline immediately.

13:19 As that negotiating power evaporated, wages stagnated, and they never recovered.

13:24 Reagan also changed immigration policy in ways that reinforced this dynamic.

13:28 The Immigration Reform and Control Act expanded temporary

13:31 visa programs that tied people to specific employers.

13:33 If a visa holder left their job, they lost legal status in the country.

13:38 Critics pointed out that this was another mechanism

13:40 for suppressing the ability for ordinary people to demand

13:44 better conditions by introducing a supply of labor who

13:47 could not push back even if they wanted to.

13:49 Now, throughout all of this, Reagan

13:51 continued to reference his time representing performers.

13:53 He would mention it in speeches, interviews, and campaign advertisements.

13:57 I was president of the Screen Actors Guild.

14:00 I understand the concerns of everyday Americans.

14:02 The public believed him.

14:04 They saw a man who had once fought for better conditions.

14:07 They did not necessarily connect that with the subsequent years spent

14:10 quietly dismantling those same protections once

14:13 General Electric started signing the checks.

14:15 But Reagan's impact extended far beyond economics.

14:17 Remember those House Democrats who voted

14:19 with Reagan on tax cuts and deregulation?

14:22 They did so because back then, broadcasting rules actually forced politicians

14:26 to engage with opposing viewpoints.

14:28 The Fairness Doctrine was an FCC rule that required

14:31 broadcasters to give roughly equal airtime to different political perspectives.

14:35 If a network ran a segment supporting Reagan's tax cuts,

14:37 they had to give airtime to someone arguing against them.

14:40 This mattered because it meant voters were exposed

14:42 to both sides whether they liked it or not.

14:45 Democrats and Republicans had to coexist in the sameformational universe,

14:48 which is partly why so many of those House Democrats were

14:51 willing to work with a Republican president in the first place.

14:54 Reagan believed this was government overreach, so he removed it.

14:58 What followed was the birth of explicitly partisan broadcast media.

15:02 Rush Limbbo show became the perfect example.

15:06 Cable news networks began creating openly

15:08 partisan programming instead of attempting balance.

15:11 Fox News took this to its logical conclusion.

15:13 Within a decade, Americans could

15:15 live in completely separateformational universes.

15:17 Conservatives consumed only conservative media.

15:20 Progressives consumed only progressive media.

15:23 They stopped sharing basic facts about reality.

15:26 They stopped being able to have productive conversations about anything.

15:30 This was not inevitable.

15:32 The conditions that made it possible were created by a specific policy decision.

15:36 Now, it's worth pointing out that one of the reasons split ticket

15:39 voting was so common before Reagan is because of the fairness doctrine.

15:43 Voters were exposed to nuance arguments from both sides,

15:46 which made it much easier to vote for the best candidate regardless of party.

15:50 Once that rule disappeared, so did nuance, and so did the split tickets.

15:55 The escalation of the war on drugs had similarly devastating consequences.

15:59 The rhetoric framed substance abuse as a national emergency.

16:02 The threat was overstated.

16:04 The science was questionable, but politically it was perfect.

16:07 Drugs were presented as an enemy requiring military-style force.

16:10 What followed was unprecedented expansion of law enforcement and incarceration.

16:15 Mandatory minimum sentences increased.

16:17 Police funding exploded.

16:18 And a prison industrial complex emerged that incentivized

16:21 locking people up rather than rehabilitating them.

16:24 The United States now incarcerates more people

16:27 per capita than any other developed nation,

16:29 more even than many authoritarian regimes.

16:32 This did not happen by accident.

16:35 So, how was one man able to accomplish all of this?

16:39 Several things aligned perfectly.

16:40 First, Reagan inherited a genuine crisis.

16:43 Carter left office with 14% inflation and public confidence had been shattered,

16:48 which gave Reagan enormous political capital.

16:50 When the economy was breaking,

16:52 voters will tolerate radical solutions they might otherwise reject.

16:56 Second, charisma.

16:57 27 years as an actor had taught Reagan how to deliver

17:01 a message that felt authentic even when the substance was questionable.

