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There probably are reference points, but they would be considered odd-ball characters who strike people as incongruous with leadership positions.
Odd ball characters are a feature not a bug when trying to upend or destroy the status quo
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Absolutely, but I see what's @Undisciplined point: the ones who see the odd-ball are indeed not guided by such an obvious pragmatism as you point out, but by the traditional forms they're used to. The exact same thing happened here: NO boomer voted for Milei until there wasn't any other choice. Before that, they voted for another socialist, citing that he was "groomed", while Milei was "just crazy". Younger generations came to understand why 80 years of uninterrupted socialist decline where possible by seeing such an idiotic stance.
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Many boomers voted for Biden because he was a "moderate" not a socialist/radical.
Biden was not moderate but pretended to be one and many boomer voters were gullible to believe him
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Exactly, same thing here. God I hate the boomers...
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I see. It always boils down to the same: the USA will have to wait for the newer young generations to have enough weight to allow for such a paradigm change, just like it happened here. The challenge is to ensure that new generation hasn't been brainwashed by socialist propaganda by then. The cultural battle must be relentless
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Ronald Reagan said the same thing, not exact words but the gist.
The fight for liberty and freedom is never ending.
Only takes one generation for socialists to defeat capitalism and freedom.
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Absolutely. It's an eternal truth that freedom is an eternal battle.
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"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same."
-- Ronald Reagan
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His speeches are the most libertarian stances I have heard from a president after Washington. Reagan is also the only president to have delivered a speech praising the father of our (originally) libertarian constitution, Juan Bautista Alberdi (the one Milei praises and seeks to re-establish):
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Amazing speeches, unimpressive administration. He gave a speech in 1964, while campaigning for Barry Goldwater, that is probably the greatest speech I've ever heard.
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I fully agree. I appreciate Reagan words, but accompanying such sacred words with such a bad administration had the catastrophic consequence of people associating the bad consequences to the ideas he promoted.
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Reagan was great. Memory is selective. People forget how terrible Carter was and the 1970s stagflation and gasoline ⛽️ lines and shortages
Which of Reagan successors have been more impressive? Bush? Clinton? Obama?
The Carter years were horrible. Reagan changed that. Inflation fell to 5 percent after a decade of double digit inflation. The economy grew by 7 percent in 1983 and 1984 after a decade of stagflation. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989 after he said tear down that wall in his 1987 speech in Berlin. The Cold War ended because the Russians were scared by Star Wars defense initiative. On his first day in office Iran freed the hostages.
He made Americans feel great again and confident about the future. He fixed the crisis of confidence in America
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Being not as bad as Carter doesn't mean he lived up to his rhetoric. The budgets were out of control. The military industrial complex metastasized.
The Cold War ended because central planning doesn't work and the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of their accumulated misallocations.
Viva La Reagan Revolucion!
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This is likely why we get generational political cycles. Second and third generations tend to squander their inheritances.
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Absolutely. This is why I think that a culture of "indoctrination" on freedom must take place. It's the only way to ensure that the ideas survive those tendencies, while freedom provides the much needed disciplining factor to keep new generations strong. As much as I hate boomers, their fathers, the same, industrious ones that got so much built from nothing, where solely responsible for laying the foundations of the socialist collapse.
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I'm not sure that can work. Maybe I'm being overly pessimistic, but I think liberty may only be appreciated by the generation that wins it.
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Maybe that could be a more explicit part of the culture, already in place, on earning a living, also understood as earning financial freedom (i.e. non-dependence on a subsidy, specially if it comes from the state). Thus each new generation will earn to appreciate their freedom as they mature in normal life. A reason state-dependence is being seen as "freedom" by the USA youth is because of the rigged economic system the state itself has implemented, making capitalism being seen as an "oppressor", so to fight to earn "true freedom" is understood as state-control. So the problem is not the act of "fighting for freedom" only, as that's something unavoidable in life as you grow and seek financial freedom, but rather to understand correctly who's freeing you and who's oppressing you. That basic compass is reverted 180° in the USA youth, so they attack what makes them free, believing they're fighting for freedom.
We have to fight socialism aka the enemy continuously