Knowing Better
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All That Changed in 1972 - A Summary
🕑 Added 2021-03-01 22:22:44 +0000 UTCMost of what I’m about to say here was said during the Director’s Commentary stream yesterday. But since those don’t stay up forever and not everyone has four hours to spare, I figured writing up a summary would be useful.
All of my videos for the last year have been building up to this point, so what point was I trying to get across?
To answer that we need to rewind the clock to Fall 2019. I decided to start focusing on projects I knew would take more time to research than my previous ones. Subjects that I had been teasing for months or even years were now at the top of my list – the most important one when it comes to this project was the Moderate’s Guide to Healthcare.
I’ve known for a while that the healthcare industry and the insurance industry were a mess. When I was in college, I was in an accident and despite having health insurance, I owed thousands of dollars. According to what I had been told my entire life, I did everything I was supposed to. How could the system be designed this way? So, I finally decided to research it and figure it out for a video. The conclusion I came to in the end was that Medicare For All was the best solution – I won’t go into why here, I made a video detailing my arguments.
At that time, the only candidate seriously discussing Medicare For All was Bernie Sanders. So that’s who I decided to support in the 2020 Democratic Primaries. I had never supported anyone in the primaries and I’d never donated to a political campaign – this was my first time and I was incredibly excited. Then he lost. I don’t believe the election was stolen from him, he legitimately lost because people under 65 just don’t vote. This is an important point that will come up later. I also watched as the Democratic candidates who were actually winning conceded to Biden, who was in 4th or 5th place at the time. It was all clearly coordinated, because that’s who the Democratic Party establishment wanted to have as their candidate.
That began another line of questioning for me. How did the primary system get this way? I made a Campaign Finance video and I knew how SuperPACs gained their power, but how did Iowa become the state we all pay attention to? Why is Super Tuesday a thing? These questions were bothering me…
At the time, I was working on my Moderate’s Guide to Climate Policy. I knew Nixon had created the EPA, but for some reason, I had never paid much attention to when and why. 1970, hmm. I just learned in my Campaign Finance video that these rules didn’t exist until Watergate in 1973/4. Those questions I had about the primary system? 1972, interesting.
But something else, unrelated, was going on with my channel at the same time. The Columbus drama showed me that I was capable of spreading harmful ideas without intending to and it caused me to rethink the way I produce content. I had also just discovered that when I was a teacher, I was telling students that the Stanford Prison Experiment was a valid example of the power of the situation. What else have I been saying that’s actually wrong? While I always did my research, I now double and triple check everything, pass the script by multiple people to check for errors, and eventually, I launched my Twitch channel so that I could get real-time feedback from my audience.
Because of the drama and my subsequent period of self-reflection, I shelved my Climate Policy idea and decided to do something completely out of left field just to reset. I wanted to make a video about Running Shoes – I am an avid runner and it’s something I’m personally interested in. During the course of my research, I learned that the modern running shoe didn’t exist until 1972. There it is again, 1972. Why does that time frame keep popping up? What else happened in 1972?
Turns out, almost everything.
I went to Vidcon London in February 2020, where I was able to talk with fellow creators about my situation. How I felt like I had let people down with the Columbus thing and I wanted to come back with a really high-concept, metaphorical video about shoes. I wanted to talk about shoes, while not really talking about shoes. I wanted to rant about giant heel cushions while also talking about the healthcare system, the primary election system, and the lie that “it’s always been this way.”
Most of my fellow creators told me this might not work, my audience might react the same way they did to my ferret videos and just not click them. Or the metaphor might not connect with everyone. So, I came up with a second strategy. I would make my metaphorical shoe video and then fill in all of the details in subsequent videos, always making sure to include a shoe reference.
Climate Change and Oil were a pair of videos I was already planning. Then I went into a trilogy about Crime and Poverty – I talked about how the police, as they currently exist, might not be constitutional, followed by how I think the post office IS constitutional and could provide a solution for the unbanked and underbanked, which I talked about last. Police didn’t have swat teams until 1971, the same year drugs were made illegal; the post office was a service until 1970, when it was turned into a business; the dollar was backed by gold until 1971 and women couldn’t have bank accounts until 1974. Every single video I made this last year has included the phrase “All that changed in 1970-something.”
Then came the final trilogy. I wanted to talk about American Exceptionalism – because again, that wasn’t always a thing. I started with Smedley Butler, a conduit to talk about American military exceptionalism. Then the Mormons, American religious exceptionalism. And finally, Libertarianism, an example of American economic exceptionalism. These three topics line up with the three legs of the Conservative stool, which JJ described.
This last video was the capstone on this year-long project. The Baby Boomers came of age in the early 70s and changed literally everything. Not all of these changes were necessarily bad – they demanded environmental regulation, racial and gender equality, campaign finance rules, lowering of the voting age, ending the draft, and making the primary system more democratic. But some of them were – criminalizing drugs, militarizing the police, turning the post office into a business rather than a service, deregulating industries, lowering taxes on the wealthy, and adding a giant heel cushion to running shoes.
