Yves here. Readers will hopefully be relieved that interviewee Benjamin Page, who in an important paper found that typical US voters have almost no influence over policy, mentions in passing that democracy has yet to be attempted. Even so, it remains to be see if even our Potemkin democracy can be salvaged.
By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute of New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute of New Economic Thinking website
The term “democracy in peril” is so often heard these days it seems to have overtaken traditional expressions like “land of opportunity” or “American dream” in the contemporary U.S. lexicon. Norms and institutions are threatened. Concentrated wealth and power leave ordinary people forgotten. Gridlock shackles policymaking.
Political scientist Benjamin Page, professor emeritus at Northwestern University, is a veteran observer of the American political landscape whose research interests include public opinion, policy making, the mass media, and U.S. foreign policy. In a groundbreaking 2014 study with co-author Martin Gilens, Page exposed a disconcerting reality: ordinary citizens wield negligible influence over government policy. Page and Gilens’ data confirmed long-standing suspicions about the predominant role played by the wealthy and business interests in shaping the political landscape.
In the following interview with the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Page reflects on the seismic shifts he has witnessed in American politics, from the promising era of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society to the current landscape dominated by obstruction, gridlock, and social media frenzy. Drawing parallels with historical periods of crisis, he contemplates the challenges currently confronting our democracy. In doing so, he provides valuable insights into the barriers obstructing progress and outlines his recipe for reform.
Lynn Parramore: You’ve witnessed so much change in American politics over the course of your life and career. What’s fundamentally different now from when you were growing up? What has surprised you?
Ben Page: Back in the sixties, a lot of things looked promising. You had Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program to tackle poverty and racial injustice. Women were achieving improvements. Change was happening. I thought it looked great!
Fast forward to today, and nothing is happening. It’s all obstruction and gridlock. Polarized parties. Moreover, there’s all this craziness going around in social media — even in so-called mainstream media. Back in the sixties, I wouldn’t have envisioned any of this. I mean, back then, my heavens, Republicans and Democrats thought they disagreed! Even if you look back to the fifties, during the Eisenhower administration, you see that some fairly progressive things happened. It was a Republican administration that was tolerant, open, and in favor of civil rights. More so, actually, than the Democrats at the time. So what a change! The Republican Party is very different today.
LP: American democracy has had several moments of crisis going all the way back to Jefferson, but somehow we’ve hung on and moved forward. We had the Great Depression, but eventually, we got the New Deal. We managed to get something done for ordinary Americans even though there were big challenges baked into the cake, such as the undemocratic nature of the Senate, which you’ve pointed to in your work. Why can’t we seem to address the needs of the people today?
BP: Good question. When you mention the Senate, you’ve put your finger on what I view as the biggest single problem in American politics. The reason the New Deal worked is that at the time, the Democratic Party was this peculiar coalition of conservative Southern Democrats and liberal Northern Democrats. They basically made a deal with each other. The big weakness of the New Deal is that it treated Black people terribly. They were left out of almost everything. That’s why the white Southern reactionary senators went along.
So that’s part of it. Another part of it is that thanks to the Great Depression, there was an enormous majority, a one-party majority in the House and Senate. That’s not the case now.
Another big difference between now and then is these closely divided parties — polarized and closely divided. That’s a recipe for big trouble.
LP: A lot of people around the world are saying that American democracy is failing. Are they right?
BP: When they say democracy may be failing, I would disagree. I think it hasn’t been tried! Really, it’s never fully been tried in the United States. But it’s true that we’re farther from it today than we have been for a long time. The current period is a lot like the first Gilded Age in the late 19th century. Our current situation also has some similarities to the period before the Civil War: sharp polarization, concentrated wealth, and big problems in the political system.
LP: In more recent decades, as the New Deal has been gradually undone, we have experienced economic globalization, which, you note, has boosted the power of the wealthy over working people. You argue that this has been handled particularly badly in the U.S. compared to other wealthy countries. In what ways? Why has that been the case?
