That thing about the liberal-socialist divide over subsidies that you pointed out was false, where did the original...
It was some guy with the Simpsons phone gag name of “Jack Meserve”, writing an essay here. It was linked off the image and for the future when you see an image of text you can usually find the original by google searching a long enough quote.
As for where it came from I guess it was off the top of his head as a mistaken sense of how history was, and it’s not like I’m in the best position to give him shit for that.
For all my “same as it ever was” enthusiasm for reminding people of continuity and recurrence across the ages, the opposite error must be just as common, people thinking that things specific to their age were the way things were always done.
(My favorite examples of this are Victorian and Edwardian depictions of Ye Ancient Traditional Country Life as sedate pipe-smoking, when the countryside wasn’t that pastoral until Enclosure and pipes weren’t a thing until the imperial tobacco trade with America)