Heather Cox Richardson

And he did that and he did it very effectively.

But it's not just that the government sort of amorphously stopped doing things for people.

I actually think that was a deliberate decision on the part of certain Republican politicians who took over the party in the 1990s especially, but certainly were behind Reagan's election in the 80s.

in 1980.

And they set up the system in such a way that the American people would no longer have a say in it.

So things like tax cuts, you know, people said they love tax cuts.

What that really did was it managed to create real deficits that made it harder for the government to do things for people.

And it divorced people from having a say in their government, having, you know,

being behind their government at the same time that we began to do everything based on extraordinary deficits.

So the money coming into the government actually didn't have a lot to do with tax dollars.

It had to do with how much the government could borrow.

Now, the more the American people ended up not liking what the government was doing, the more that the Republicans in charge of the systems

stripped those systems down so that the people had less and less and less to say.

So by 1986, you are already hearing from the Republicans under Reagan the idea of ballot integrity, the idea you had to go into the rolls and clean them up because they were not legitimate.

So what do we get?

We get Florida does that in 1998.

And in the process of cleaning up the voter rolls, knocks about 100,000 people off the voting rolls in Florida in 1999.

You know, something happened in Florida in 2000.

I can't really remember.

But then you think all the way through, you get Citizens United, which is, you know, makes money pour into the system.