BP: If you look at Western Europe, Japan, or pretty much any rich country in the world, they’ve done much better than the United States at creating and maintaining a generous safety net. They’ve done a better job of taking care of people who got wiped out by globalization, who had their jobs go away, their wages go down, and so forth. It’s not astrophysics to know what to do about that. Everybody knows what you can do if you want to. In the United States, there are two big problems. One is lack of will in the sense that we don’t have much of an organized labor movement at this point, and we have enormously powerful billionaires pushing against progressive policies or efforts to reform. We have a Democratic Party that’s dominated by professional people and heavily dependent on liberal billionaires who favor liberal social issues but oppose economic progressivism. That’s a very different scene.
The forces in the U.S. are different, but so is the structure of U.S. politics. Our system just makes it very, very easy to block things. The public doesn’t get its will done mostly because the billionaires and corporate interest groups are able to prevent anything progressive from happening, even when it has popular support. They can prevent taxing capital gains. They can prevent us from enacting a really good safety net. They can keep the earned income tax credit down, etc., etc. Our research shows that even when 70% or 80% of the American public favors a new policy, it usually doesn’t happen. It only happens maybe 35% or 40% of the time. A wealthy minority is able to block things that the majority wants.
LP: Are we witnessing a shift where the few can not only hinder progress but also actively change laws on popularly supported issues, such as reproductive rights? Policies that disproportionately impact the well-being and security of less affluent folks?
BP: Yes, and that, of course, points a finger at the Supreme Court. Republican state legislatures and governors are in on this, but the Supreme Court is crucial. Democracy has not been tried there. It’s an institution that can just do pretty much what it wants to do at changing laws and policies. Sooner or later we’re going to have to deal with that. It’s very tough. It will take a constitutional amendment, probably, but putting term limits on justices would make a very big difference because justices would be appointed more often and would better reflect the politics of today instead of decades ago. We could arrange it so that the court is a bit larger court too. We could arrange for every president to get a few appointments, rather than these Mitch McConnell situations where you cram three, four, five new justices onto the court and completely go against what the public wants about a lot of things. And enlarging the Court could be done within the existing Constitution; Congress could do it.
LP: How much does the reinvigoration of democracy depend on more economic democracy?
BP: A lot, I think. This is a serious problem. Inequality of wealth has gotten so huge that the power of Elon Musk, Charles Koch, and so forth is just overwhelming. The Democratic Party is scared of them. The Democrats have their own favorite billionaires who are generally, as I say, socially liberal but economically conservative. In the end, there are so many pathways by which money can be turned into political power that it may simply be impossible to change things without getting at the structure of the economy and the concentration of wealth. That’s a little discouraging because the political system being screwed up makes it hard to do much of anything. We can’t even get simple taxes on unrealized capital gains. It seems obvious that we’ve got decades of huge gains in the economy from international trade, from automation and so forth, but an enormous amount of that has gone to very few people. They ought to share. But how do you make them share? Philanthropy won’t do it. You’ve got to do it politically, but our system is so messed up that it is very hard to do so.
LP: It’s been rather rare in human history that the wealthy just simply offered to hand over to the people their fair share. They have to feel a lot of pressure.
BP: Actually, a little comment on that. My friends who study comparative politics keep pointing out to me that though the wealthy run things pretty much everywhere, even in Sweden, they run things in a very different way.
LP: How so?
BP: Well, they go along with doing something for workers. It’s an interesting question as to why. One reason, almost certainly, is that labor is so much better organized and more powerful almost everywhere other than the U.S.
LP: Why is it that workers have been able to stay organized in places like Sweden when ours can’t?
BP: Well, you have to ask how they ever got started organizing. In the United States, they barely did. Here, the working class has been divided from the beginning by slavery. That’s a crucial factor. Black strike breakers used to be deployed by bosses who wanted to resist segregated white unions. But beyond that, the union movement has been divided by craft unions versus industrial unions. Labor has been repressed in many ways at many times. The most recent real disaster was probably the 1940s, early 1950s, when Hubert Humphrey and other politicians of both parties basically clamped down on any political left-wing tendencies of labor, purging anybody who’d talked to a Communist Party person ever, and so forth. But the weakness of U.S. labor goes back a long way, and it has deep roots.
LP: Where do you think today’s Democrats should focus on addressing issues faced by ordinary people?
