I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing a lot, and I honestly think that a great deal of it can be ascribed not to cruelty or ignorance but just to a combination of nostalgia and indifference to politics. I think as some people get older, their memories of different administrations get glossed over and simplified, and they simply get burnt out on giving a crap. I know my liberal-til-the-end 89-year-old aunt would sum up Bill Clinton’s years as “that womanizer”, Bush as “just an idiot”, etc. And if you mentioned Reagan, she’d say “I never trusted him… but the 80s were good years, hmmm…” I feel like grandparents are looking back at the days of Big Business and Big Wall Street and trickle-down BS as a golden era and forgetting that it didn’t work out so well.
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