Sorry if the premise is inflammatory, but I’ve been stymied by this for a while. How did we go from something like 1940s era collectivism or 1960s era leftism to the current bizarro political machine that seems to have hypnotized a large portion (if not majority) of the country? I get it - not everything is bad now, and not everything was good then. FDR’s internment camps, etc.
That said - our country seems to be at a low point in intellectualism and accountability. The DHHS head is an antivaxxer, the deputy chief of the DOJ is a far-right podcast nutball, etc. Their supporters seem to have no nuance to their opinion beyond “well, Trump said he’d fix the economy and I don’t like woke.”
Have people always been this unserious and unquestioning, or are we watching the public’s sanity unravel in real time? Or am I just imagining some idealistic version of the past that never existed, where politicians acted in good faith and people cared about the social order?
Democracy isn’t the problem; it’s the money in politics, which is an intended effect of capitalism.
Capitalism is the problem. Capitalism by its very natire is a system of economic distribution where you have an owner class who control a working class via wages, where the working class will never be paid what they are worth due to the profit motive that the owner class has when it comes to the profit of their business. Shareholder capitalism makes this even worse, as the profit year-over-year must ALWAYS go up, as that is how stock price increases. It is to the point where shareholders sue companies not for losing money, but for making less money than they did the year prior, and they win.
Imagine an alternative where you could have democracy in your workplace (worker-owned coops). You would be able to hire and fire your boss with a vote. You will be able to determine the direction of the business, also with a vote. This could be the reality if we just forced all corporations to be worker-owned coops.
This, combined with a hard wealth cap and a UBI, will prevent any one person (or small group of people) from gaining enough power to buy a government, and the addition of democracy in business will also make business interests harder to corrupt as well.