BP: There’s quite a lot of work to do. The Democratic Party is no longer a working-class party the way it was during the New Deal. When you look at voting statistics, professionals are the heart of the Democratic Party now, with some support from Black, brown, and public service workers, but not much support elsewhere in the working class. The professionals are just not enthusiastic about steeply progressive taxation. They like Social Security and Medicare. They like middle-class and upper-middle-class programs, but they really don’t favor redistributing wealth.
LP: Redistribution is kind of a dirty word, even to the Democrats.
BP: If not a dirty word, at least it’s not a banner that you want to wave around and try to march up the hill with. So that’s part of it, but in terms of concrete things, it’s really interesting to look at the Biden administration’s history on tax reform. Joe Biden, to his credit, picked up a whole lot of ideas from Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders about taxes. He actually had what I thought was quite a good tax proposal. But it got watered down step by step in the House and the Senate. Part of that had to do with the Senate being extremely unrepresentative. The Democrats, even when they supposedly control the Senate, are really held hostage by people like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. At any given moment there are half a dozen Democrats from red states who are not very interested in progressive economic matters. That’s beyond the control of the Democrats unless we reform the Senate, and that’s one of the key kinds of reforms I favor. Similarly, the Democrats have to get money to run a political party, and they get it from professionals. They get a fair amount of it from really wealthy people.
LP: Research has shown that Democrats receive substantial funding from private equity. Not quite as much as Republicans, it appears, but plenty. There has been a lot of concern about the growing influence of private equity on the political system and its impact on democracy. What’s your take?
BP: A good way to personalize this is to think about Chuck Schumer. A lot of people view him as a very liberal guy, and in many respects he is. But when it comes to Wall Street, private equity, and big banks, he’s their guy.
LP: Can we really disconnect social matters from economic matters? For example, there have been many reports of private equity firms coming into communities and decimating local businesses and negatively impacting people’s livelihoods, their lives. That can’t be helpful for social justice matters either, can it?
BP: Social matters and economic matters come together, particularly as they affect ordinary people, that’s right. But not in the minds of billionaires. I spent quite a bit of time studying the wealthiest billionaires, and it’s pretty clear that close to a quarter or a third of their money goes to Democrats. It’s also pretty clear that the reason it does is almost exclusively social issues. “Liberal” billionaires don’t like MAGA Republicans, their social conservatism, their religious conservatism, and so forth. But I’m afraid the Democratic billionaires… well, I’ve only known one or two in my lifetime, but it’s certainly true of them, they just are not very keen on progressive economic policies.
LP: You’ve expressed your concern about the possibility of a Trump presidency. Can you highlight specific scenarios or policy changes that particularly concern you if that transpires?
BP: Well, let’s see. There’s a spectrum of scenarios you can imagine if Trump were elected again. Some of them are just mild nightmares. Others are truly frightening. I don’t have a crystal ball, but the thing that’s totally clear is that he does not want politics to be run by the majority of average citizens. He wants to disenfranchise people who believe things he doesn’t. Especially persons of color, especially poor people. That’s potentially a very grave danger. It has started already. If it’s carried through to the end, we’re going to have minority rule for a very long time. Definitely not democracy.
LP: What do you think should be done to prevent these frightening scenarios?
BP: The key thing is that there has got to be a bipartisan project to stop Trump. There are a lot of thoughtful Republicans who realize that this is an inflection point in American history. This is a singularity. Something very unusual could happen. A good many Republicans want to stop it. So one thing that reformers or academics or ordinary citizens can do is to help Republicans who want to stop Trump. Make it easy for them to do it without forcing them to vote for a party that they don’t like: the Democrats. Any place we can get fusion tickets, for example, that could really help. Like the old way in New York when the liberal party would get together with the Democrats, but people who hated the Democrats could vote for it.
LP: The fusion possibility is interesting. I think of its occasional successes during challenging periods, such as the 1890s in North Carolina. Despite significant differences, the Republicans and the People’s Party collaborated in state elections, with Black people and white farmers able to unite against Democratic elites. There was backlash, of course, but they got things done — securing the governorship and making strides in voter rights, education policy.
