Yea it turns out when you divorce politics from anything that matters it just becomes reality tv. Americans are too moronic to wield the power they claim today so it's hard to feel anything negative about this.

I'm not sure it's fair to mock the public figures, because it's not like the guys in between them were anything particularly remarkable either. Democracy doesn't select skilled leaders, it selects charismatic ones with 'flexible moral values' of the sort that are useful for gaining sufficient backers. It's fairly predictable that democracies with relatively wide suffrage would trend towards electing pop figures.

This also is exactly democracy was mostly felt to be an unsustainable system by the ancient philosophers. And in reading Plato's assessment of democracy, and its cycles, in "The Republic", he sounds like much more like a prophet than a philosopher.

Don't forget Schwarzenegger too, but both he and Ventura are objectively less evil than Thiel.

Are we forgetting the original one, Ronald Reagan? Guy was a literal middling actor, whose only claim to fame was snitching on Communist sympathizers in Hollywood when it was cool.

Eh, we had Reagan and Schwarzenegger and others before too

They put in some effort to not behave like clowns after getting elected, though

Schwarzenegger, maybe, but Reagan? The man was a horror show as president.

Not sure, I’m a bit too young but the standards seem to have been much higher back in those days. Reagan’s [public] behavior would still be pretty tame nowadays.

Of course broadcasting your deranged random thoughts to the whole world in the middle of the night wasn’t really and option and listening to Nixon’s tapes the way they behaved in private was well.. quite something. I don’t even believe that Nixon was especially egregious either he just decided to record everything anyone said in his office due to whatever reasons.

And then you had career politicians like Johnson who might have been even more vulgar than Trump..

> Not sure, I’m a bit too young

I, sadly, am not and he was a horror show.

> but the standards seem to have been much higher back in those days.

He was a service-cutting, union-busting, lunatic military hawk guided by Nancy's astrologer. Sure, he's not as overtly and in-your-face as bad as Trump (who could be?) but that doesn't preclude him being a horror show in and of himself.

I'm pretty sure all of them, as well as the most reliable voter age bracket, all grew up with lead in the gasoline still.

This theory has held up poorly to other theories, such as the federal legalization of abortion. Positing a single cause, even a single dominating cause, is an incredibly, incredibly hard claim to demonstrate. I do believe that unleading gasoline had widespread social impacts, but this narrative is just lazy reduction with no benefit.

Personally, I think the easiest theory is simply economic prosperity. Most American problems these days can be described in terms of relationship to wealth. changes in education take decades to reflect in aggregate effectiveness. If nothing changes, I think we'll be facing a similarly-violent time period for likely the rest of our lives, even if we aren't there yet.