Why?
Because their toxic philosophy is embedded into our culture.
Selfishness is a basic human "condition", and media's constant drumbeat has helped to immortalize the "conservative" approach to almost everything we see/hear/read.
The underpinning of all media is advertising, and advertising aims to be as vacuous as possible and to appeal to as many as possible so they can make money. Those facts ensure that what we see, hear and read (for the masses) will be as uncontroversial as possible.
This is why so many governmental leaders are so eager to kill "public broadcasting", and why so many "liberal" leaders are so wimpy when it comes to supporting public broadcasting. They fear the backlash and withholding of funding from corporate/business people who fear the type of programming that comes from public broadcasting.
Those of us of a "certain age" can still remember how robust programming used to be and how eager media once was, to take on the "giants" and to expose their misdeeds.
When your only goals are to make money and to hold onto it, the " public-good" (the commons) is of no interest to you, and whatever money must be spent to discredit the premise of such a thing, MUST be extensive and long-lasting.
Conservatives (republicans) have been masterful in their construction of such a climate over the last 40+ years. Liberalism like we saw from Johnson scared the beejeesus out of them. Had Viet Nam not derailed him, we might be in a totally different place by now. The conservatives spent a LOT of time and money setting up their think tank/media buy-outs during the late 60's while the rest of us were distracted. They only became more focused after Watergate, and amped up the vitriol.
They realized that they needed to work under the radar and set out to populate the lower echelons of elected office...creating a "farm team" (sleeper cells?) of eager young people who would be ready when they got their chance to get back into power.
When you have a steady stream of reporting only one side of any given issue, with NO push-back from an alternate view, it's easy to see how so many people became convinced that things must be as "they" say it is.
Recruiting Reagan was their crowning glory, because at the time he became president, young people were not coting all that much (our focus was distracted by our own lives at that time, and the main issues seemed "resolved", so the older generation of that era made him president. Behind him were the ones who had "graduated" into power (those 60's sleeper cells), and they were the ones who shaped what we are now living.
It's no surprise that the 80's ushered in the consumer era. It's also no surprise that the excesses of the 80's created the bubble economies of the 90's & '00s.
Had we stayed on a true course that Johnson laid out for us, who knows what our society would look like now.
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