And it’s not just in the US that this descent is present. In her autobiographical book Feria, Ana Iris Simón tells of her working class parents who by age 30 had two kids, a house, and a stable, comfortable life. In year 2019, a much more educated Simón, on the other hand, couldn’t hope for the kind of economic well-being that her mailwoman mother easily achieved back in the 1990s. Simón’s entire generation was scraping up a miserable existence out of a patchwork of temp gigs long past the age when their parents were making enough to live comfortably.
Again, why? Different countries, yet a very similar and a very steep decline. Let’s not be materialistic and only look at the economic factors. Have people become happier? Do they take fewer drugs, suffer less from addiction, have more kids, have happier, longer marriages?
Well, no. Then let’s discuss why this happened. If the favorite Soviet author Communist John Steinbeck would agree with Donald Trump that America is less great now for a regular working man, then we are definitely on to something here. There’s a wide bipartisan consensus that something important has been messed up. There was some discussion of this in very early noughties but it dried up since then. Unless you go to the very far right, you won’t find anybody even trying to figure out what went wrong.
Clarissa's Blog 
This man has Neoliberalism down to a T: https://www.compactmag.com/article/kamalas-vengeful-neoliberalism/
LikeLiked by 1 person
“It’s an expression of one of neoliberalism’s roots, the removal of irrational barriers like “nations” or “traditions” that prevent individuals from advancing economically and hedonically.”
Yes, and there’s more. Neoliberals are radically opposed to any boundaries that are collectively established and maintained. Yet they lecture everybody about the importance of sexual freedom from their own rock-solid marriages and the evilness of borders from their gated communities. Winners of the neoliberal game privatize boundaries and control and exercise them on their own lives while encouraging everybody else to embrace chaos. Because chaotic, gushing, unbounded marks are easy to despoliate.
LikeLike
What starting point are you taking?
I checked on killing of police officers and alcohol consumption, for example. In the U.S., things got steeply worse in the mid-1960s, followed by two bad decades in the 1970s and 1980s into early 1990s, improvement back to early 1960s levels by the early 2000s.
For divorce, marriages have been getting longer over the past couple decades, but marrige itself has gone way down.
News from New York City in the 1980s with Bernie Goetz was not all that different from the news today.
LikeLike
Alcohol consumption improved in early noughties because that’s when the opioid epidemic was born.
Just saying.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Divorce rates are nothing to crow about when the reason is that only weirdos get married anymore.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Now if a left winger brings up longtime left wing ideas about this phenomenon, they are accused of spouting “right wing talking points.”
LikeLiked by 2 people
That’s what Ana Iris Simón discovered. The moment she mentioned that the standard of living dropped since the 1990s, she was called a fascist. That she comes from a long line of proud Communists changed nothing. You aren’t supposed to notice any of this because only fascists do.
LikeLiked by 2 people