So I’ve said a lot of the 80s reaction involved not so much actively suppressing left-aligned segments of the population as writing them out of the polity and exposing them to attrition

I think the emerging narrative of AIDS as something inflicted on the gays by the straights is pretty rich (especially looking at contemporary STD transmission rates among MSM and realizing it’s only time until another long-incubation disease emerges and it happens again) but it’s absolutely true that that was understood (and leveraged) as a way that liberalized sexual and gender norms would “take care of themselves”

And after the fall of formal housing segregation brought blacks into all sorts of urban neighborhood cities were in a sense abandoned - as recently as Nixon, the United States (which was an urbanized country) supported cities at the federal level through extensive grants; Ford’s “drop dead” to New York - refusing to backstop its clientilistic welfare state as the urban industry it drew on declined – was the big turning point, on to Reagan and “managed decline”

When you see things marvelling at how the “War on Drugs” and Clintonite crime measures were supported by black politicians at the time it’s because the absence of aggressive police on city streets, allowing their decline into “urban jungles” was considered a backdoor strike against black communities

And I was wondering if there’d be an equivalent in this cycle and more and more it almost seems like natural disasters (and climate change) might be playing that role but the targets don’t particularly make sense? Like, simply letting Puerto Rico take the hit is the exact kind of thing I’m thinking of, and you can draw lines to Katrina and the “shock doctrine” and rebuilding in a neoliberal way afterwards

But, like, to the extent that our political system was subject to more strain than it could bear and needed to shed load, it wasn’t Puerto Ricans or Houstonians that were a particular burden, or form much of a coherent category that aligns with active issues and partisan cleavages, right?