Reagan’s ‘vote with your feet’ rhetoric was the lie blaming poverty on laziness

Evidence

Reagan had argued that Americans could escape poor living conditions if they so chose. All they needed to do was to “vote with their feet.” They could just move along. Those who remained, he seemed to suggest, did so because they wanted to or were too lazy to aspire to something more. This was the lie. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 497

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is the reader’s key term ‘the lie’ being defined at its source — the Reaganite claim that entrapment is choice.
• XREF: Core to the reader’s thesis: ‘the lie’ as the ideological content of ‘the after times’ — the story a country tells itself after it has failed to change. — connects to: American conservatives blamed poverty on personal failings while favoring free competition — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1587
• DEEPTHINKING: ‘This was the lie’ — in three words, the intellectual scaffold of the book’s central concept, warranting a full chapter on Reagan as its origin.