Then they told us it had always been this way, so we shouldn’t change it.
But that’s not true. They changed it. They were alive during the first primary elections, they saw the first SWAT teams, they ran the first marathons. It wasn’t always this way.
I’m not saying that they shouldn’t have changed it, the point here is that WE CAN ALSO CHANGE IT. There is no reason it has to continue being this way. But here we are, having just elected our generation’s version of Jimmy Carter. Neoliberalism is all we’ve ever known and we just elected more of the same. After the nightmare that was Nixon, people wanted the safer option, someone who wouldn’t really rock the boat – a return to normalcy. The problem was that normal wasn’t working for everyone, so when someone came along promising to change things, they voted for him. If Trump is our Nixon, I worry about who our Reagan will be.
I started this by saying that I supported Bernie Sanders since he offered tangible change. Then I watched my generation either not care enough to vote or vote for the safer option, because this is the way things have always been. Why risk radical change?
Over this last year, I wanted to show my fellow Millennials that this is not the way things have always been. This isn’t how the Founding Fathers or the Constitution designed the system. Our parents made it this way because they wanted to.
We can too. We just have to vote.
Comments
fearnoart
I know that 1972 was a watershed year but it was also a watershed period. Oftentimes when I look at the past, 1968 comes up as a year of dramatic change too. But I think you are onto something here. I was just reading Heather Cox Richardson's latest post about now that the courts have been stacked by McConnell and Trump, the "nondelegation doctrine" is coming into play and depending on how the Supreme Court rules on that, much of the government could be ruled unconstitutional. This doctrine says that Congress cannot delegate authority and would undo much of the New Deal. The arc of Republican policies since the days of Reagan has been chipping away at the programs set up by the New Deal. I'm old enough to remember some things about the time but not old enough to have understood what the big picture is or was. Maybe this realignment, for lack of a better way to describe it, is a generational thing and is a product of having such large waves of generations with the power to change it? As far as Biden, I agree it seemed a little odd that suddenly everyone got behind him in the primaries but I think that was probably due to the party itself deciding that Biden had the best chance of defeating Trump more than deciding that Medicare for All, or Climate Change were losing platform positions. Democrats have long needed a reality check that Republicans were not playing by the same rules and were more willing to fall in line to meet singular goals than debate alternative views.
Abra Lindstrom
Well done on this project! I'll admit I was a little confused on the shoe video when it first came out. I recently went back and watched it again after I finally pieced together the theme of the last several videos. This brought everything together perfectly.
Chris
You may have already explained this elsewhere but I think I'm out of the loop. Can you elaborate on the situation with your Columbus video? What was the drama that you referred to?
Stephen
Thank you KB for all the great videos! They have been really entertaining and thought provoking. But there is something that I think is important to remember. I noticed that you mentioned the early 1970s quite often in your videos (though I didn’t guess that it was leading up to something), and it made me think that it was a very pivotal moment in modern history, especially American history. I don’t think that it is as simple as saying that the new 1970s policies were made because the Boomers came of age. They were a response to the political and social turmoil of the 1960s, even a backlash against 60s radicalism. The civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the growth of student activism and political radicalism and the whole counterculture peaked in the late 60s; and what followed in the early 70s was Nixon’s response. I think this was definitely the case with the militarisation of the police force and the War on Drugs. They were a way to attack radicals, minorities and the counterculture directly through the association (or perceived association) with drugs. While policies like the EPA and ending the draft were a carrot to appease those movements (or in a more cynical Nixonian sense, to take the wind out of their sails). But that 60s radicalism was driven by members of the Baby Boomer generation. I am sure that as they got older many of them supported many of the policy and social changes that came in the 70s, but hardly all and not all for the same reasons. It really disheartens me when I hear people talk about ‘Boomers’ and ‘Millennials’ because things are never as simple as reducing entire generations to ‘they’ and ‘we’. But I do agree that it is important for people to become more politically active, I don’t know if it is as simple as encouraging people to vote more. Maybe America’s electoral system needs more reform to make voting easier and more effective as a way to incentivise political participation. Maybe some kind of political reform would make other reforms easier to achieve. Thanks again for all the great content!
Jailyn Dyer
Hey, I was born in 1972. I might be one of your older viewers. My parents were definitely boomers, evangelicals, and part of the moral majority. I'm the only one in my family that went the liberal route somehow. I've voted in all elections and most primaries. This year they had ranked voting in the Kansas Democratic primary, which I was very appreciative of, but our primaries were after everyone was out of the race, including Bernie. I still could vote for him, but it didn't matter. That's the frustrating thing about elections on the national level that people find so dispiriting. I live in Kansas. I vote Democratic. While I still vote and I think it's important, I realize why so many people think their vote doesn't matter and don't vote. Local and state elections see more traction and I wish people took them more seriously. But still, I vote for the candidate I support even if it isn't the candidate I'd prefer by the time primaries are done. I really like where your channel is going, as far as ideology, and I'm happy you take the time to research your topics. That's why I support you. Have hope. That's what keeps us going in the face of the injustices in the world.