BP: Absolutely. That’s a very important comparison, because back then the Gilded Age resembled the present period. You had a reactionary government like Trump’s — McKinley and so forth. You had a huge concentration of wealth, big wealth power. Rich people owned senators through corrupt state legislatures. So a lot of political reforms were needed. And the People’s Party (the word “populist” seems to have been ruined for all time) was very inclusive as far as working with Black people, women as leaders, and so forth. As you say, those people got together, particularly in the Progressive period, through fusion. They worked on democratic reforms. We got the right for women to vote. We got a direct election of senators. We got a number of achievements out of that period.
LP: How might something like that work today?
BP: Well, I think there are two somewhat separate ways of thinking about it. The immediate crisis concerns stopping Trump. Democrats need to keep talking to Republicans like Liz Cheney, who’s a tremendous force for good on Trump, even though I disagree with her about almost every kind of public policy. Adam Kinzinger from Illinois, ditto. There are a fair number of people like that, including even ex-Trump officials, which is rather amazing. Many of them have become pretty reasonable about the dangers of Trump. So we have to work with those people. On the other hand, they aren’t really part of the democratic reform coalition, just a stop-Trump coalition. I think the more important long-term thing, and it’s getting late to do it, is for the Democrats to start appealing again to workers, all workers, including small-town and rural white workers, including the agricultural workers who’ve been ignored forever. It’s hard for the Democrats because they are a party of professionals. People like me. I sort of look around a room where I’m talking to friends and there’s a little diversity, but not nearly as much as there should be. There are no workers.
LP: You note that a big part of the problem with American democracy is just getting people to the polls. And then there’s making sure there’s somebody they actually want to vote for once they’re there. How do we do that?
BP: You know, we need to have a holiday for election time. Veterans Day is a great choice.
We need to have automatic voter registration. Why should people have to go through a lot of hassle to get the right to vote? That’s ridiculous. We need to make it easy to get your ballot in. That means encouraging – instead of forbidding – people to help collect ballots from nursing homes and the like. There are a string of obvious reforms like that. But the thing that doesn’t get talked about as much is that if you want people to vote, you’ve got to give them attractive choices. We’re stuck in a two-party system. Lee Drutman calls it a two-party “doom loop.” That’s a frightening phrase, but it’s a good way to put it. We need a political system in which people can look at a number of candidates and express more nuanced views. Picking just one out of two unpopular candidates provides no real choice at all. When a third party shows up, plurality voting cannot even guarantee that the least unpopular candidate will win. Most people around the world think the U.S. system is just nutty.
LP: There are only two things on the menu and I don’t want to order either one of them.
BP: Right. Many people don’t like either one. And why don’t we like either one? Well, it has to do with party control of nominations, which happens with these ridiculous one-party primary elections, low turnout of 15 or 20 percent a lot of the time. Very unrepresentative of average citizens. Highly representative of extremist party activists who ring the doorbells, get their friends out to vote. They can nominate yellow dogs or blue dogs or any kind of dogs they want to nominate, and get their dog elected in November in one-party districts. Crazy system!
I have some ideas on how we could get away from that. “Proportional representation, American style.” Give people a lot of choices by having multiple-member congressional and legislative districts within a state. If it’s a big state, create several different mega-districts where you elect four or five congresspeople at once in each. And you do it in a very easy way. You have maybe seven or eight candidates, and voters rank them. Simple computer programs can turn those rankings into the most popular four or five candidates. The great thing is, that way you represent the whole district. Say you’re electing five: any group that has around 20 percent of the population will get at least one official they like, for sure. Important minorities will almost always get representation. It also means that you don’t have so many “representatives” who are unpopular and unrepresentative of large parts of their districts.
LP: What about partisan gridlock? What do you think is the key to cutting through that Gordian knot?
BP: Proportional representation with multi-member districts will help. But I think cutting through that knot is also very closely related to making things more democratic within all our institutions. A lot of gridlock comes from “veto points” among the many officials and institutions that all have to agree on legislation: the House of Representatives (often captured by an extremist minority); or just the Rules Committee within the House; or small groups of Senators who can filibuster; or the Senate itself, if too many of those small, rural red states oppose a progressive policy. There are veto points everywhere. That’s what makes it so difficult to get anything done, especially when there are two parties that are polarized and have roughly equal strength. It means that at any given moment, there’s going to be one obstructive party, almost for sure, that controls at least one veto point.
