Growing up through the Clinton years and thankfully the Bush 43 years, I can kind of get a sense of what you are talking about. To live through so many years with a president who disrespected the office and did more harm than good -- it was like a sigh of relief when Bush was elected. I don't know if this is comparable to how people felt when Reagan beat out Carter, but from what I've read, and from Reagan's margin of victory, this seems to be the case.
It just amazes me the inspiring words I hear from people about Ronald Reagan. Granted, the leftist media will always be out their spewing their junk, but to see, read, and hear a vast majority of love and respect at this time is juat a testiment to Reagan. He loved and respected the American citizens, and now it's out turn to recipricate the love and respect.
I know that Conservatives are able to draw the similarties between Reagan and Bush. I just hope that more people are able to recognize these similarities and actually acknowledge them.
Absolutely, although the malaise dispensed by Cahtah was quite a different thing than the corruption inflicted by Clinton. Unless one had lived through the awful Cahtah years, it would be difficult to find a way to gauge the difference. Clinton, IMO, was far worse because he was criminal, corrupt, a murderer (Waco, anyone?) and apparently conscienceless. Cahtah was more of a bumbler, the kind whose (in his eyes) "good intentions" pave the road to hell. Both damaged America on the international level to a profound degree. If God were not in the business of rescuing America from her worst leaders, I don't know where we'd be today after the likes of Lyndon Johnson, Jimmah Cahtah, and BlubbaX42.
Tyranny, in its varied forms from tin horn thugs to Marxists to 'Rats to political correctness to feminazi's to environmental wackos, is a great pox on human civilization, that has killed more than TB, malaria or the plague. Ideas are the DNA of human civilization, and tyranny in its varied forms is the sickness resulting from a particular broken idea.
The broken idea is the confusion of individual responsibility with group responsibility. This confusion has become more endemic with modern means of mass communication.
When you or I see a fat person sitting next to a thin person, we see that most likely the fat person has chosen to eat more and exercise less. When a leftist sees this, they see oppression and unfairness. It's not fair that the fat person has stolen the thin person's food, and society should fix it.
What should be an appreciation for our God given rights and responsibilities to each do the best we can with our brief time in this life, with opportunity for all, becomes instead societies obligation to see that everyone gets the same results. Where we delight in the great diversity of lives and results that we see in the people around us, leftists see unending examples of unfairness and inequality. The leftists confuse equal opportunity with equal result. Of course, any government that has the power to make us all equal, also has the power to make us all slaves.
The loss of faith in an underlying moral order and the failure to hold individuals responsible for their own choices and their consequences, instead placing that faith and trust in "society", leads to all manner of tyranny.
Like the struggle against a deeply infectious and virulent virus, the war on this disease may never end, so long as human society continues.