1975 and 2025 Are the Same Story Being Retold

History does not repeat itself because people forget facts. It repeats because people refuse to recognize patterns. When you look closely at 1975 and compare it to 2025, the similarities are not abstract or symbolic. They are structural, cultural, and political.

In 1975, the United States was coming apart at the seams. The Vietnam War had ended in disgrace. Trust in government was collapsing. The economy was squeezing everyday people while power and wealth consolidated at the top. To maintain control, the ruling class leaned heavily on fear. Communism was positioned as an existential threat, not because it was about to take over, but because fear is an effective tool for keeping people from questioning who actually holds power.

Hollywood reflected this moment honestly. Films like Taxi Driver, All the President’s Men, and Chinatown exposed corruption, alienation, and institutional rot. These were not escapist stories. They were mirrors. They showed a country where people felt abandoned, unheard, and manipulated by systems that claimed to serve them.

One critical tension during that period was the emotional collapse of poor and working class white men. Many felt invisible and powerless, yet they could not name the real source of their pain. Instead of recognizing class oppression, they leaned into racial identity. Whiteness became a psychological substitute for power. It offered the illusion of belonging to the ruling class simply by association.

That illusion was and still is deadly.

White men without wealth mistook racial proximity to power for actual power. They saw other white men in government and business and assumed shared identity meant shared interests. It did not. Those men had money. Money is power. Race without wealth is not protection from exploitation.

This misunderstanding created a feedback loop. Poor white men, refusing to acknowledge class reality, defended systems that harmed them. In doing so, they elevated more ruthless elites into power. Once those elites gained influence, the harm expanded outward and downward, hitting everyone harder, especially Black and brown communities.

Now look at 2025.

We are watching the same play with new actors. Fear is again the primary tool of control. This time the boogeyman is immigration, crime, culture, and economic anxiety. Black and brown people are deported incorrectly. Citizens are swept up and treated as disposable. Job access for Black Americans continues to shrink. Surveillance and punishment expand while accountability for the powerful disappears.

White Americans feel the pain too. Wages stagnate. Costs rise. Stability erodes. But instead of recognizing that the system is failing them by design, many cling to racial identity again. Whiteness becomes a shield against self reflection. Rather than asking who controls resources, they ask who to blame.

That deflection props up the same power structure. It allows wealthy elites to rule unchallenged while everyday people fight each other over identity scraps. When moments of perceived power arrive, even briefly, they are used to reinforce hierarchy instead of dismantling it. The cycle deepens. The damage spreads.

The people who suffer most remain the same. Black and brown communities bear the brunt first and longest. But the system eventually consumes everyone except those at the very top.

The solution is not silence, nostalgia, or denial. The solution is clarity.

People must understand the difference between race and power. Whiteness without wealth is not protection. Fear is not truth. Identity without class awareness is a trap. Solidarity across racial lines threatens elite control, which is why it is constantly undermined.

Breaking the cycle requires rejecting manufactured enemies and naming the real structure at work. It requires refusing to trade dignity for proximity to power. It requires recognizing that the pain of 1975 never disappeared. It was deferred, repackaged, and sold back to us in 2025.

If we do not confront that reality now, we will be writing this same essay again in another fifty years.