So here’s the magic trick. If you reform all our political institutions so that they’re all more democratic, reliable, responsive – the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the Presidency — then they won’t be as obstructive. And they won’t be so different from each other. They won’t be fighting all the time, and there won’t be as much gridlock among institutions. There will be action and efficiency. But there will also be democratic responsiveness.
LP: You remain optimistic despite all the challenges that face American democracy. What keeps your belief in this system and the idea that it can be reformed alive?
BP: Well, I have bad days, but I am generally optimistic. I think my optimism mostly comes from a sense of history and a sense of what the world is like outside the United States. If the U.S. wants to compete as any kind of great power in the world, it’s on the wrong track. I have quoted President Xi of China because I’m especially interested in China. Xi is saying, you guys basically are failing. Well, there’s something to that. I would hope that is going to lead Americans of all sorts to wake up and take notice. One good moment, in a strange way, was when the Republicans had their bizarre Speaker fights. It was ludicrous. We almost shut the government down. We had trouble raising the debt ceiling. We had trouble approving any sort of government budget. Could hardly do a thing. The world looks at that, and we look at that, and I think an awful lot of principled conservatives – as well as progressives – say, ok, this is intolerable. There’s got to be a change.
So I’m hoping that there’ll be a really large social movement. I hope that millions of people, like during the People’s Party and Progressive periods, will insist on changing the system and making things happen. We’ve done it before.
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It was a very interesting piece on the problems of American politics. That is, until he too a hard-right turn down Trump Derangement Syndrome Lane and then all bets were off. You get a bad case of TDS and it takes you down strange byways – such as when he sees Liz Cheney as a solution to Trump. Yeah, nah! And he makes other mistakes too such as when he says ‘The Democrats, even when they supposedly control the Senate, are really held hostage by people like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.’ That is not a coincidence but is by design. If Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema both fell off a building, then you would quickly have one or two new people that would fill that role for the Democrats. Until you get the big money out of the political system, it cannot be reformed. And it was not long ago that the Supreme Court gave a green light for it even more. This post is still interesting but take with a few grains of salt.
Right. Long before Manchin and Sinema, you had Joe Lieberman — who had been Al Gore’s VP pick, for crying out loud — as the “rotating villain.” Strange that Page does not see that all this is by design, an intentional strategy on the part of the D party insiders. They don’t want the responsibility of actually ruling, they’re comfortable blaming the R’s. Gridlock and having a figure like Trump around is what they want, it turbocharges their fundraising opportunities and even lets them fire up WW3 while pretending to be the lesser evil.
I agree that the TDS is jarring. There doesn’t appear to be any recognition that Trump is just a symptom of reaction against the “uniparty” era for which Democrats themselves are primarily responsible due to their shift from an erstwhile party of labour to a creature of urban educated elites. I believe this shift is also responsible for much of the despair which manifests itself in an electorate where something like half the population no longer bothers to vote.
I think he’s slightly better on the problems with the Senate, since he does acknowledge that it’s not just two recalcitrant Dems who are responsible for the gridlock — I think he notes that there are at least 6 or 7 always waiting in the wings to take up the Manchin/Sinema positions.
He reminds me of Thomas Frank. He knows the game is rigged but somehow thinks that the Democrats didn’t help create the system, or at least didn’t do it on purpose, it’s just unforeseen and unintended consequence of the Democrats being good guys and girls. They reallllly want to stop it but just can’t for some nebulous, undefined reason.
He also fails to recognize that the so called social issues that the Democrats focus on are based around divisive identarian politics that just so happen to fracture any sort of possible solidarity between the basic citizenry and allow them to continue to drain us dry.
That’s exactly right, Rev. The reason the US political set up is the way it is, is because a number of very rich and powerful people want it to be so. You have to get rid of the buying and selling of politicians to the high bidders. There should be full and frank declarations of how much and from whom funds come from, and most importantly, a cap on maximum individual and total contributions to each party and individual candidates. State top-up funding for candidates who have large popularity but are not able to raise adequate amounts of money might be a thing too.