17:04 Wealth will trickle down.

17:06 We will all rise together.

17:08 People wanted to believe that, so they did.

17:11 Third, timing.

17:12 The baby boomers were entering the peak of their earning years.

17:16 They were a massive generation and a powerful voting block.

17:19 Affluent people tend to vote for lower taxes,

17:22 even when those cuts come at the expense

17:24 of services that help people who are not them.

17:27 Fourth, Democrats were weak.

17:29 Many congressional Democrats held conservative

17:31 views and sympathized with Reagan's agenda.

17:33 No unified opposition emerged because in many

17:36 ways there was significant agreement across party lines.

17:40 Fifth, the reconciliation mechanism by bundling enormous

17:43 policy changes into a single legislative package.

17:46 Reagan avoided having to defend each decision individually.

17:49 Tax cuts, deregulation, and spending changes all went through together

17:53 before most Americans fully understood what was happening.

17:57 And finally, Reagan had an enemy, communism.

18:01 Anyone who organized could be painted as a communist sympathizer.

18:05 Environmentalists became enemies of prosperity.

18:07 You were with Reagan or you were with the communists.

18:11 There was no middle ground.

18:13 Now, here is where it gets complicated.

18:15 Because Regan's legacy is not as simple as one man ruined everything.

18:19 Many of the trends people blame on Reagan

18:21 were already in motion before he took office.

18:24 Manufacturing had been declining since the 1960s.

18:27 Globalization was reshaping economies around the world

18:30 regardless of who occupied the White House.

18:32 Reagan did not create these forces,

18:34 but he removed every guardrail that might have managed them.

18:38 When manufacturing moved overseas,

18:40 there was no retraining programs because Reagan had cut them.

18:43 When corporations consolidated into monopolies,

18:45 there was no enforcement because Reagan had gutted the agencies responsible.

18:49 When wealth concentrated at the top, there was no progressive tax structure

18:52 to redistribute it because Reagan had cut taxes.

18:55 The trends were already happening.

18:57 Reagan ensured that there was nothing standing in their way.

19:01 And perhaps the most lasting damage was psychological.

19:04 Reagan sold a story about how the economy works that 40 years later,

19:09 Americans still largely believe.

19:10 The idea that wealth created at the top

19:13 eventually benefits everyone at the bottom.

19:15 That government is always the problem, never the solution.

19:17 that if you are struggling, it is because you have not worked hard enough.

19:21 This narrative was enormously comforting to people who were doing well

19:25 because it absolved them of any responsibility for people who were not.

19:29 And it was quietly devastating to people who were struggling

19:32 because it told them their suffering was their own fault.

19:35 By the time the evidence made it clear that wealth was not trickling down,

19:39 the fairness doctrine was gone.

19:41 The media landscape had fractured and a significant portion of the population

19:45 was consuming information that reinforced

19:47 the Reagan worldview rather than challenging it.

19:50 The feedback loop was complete.

19:53 Policies created conditions.

19:54 Conditions were reinforced by media.

19:57 Media shaped public opinion and public

20:00 opinion prevented the policies from being reversed.

20:03 So we return to the original question.

20:06 Did Reagan ruin everything?

20:07 The honest answer is he inherited

20:10 a genuine crisis and applied genuine solutions.

20:12 Those solutions worked in the short term and that short-term success was real.

20:17 But those short-term solutions became permanent policy.

20:20 And permanent policy created structural damage

20:22 that has compounded over four decades.

20:25 stagnant wages, shattered collective bargaining, mass incarceration,

20:28 a media landscape so fractured that Americans cannot agree on basic facts,

20:33 and an economy where the gains go almost

20:35 exclusively to the people who are already winning.

20:37 Reagan did not ruin everything.

20:40 He changed the rules, and nobody has changed them back.

20:44 Reagan also undid efforts that were

20:47 a historical anomaly rather than the expectation.

20:50 Go and watch his video next to find out why

20:53 the 30 years before he took office were truly unique economically.

20:55 And don't forget to like and subscribe to keep on learning how history works.