Can one still claim that the USA is a liberal democracy? Where do you draw the line?
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Looks like you are a few years behind events.
200?
It’s at least a Soft Oligarchy yes. There’s no legally or extra legally enforced class system. If you can make it into the upper classes, by guile, luck, or sheer bastardry they’ll accept you and let you run some things, maybe even political offices. See J.D. Vance, a millennial from Appalachia who has risen to the Vice Presidency via guile and sheer bastardry.
But it’s a Soft Oligarchy because opportunities are far from equal. Before anyone starts screeching, equality of outcome isn’t an expectation here, merely equality of opportunity. In the large majority of cases your zip code can predict your future socioeconomic level. And not because rural areas are cheaper, that just means middle and upper class start at lower numbers there. Those classes are still not being obtained. Along with this are several studies over the last couple decades telling us that socioeconomic mobility is all but dead, both individually, and more recently, intergenerational mobility.
So while you aren’t going to be killed or imprisoned for earning too much or asking for stuff above your station, it is very rare to access those levels without being born to them. Thus the “soft” in Soft Oligarchy.
There’s no legally or extra legally enforced class system.
Lol wat?
US has a strict class system. There is owner class and working class, they get treated differently under the law.
For example, look at how owners get taxed v how regular people get taxed. That’s legally enforced class.
.D. Vance, a millennial from Appalachia who has risen to the Vice Presidency via guile and sheer bastardry.
Regime propaganda relies on these stories to justify the class system. Every generation gets a few of this class traitors so pedons can be told… You see loser, if you worked harder, daddy would reward you too! Now back on the planstation, start making daddy some mother fucking money.
The tax system doesn’t care where you came from. In a Hard Oligrachy it would. You would never escape the working class tax system or justice system and those systems would be designed to prevent you from changing classes, to the point of destroying anyone with the pretensions to try. The fact that you can access that other standard of treatment means the class system isn’t enforced. If you want to say it’s highly encouraged I would agree with you, but this isn’t some conspiracy to have a couple winners that get highly propagandized, and there’s no law against socioeconomic mobility.
Examples of Hard oligarchies are countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia. In Russia you will go out a window because someone powerful didn’t like your competition and you have no protections; and in Saudi Arabia you will be arrested for pissing off the Royals.
The US is bad enough without exaggerating shit to make it seem like the worst. That leaves us unable to see what we might want to keep. Like the way the justice and healthcare systems treat rich people, we should all have that.
You would never escape the working class tax system or justice system and those systems would be designed to prevent you from changing classes, to the point of destroying anyone with the pretensions to try
This is practically how it functions, working class rarely becomes owner class.
there’s no law against socioeconomic mobility.
There is a set of laws that protect owners property, they get cash transfers from the government budgets, their legal entities get preferential tax treatment. Sure anyone can start business technically but capital is needed…
US increasingly doesn’t have social mobility, you parents social rank correlates strongly with your own out comes.
In Russia you will go out a window because someone powerful didn’t like your competition
Boeing milled its whistleblower, nothing happened.
Esptain committed “suicide”
JFK, mlk and malcom X got killed by the ruling class.
So it’s conspiracy theories.
Have a nice day.
So it’s conspiracy theories.
Lol, they are about as valid as whatever the government is shilling. It does make one wonder why so much of government records related to these murfers are classified still…
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.
I’m no fool, they never convinced me of that lie.
50 is divided, not united…
How does one unite that which is already whole?
Ever tried having health insurance from a particular provider in one state, and having a health issue in another state?
You Luigi it.
There ain’t a goddamn thing united about these fucking states, except they let you temporarily cross the borders for a few days or couple weeks or so. God forbid you have any issues out of your registered home state though, you’re basically fucked.
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 US has been an oligarchy for some time. Act accordingly.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/princeton-experts-say-us-no-longer-democracy
A while ago
Pretty sure it crossed that line decades ago.
Late 19th century. There was some pushback, some anti-trust laws with teeth, and then decades of bloody union battles to secure rights workers and their elected officials have thrown away for 50 years.
The concentration of wealth and influence of 10-16 people trumps that of hundreds of millions and is as bad or worse than it was during the robber baron era.
Political representatives are bought and paid for which means the poor have no voice against the wealthy.
We have a justice system that is incapable of prosecuting the wealthy and powerful, when it isn’t being stocked by ideologues.
Meritocracy is dead; Birth has much greater correlation to wealth and power.
Media is fully captured by the wealthy; they own the vast majority of media consumed: TV, film, news, social junk.
Nice country you got here.
Remember when unions thought they were so Irreplaceable and important. That they would withhold Support for a second term from a Democrat, they didn’t think did enough for them. One of the biggest miscalculations and blunders of the post World War II era. Because first they came for the unions and labor power.
I’d say around the beginning of the 1900s is when we truly lost the plot. While we, the workers, were given a few breadcrumbs over the years to appease us, the Owner class was strip mining the wealth at every level imaginable, there’s a reason people like Rockefeller and Carnegie were richer than heaven at this time in history.
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.
Astronaut Pistol Astronaut.
Can someone explain this comment? I can ask dumb questions here right?
“Wait, it’s an oligarchy?”
“Always has been.”
Yes.
The land of the free enslaved it’s inhabitants.
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
Feel free to crosspost to [email protected]
I think it’s worse. I think we have noble houses fighting for the throne again. The Bush family, the Clinton family, they wanted Michelle Obama… In what sane democracy does the family member or wife of the last elected leader make sense as being the best option? Forget oligarchy, we have a straight up monarchy brewing with a nice democratic paint job.
Speaking of the nice paint job, it’s a good job you guys made that Eagle thing official. That makes it nice and clear that you’re not at risk of transitioning from democracy to dictatorship.
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The Bush family, the Clinton family, they wanted Michelle Obama
That’s how an oligarchy works though. A few powerful people, usually dynastic families, decide how the country should be run. You’re giving an example of oligarchs picking an oligarch. How is that evidence of monarchy rather than oligarchy?
Blood descendants are a foundation of monarchy though