Thank you, my thoughts exactly. I’m left asking myself, how can somebody so plugged into the system, who spends their professional time in deep analysis, not understand the influence of dark money on the political parties? Reading this piece makes it sound like the only money entering the system is the money that we can see, when in fact political funding is like an iceberg, we only see the top of the iceberg sticking out of the water when the vast majority of it is buried beneath the surface.
This is an excellent metaphor for understanding elite academics, even those who seem to be “progressive.” Page notes a number of obvious problems poking up above the water line, but gives little indication of how they are all connected below the surface. Historically, this has been the role of “political science” in the US: detailed, specialized focus on specific aspects of the *surface* phenomena – elections, “public opinion,” the committee system, the visible legislative process, etc. – while refusing to link these to the larger system in which they operate.
This is almost comically demonstrated in the paragraph that starts with “The immediate crisis concerns stopping Trump” and ends with “It’s hard for the Democrats because they are a party of professionals… There are no workers” without explicitly linking the Trump phenomenon with the latter. On the contrary, the key first step for the Democrats is a “bipartisan project to stop Trump” with the likes of Cheney and Kinzinger!
We’ve been dismantling the New Deal barriers to accelerated economic concentration for nearly half a century now, as we have dismantled the few restrictions we had (briefly) on the role of money in politics. It’s hard to see how this will be reversed without some sort of major crisis or upheaval.
When your paycheck depends on those corrupt parts of the system not being addressed… University endowments cone from the same people that fund that dark money. Professor Page understands his position succinctly.
I totally noticed the same thing! He accurately diagnoses multiple problems with the US system of government, and then makes Trump this boogie man that if stopped will make things better. Huh? Totally jarring TDS. Trump is a SYMPTOM of our problems, not the cause!
A symptom can cause a whole new bunch of problems on its own.
“Going into shock” is a symptom of a very bad injury. But if something is not done to reverse the “going into shock”, the “shock” itself can leave the patient dead so fast that no time remains to address the “very bad injury” problem.
Sometimes the “going into shock” really does have to be treated firstest of allest. Sometimes the patient needs to be immediately stabilized, and then the very bad injury problem can be addressed.
The line Page uses when discussing Trump’s threat was:
“I don’t have a crystal ball, but the thing that’s totally clear is that he [Trump] does not want politics to be run by the majority of average citizens.”
Isn’t that exactly what he and his co-author Gilens documented in their paper, that the majority of citizens have no influence? In other words, status quo under Trump? That’s the threat he’s so worried about?
You can’t save something that never existed, US “democracy” has been a sham performative for the plebs facade ever since the Framer’s Coup. TDS is just more noise, the Dems and Repubs represent pretty much the same people while they play out a pantomime called “see how different we are, no really!” On substantive issues, such as the upward transfer of wealth and income, battling China, supporting Zionist ethnic cleansing etc. they are all on the same page. The Repubs can play with cultural issues such as abortion because their precious children can always just fly to Europe for a holiday where pregnancies magically disappear, or they can openly support their lesbian daughters as Cheney has while seeing no hypocrisy.
This has long been my position as well. We have not had democracy since 1787, and I’m not even sure we had it for a short time before that.
I also cannot understand how people can believe that this can be fixed by simply “getting money out of politics”- I think this is delusional. This, like Trump Derangement Syndrome, is another SYMPTOM of our system. It is not the root cause.
The root cause is the concentration of wealth- Capitalism. You can change laws to make all the various forms of bribery illegal, but as long as there are wealthy people, they will relentlessly and systematically corrupt the government, legally or illegally, and diligently work to make corruption endemic again via legislation that favors them- because they are incentivized to do so under a capitalist system- Marx pretty conclusively demonstrated this and has been proven correct.
You also have to prevent the concentration of power- because as we saw in the USSR, concentrated power will be used to acquire wealth, just as wealth is used to acquire power.
