alt Hacker News> There was a past American government that was strong enough to stamp out inequality and fight for civil rights.
this is a hilariously naive rewriting of history, the government was very reluctant to make those changes. It's thanks to popular movements that those changes were made.
I'm thinking specifically of the Little Rock Nine in 1957 where President Eisenhower took charge of the national guard so that nine Black students could attend high school. The government isn't one monolithic entity. It's a bunch of people doing different stuff, and some of them suck, and some of them are awesome.