After Watergate Americans learned that a free press could bring down a tyrannical government. So the Right got to work destroying the free press.
Reagan went after the Fairness Doctrine and made it easier for one company to own all the TV and radio stations in a town. The new tech helped destroy the local newspapers.
Around 55 years, when the southern strategy was enacted to solidify racist support for Republicans.
Before that the parties were more mixed and it was the confederates and robber barons doing the damage. Before that it was the slave owners. And before that it was the colonizers. Before that it was probably whichever tribe had the best growing season or pointiest flint arrowheads.
I’m starting to second guess what the point of progress really is. Are we trying to ride humanity out until the heat death of the universe? Or just the next billion years before the sun boils our oceans away? Another 2000 years so today’s assholes can become deities? 52 more years the the US Tricentennial?
The lethargic, stagnant, apathetic, merciless, ignorant, xenophobic state of humanity in the sci-fi Lord of the Rings fan fiction called Warhammer 40,000 is getting increasingly more prophetic.