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"As many commenters have noted in my related stories on Ruminato, it all started to go wrong when Reagan was elected." But Reagan rode a wave that started much earlier. One interesting book on the topic is Upswing by Putnam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D._Putnam . He goes back to 1870 and tries to understand the long waves of change in American politics.

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I’m not a historian. However, I believe some of this goes much further back in time.

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Putnam argues that caring about the community, about the common good, reached a peak around and after WWII. Since the 1960ies communal values have been in decline and individual values became ever more important. He reports on interesting proxies that can be used to measure this, such as the frequency of words such as "I" and "we".

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