United States | News & Politics

The last ~45 years of grinding neoliberalism shows me little reason to believe that we can.

The US has never been and will never be a democracy, because it was born of a bourgeois revolution[1]. The wealthy, white, male, land-owning, largely slave-owning Founding Fathers constructed a bourgeois state with “checks and balances” against the “tyranny of the majority”. It was never meant to represent the majority—the working class—and it never has, despite eventually allowing women and non-whites (at least those not disenfranchised by the carceral system) to vote. [Princeton & Northwestern] Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy

The US working class got some temporary gains in the 20th century (and I could describe the extraordinary—unique, really—causes of them), but those are very unlikely to ever fully return under capitalism.