Can one still claim that the USA is a liberal democracy? Where do you draw the line?
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Astronaut Pistol Astronaut.
Can someone explain this comment? I can ask dumb questions here right?
“Wait, it’s an oligarchy?”
“Always has been.”
I would say corporatocracy. Ever since Citizens United, corporations have been making more and more policy and political decisions, placing in power who they believe will advance their agendas of unlimited and never ending profit.
Corporations are fiction of law.
Owners are a few very wealthy individuals who abuse this fiction and the state against the pedon class.
It is a class war and always has been.
in war, both sides are aware they’re fighting. they’re both willing to fight. they’re both armed.
Well then we got a generational genocide of the indigenous working populations
The owners would rather bring in immigrants than create a country where people feel comfortable having families
Americans foundation was built as an oligarchy.
Well in 2015 Jimmy Carter said that the United States is "just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and congress members. "
That same year The Economist’s Democracy Index downgraded the United States to a “flawed democracy” and it has continued to trend downwards since then.
If you’re looking for something more recent, Bernie Sanders is saying the same thing: “We are moving rapidly into an oligarchic form of society. Never before in American history have so few billionaires, so few people, have so much wealth and so much power”.
So between the massive (and growing) income inequality in the country, and rulings like Citizen’s United it’s hard not to believe it’s not at least on the trajectory towards an oligarchy. Now throw in the blatantly corrupt picks of the Trump administration, where cabinet positions are favors to rich friends, or being given to billionaires with a direct interest in killing the government agency they are running - not to mention all the things he’s routinely done / will do to enrich himself / friends with tax payer dollars and it certainly seems like an oligarchy to me.
And just on a personal vibes level, living here, it feels like legislation to help normal people or solve normal people’s problems is almost non-existent. And when it does happen, it also conveniently throws a ton of money at the rich at the same time (see recent tax cuts, pandemic relief funds, etc.). Even something like the Affordable Care Act, which did a ton of net good things for this country, enriched a whole lot of private healthcare companies along the way rather than creating an actual public option with negotiated prices to keep government costs down.
Yes.
Lol this post made me appreciate Lemmy so much.
There was a question on dead-it asking something about why the American middle class seemed to suffer so much since the mid20th century and it was full of obvious bots pointing to the positive but temporary effects of WW2. It took quite some scrolling before I saw any mention of the stagnation of real wages since then.
The US has been an oligarchy for some time. Act accordingly.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/princeton-experts-say-us-no-longer-democracy
A while ago
the US is run by billionaires and corporations.
you can live in peace as long as you don’t inconvenience them too much, and keep paying them
Stop dancing to their tune and you quickly discover how much freedom you really got
The only solution is to quit being
boomerpoor lolEdit: Interesting auto correct
The land of the free enslaved it’s inhabitants.
It’s been an open oligarchy since Citizen’s United. Seems like a lot of people are just now seeing the effects of what that decision allowed. Our Supreme Court was already corrupt, but because they at least maintained an air of dignity, people just looked past the death of our democracy.
You’re thinking of Kleptocracy, where politicians are mainly worried about extracting wealth from the country. Oligarchy has to do with class mobility and who is allowed to run for office. (Namely a financial and political class of “elites”) Citizen’s United kick started another era of politicians working to grab as much money as possible for their donors.
I would argue that Citizen’s United effectively made it impossible for non-elites to meaningfully effect the US political process, forcing us down a road where only those who can raise the most money are considered eligible for political office.
That was already the case though. I’m not arguing we aren’t living under some sort of Oligrachy, I’m arguing that Citizens United was a logical symptom of that Oligarchy, not the start of it.
LoL! Just because the Richest Man on Earth bought Our Presidency and anytime you kill a Rich Person it’s considered an Act of Terrorism DOESNT make us an OLIGARCHY!
No, we will never be an oligarchy. A plutocracy, yes, but I think money is the deciding factor here.
A Plutocracy is merely an Oligarchy by virtue of wealth. It’s not as if you or I could ever earn enough money legitimately to move up to the ruling class. That makes it functionality indistinguishable from an Oligarchy that is hand picked by arbitrary factors.
citizens united is where I would draw the line and no I don’t think we are an oligarchy but a plutocracy. Honestly Im not even sure if that is the right word because the money itself has the effect and the various wealthy people spending it. I don’t think they even really understand what they are doing. So its more like being ruled by money rather than the wealthy per se and honestly the ones calling the shots are the financial entities so corporations. Part of it may just be their relative power and active global decision making bend. News articles talk about musk possibly being the first trillionaire but mean while corps have based a trillion as early as 2008 and now many multi trillion dollar companies are around and the top add up to tens of trillions. So corptocracy. We had enough of that to begin with but now its out of control. Someone recently posted the international agreement that allows corps to sue countries and that finished up in the 90’s so it not only started before but is also not just a us thing.
A plutocracy is a type of oligarchy
Yeah. I prefer to say plutocracy though, because its clear that the power is obtained by money specifically
The USA has always and forever represented the will of the Bourgeoisie. The issue we are seeing now is further and further separation between the Proletariat and a smaller and smaller concentration of the Bourgeoisie due to Capitalism’s centralizing nature. The silver lining is that this same centralizing process makes Socialism even easier to implement once the Proletariat siezes control, as these large intricate networks have already developed their own infrastructure for planning that can be folded into the Public Sector, the hard part is getting over that threshold of power.