Will Latinette
"If Trump is our Nixon, I worry about who our Reagan will be. ..." Touche' !
Suave Klutz
Respectfully disagree-ish, Barry D, though not with most of your take, more with the framework. We can and do work across generations. It's a defining characteristic of our species. The glib, catchy, unscientific generational divisions are chiefly cosmetic distinctions, often with no more gravitas than a Buzzfeed quizlet. We have vastly more in common with one another than we differ, but because our pop culture references don't overlap, and because every generation rebels against its forebears, it's easy to swallow the false narrative of "when we get to the front of the line we'll do it right, so get outta our way you greedy old farts." Boomer, X, Millennial, Z, we're all a snapped ankle or chemo series or layoff away from homelessness, from bankruptcy. It's a corporate kleptocracy that's called the shots in the US since shortly after its inception. Every generation has suffered its robber barons, its wartime and peacetime profiteers, its business interests and revolving door lobbyists that have drafted much if not most of the legislation that's crushed us all and brought us to this point in history. We're powerful when we unite, weak when we divide ourselves. And we do divide ourselves. It's incumbent upon the savvy and creative and informed of us to build each other up, encourage one another and pull together. It's because the challenges we face are difficult that we are inspired to undertake improvements, and we must have the discipline to start now, and not give in to our baser impulses to waste our energies on blame. Have compassion. Our parents and grandparents were and are just as helpless and hopeless feeling as we and our children feel. Let's not give in to that. We can do so much better, so much more. Let's get to it.
Dachannien
Biden was the presumptive nominee not because he was inspiring. He was the presumptive nominee precisely because he wasn't inspiring. He was safe. He wasn't Trump, in the most necessary way possible: he was boring. And even though we really need change at the foundational level of governmental policy, the price of four more years of Trump was too severe to risk it on a damn fool idealistic crusade. Bernie isn't boring. Instead, he represents the same kind of "threat" that Trump campaigned against: the nebulous fear of some... thing... that could maybe possibly change whatever mediocrity the white Christian middle class has eked out for itself. That fear is based entirely on lies, and those lies were repeated over and over to the Boomers by people like Ayn Rand, and then *by* the Boomers themselves, because it has worked to keep them in power. Generation X was told those lies as well by our parents, and it has interfered with our political and moral growth. It's really only been the Millennials and up-and-coming Zoomers that really and truly understand that the system is fundamentally rotten to its core, by seeing that racism and sexism are central to conservatism and, having been raised a little bit better by Generation X than Gen X was by the Boomers, are unwilling to give that racism and sexism a pass, and therefore see the corruption more easily. From my own perspective, Trumpism was the metastasis of that blight which, once seen, showed how disgusting the rest of conservatism actually is. In four short-or-maybe-really-long years, I turned from a Gary Johnson-voting "personal freedom" guy into "you know what, we can support people's personal freedom without being complete assholes to each other". And from that vantage point, letting people become financially ruined because of an accident, or letting a family suffer in poverty even though they work their asses off, feel like inhumanity. And so that's what informs my politics now. The only roadblock now is that most of what's *right* is simply not *possible* in the current political climate. That's what needs to change - the stranglehold of the Boomers needs to be broken first, and then real policy change can happen.
Alistair Struck
I for one adored how interlinked everything was. Even from the first minute, I knew it would tie everything together, and it really recontextualized the last year of your work. Everyone my age should see this series, because we need to know how and why America became the what it is today; a dystopia we don't recognize as such only because of its familiarity.
Jerrad Pierce
Thank you for the write-up. I did miss the director's commentary. The Smedley Butler video was truly excellent, and the Libertarian video finally pulled together a number of threads, although this letter does so even more.
retronymph
KB really is the best educational channel, what a genius, well laid out and well executed idea. It's like a whole season of a tv show but made by basically just one dude.
John SeCheverell
If Biden is as good a President as Jimmy Carter, I think we will be in good shape. Camp David, Panama, normalization of relations with China, helping manipulate the Soviet Union into their version of Vietnam in Afghanistan
Marc Matteo
Hey, can you post some links about the Columbus thing? I vaguely remember your first video and I remember liking it. You called out some other video making what I thought were outlandish claims about Columbus. Now, I already knew that Columbus was not a good guy, even by the standards of the day (which were themselves pretty bad), but I think such vilification should be accurate. So maybe I read more between the lines than was there. But then I recall your most recent video where you backpedaled a lot and I couldn't quite figure out where you were coming from. So since you referenced it above, several times, I thought maybe a refresher would be in order.
Kevin Kolbe
This is why I support you even though you have more patrons than anyone else I support. Also, voting isn't enough. Vote FOR the candidate you want, not against the candidate you "hate" most. It's an important distinction. If we keep accepting what we're offered, the menu will never improve.
