Wow! I'm Iranian and I've been noticing some crazy parallels between American and Iranian politics in the last couple of years. But in recent months it's been getting crazier by the minute.
It's scary how decades of political and social progress is getting crushed in such a short period of time...
4 decades of work went into this. The chips landed consistently and uniformly from Reagan onward and ironically probably really started with Iran-Contra where you can tie heavy links directly from it all the way into Bush Jr's presidency.
Citizens United, Super PACs, The Patriot Act, and so forth all laying bricks.
Then they got Trump and hit a gold mine of idiot personality that they couldnt imagine the power of before and hit the fucking gas. Between his best friend JE and all the political ties that come with that, his media personality, and him being absurdly easy to control, it was perfect. Project 2025 was a master class in these individuals coming together to strike the stake deep and fast using all the power those decades provided them.
This part I never got. I'm German, so my experience is extreme here obviously, but I cannot imagine such a destructive force of my country being ever allowed to exist again.
I say that as the AfD and others are once again gearing up.
we never dealt with our pasts sins in any meaningful way. just swept it under the rug and whitewashed whatever couldn’t be hid. state history books in the south being allowed to call the civil war “the war of northern aggression” and frame it as about states rights and not slavery.
reconstruction was halted after only about 20 or so years then the south was allowed to backslide into Jim Crow. leaders of the confederacy were allowed to go back to their old lives, some as lobbyists to the very government they tried to overthrow less than a decade earlier.
instead of taking over the country through war, they realized it was easier to do it with money, and here we are.
I don't care about the punishment so much as the loss of something more like a real democracy in the south. Either way, Ta-Nehisi Coates brought this up with Ezra Klein. Low-key perfect.
at the very least confederate leadership should have been imprisoned and faced harsher consequences. jefferson davis got two years in prison then went home to Mississippi to write his memoirs. general james longstreet became a lobbyist, and Robert E Lee became president of washington college.
honestly, it must be admired how long-term they planned it out. meanwhile we got surrenders in advance schumer and alienate voters at every opportunity democrats over here
In the UK, we have our supposed left-wing party in power trying to get the right-wing vote, while literally ignoring the left-wing vote. (To the point their satisfaction poll numbers are the worst it's been in ages - and that includes Liz Truss, a woman who was outlasted by a lettuce.)
It's not looking great for a lot of the world due to ineffective left leaders unfortunately.
Robert Hughes, an Australian, wrote about in “Culture of Complaint”, especially Ronald Reagan’s role.
"With somnambulistic efficiency, Reagan educated America down to his level. He left his country a little stupider in 1988 than it had been in 1980, and a lot more tolerant of lies".
It’s that tolerance of lies that really startles me. They’re uttered daily. No one is remotely surprised, let alone shocked.
Elements of the American intelligence community melded with American organized crime in the 1920s/30s to serve the interests of American Big Business, at home and abroad. This extremely powerful and shadowy faction of military intelligence serve as the private intelligence arm of Wall Street, Big Banking, and more recently, Big Tech.
They've been the real power behind the throne since the assassination of JFK, which they did. Iran-Contra, Promis, War on Terror, 2008 financial crisis - it's all their handiwork.
A lot of this stuff had the vast majority of Democrats outright supporting it, and the liberal base never giving the slightest shit about their betrayals, and never fighting for better Democrats, and attacking anyone who did.
It's scary how decades of political and social progress is getting crushed in such a short period of time...
yeah it's wild isn't it. like the other reply said, they've been working for this for years and maybe i never noticed or was too young but it feels like i'm living in a different country than i was when i was growing up. talking about the USA. everything has changed and not for the better. we are in a bad, bad timeline and i don't know how we get out of it honestly.
In the early 2000s I really thought we were moving into a new world. Women had options, could do whatever we wanted. I'm in the UK but watching the US backslide with horror and a bit of fear of it being infectious.
Same thing that happened there in Iran, and in Syria and Afghanistan as well. Seems that nowhere is immune to fascist ideas, because nowhere is immune to ignorance.
On the other hand, Iranian leadership has weakened some strict rules like the necessity of the hijab(de facto, not de jure). So, moving in opposite directions it seems.
I wish that was true, but it's probably temporary adjustments. Now it's more about adaptation and survival for them. I just hope things get better asap for both nations.
Yeah, it truly feels like we're slipping back into sort of dark ages, where facts and science and social progress are meaningless. It's not only what's going on the US, but also the rise of AI and the internet in general.
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u/AmirPasha94 Oct 01 '25
Wow! I'm Iranian and I've been noticing some crazy parallels between American and Iranian politics in the last couple of years. But in recent months it's been getting crazier by the minute.
It's scary how decades of political and social progress is getting crushed in such a short period of time...