cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20368770
It’s easy to understand if you realize that America is essentially a corporation rather than a country, and that country is only representing its shareholders.
In case you’re confused - if you’re not rich and powerful, you’re not a shareholder. You’re an employee or a commodity or an expense, and you exist to enrich the shareholder class.
America had a moment in the 60s and 70s where real change might have been possible. Then Reagan took over in the 80s and selfishness and greed somehow became virtues.
They instilled a sense that helping others makes you dumb and gullible. Strong, smart people get theirs and fuck everyone else.
People who need help are just taking your money to buy drugs and can easily get a job and become middle class instantaneously.
Then a few decades later, the middle class disappeared, and everyone became poor and struggling. Corporate profits keep breaking records, though. Economic inequality in America has surpassed pre-Revolution France. Every billionaire is Louis XIV-level rich and indulgent.
Honestly, it's incredibly naive to think that America's issues started with Reagan. The McCarthy witch hunts against communism happened in the 1950s. They targeted education institutions, as well as people that believed in democratic socialism. It stopped a generation from coming up through college and having those values instilled. It was that generation that passed reforms like universal healthcare in other western countries. Reagan was just a product of that system, he wasn't the root cause.
It is a bit like saying "feminism was going perfectly until Phyllis Schlafly came along!" There's a point to be made in there somewhere, but it suffers from a want of depth.
I just want to point out that this is typical. Even when we're blaming someone or something for all the bullshit we still can't agree.
We survived the Gilded Age. We can survive this, if we fight. Labor revival, revitalized progressive movement, voting reform...
Nothing in life is guaranteed, but I still hold out hope that we'll join the developed world in the coming years.
If we had an unlimited timeline I'd buy that, the problem is climate change will make all but struggle inevitable in ~75 years at the rate we're destroying it.
Famine, water wars, and billions of climate migrants will destroy any hope of an egalitarian revolution...
75 years is a very optimistic timeline. The things you mentioned are already starting to happen.
I know, I was going to use ~10 years, but used a conservative number so I could source it undeniably if pressed.
I don't want to burst your bubble, but the developed world, or rather the people in charge of it, took a good look at you guys and decided they wanted to live like kings as well.
Since then, they have steadily dismantled institution after institution while telling people that immigration is the reason their lives are getting worse. It won't be long before we lose access to good, free healthcare, safe and affordable education, and all the other qualities of life we've enjoyed for so long
Immigrant here! This is true.
There they are, get em!
Violence it is then.
Yep, get active, get involved, and volunteer. We don't have to just hope, we can be a part of making it happen
Whether that be for a union or a political campaign, they are won when we fight for them
I am not enjoying Gilded Age II: Electric Boogaloo
Just long enough for operation paperclip to have settled in and start grassrooting some real patriotism
Gordon fucken Gecko become a mascot for the right.
That sense must surely have been already there, because you couldn't instil it easily if most people genuinely believed otherwise.
It has taken the better part of 50 years to get from there to here. I wouldn't say it was easy.
The evangelical bloc was the hardest to convince. They had to get some capitalist representation in the churches to counteract all of that business about "helping the poor" and "blessed be the meek" that Jesus was always going on about.
Once they got Joel Osteen to convince millions of viewers that Jesus wanted them to be rich, that really clinched it for them.
I hate how even though it sounds like you’re oversimplifying and maybe even exaggerating, the stuff you wrote describes exactly how conservatives around me think.
All of this is correct, except the middle class has not disappeared. The moment the middle class disappears the state collapses