As Bakunin said, if you want to prevent the misuse of power, you make sure that nobody ever gains any in the first place. We need a much more radical fix in order to have the society that everyone seems to agree that they want (a free and equal one), we have just been propagandized to such a degree that we are too afraid to actually attempt to create it.
An upbeat analysis with simple and obvious solutions, even though simple ain’t easy and obvious don’t mean recognized. Still, it feels good when improvements can be so straightforward.
Nonetheless, in the name of cynicism, I read the following comment by Page with jaundiced eye.
“I sort of look around a room where I’m talking to friends and there’s a little diversity, but not nearly as much as there should be. There are no workers.”
On the contrary, the workers were there in force. They were the ones preparing and serving you cocktails and canapés!
@Steve M — Yes, exactly. As the popular Netflix series “The Crown” demonstrates over and over again, the British royals have the most intimate conversations in front of their servants, because servants literally don’t exist as human beings for the royals. We have our own royal order here, but in the U.S. it tragically includes academics like Page, and virtually all other members of the PMC.
Workers are less than human; literally unworthy of notice. As Frederick Douglass famously said:
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
Well, workers, if this is not the time to unite, when will it be?
I once worked at a banquet server during a meeting of CEOs. It was the new CEO of Laura Ashley or some other higher end brand, a man whose previous experience had been with a company completely unrelated to women’s clothing, pitching a deal to Nordstrom execs.
That was the first time I realized these people really weren’t all that smart and were just making it up as they went along.
Side note: A good friend of mine bartended a function during the 2000 presidential campaign where the “reformed” alcoholic W was in attendance. Buddy told me he personally served Bush several glasses of wine at that event. It was a really long time ago and perhaps Bush was being gentlemanly and picking up drinks for other guests. I kinda doubt it though. Anyway, it still speaks to the dynamic of the elites not paying any heed to the “little people” watching them.
I knew a guy who was a nurse for LBJ when he ended up in I think Bethesda. Said, with many examples, that he was as much a rotten person as the worst of the British ruling class. My cousin was LBJ’s secretary for years, and when I mentioned this to her she got red in the face. Don’t know whether that was from trying to restrain herself from spilling more beans, or anger at any challenge to her elevated boss. Or something else. As a Vietnam vet and New Deal liberal, I had plenty of reason to hate the sonofabitch. So many more deserving of the same…
As the cost of running for office has risen over the years, every candidate has become increasingly dependent on big donors who demand something in return. In essence, today’s lawmakers are either billionaires themselves or pawns of billionaires. Until this structure is changed, there can be no change.
The Athenians had the right idea: sortition, not elections.
What a wonderful response below, yet I surmise most will gloss over it: Nothing to see here, we all know the game being played, it’s in the same vein as “we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” But for how long can the fantastical ideal subsiste in the fact of the harsh reality, or at least an honest appraisal of the oligarchical system as it truly functions with all its cruelty, ugly warts and infirmities?
LP: A lot of people around the world are saying that American democracy is failing. Are they right?
BP: When they say democracy may be failing, I would disagree. I think it hasn’t been tried! Really, it’s never fully been tried in the United States. But it’s true that we’re farther from it today than we have been for a long time
Yes, so true. I was going to comment on that as the essence of the whole interview.
Yves nailed with it in two words, Potemkin democracy. Presently, my bet is on a weak, totalitarian regime. I also think the Democrats to be more dangerous than the GOP, but no matter. Some sort of wobbly, neo-feudal structure with rationing of most everything.
I’d like to be around for the collapse of the empire, because when it happens, it will be very quick. But I suspect I’ll miss out on it. I do look forward to the next two years though, as I foresee all hell breaking loose. Potemkin… beauty.
I’d call it an “imperfect plutocracy”. (Some democratic elements required for legitimacy, stability etc. spoil things a bit.)
It is demagogic democratic plutocracy
‘Electoral oligarchy’ is the best description I’ve seen, from Michael Hudson’s latest book.
Years ago I used the term “cosmetic democracy” and little has changed to disabuse me of its applicability.
The US empire is already collapsing. It is just happening gradually, rather than in a sudden big downfall. It will probably continue along the downward spiral it has been stuck in from the hangover of the post-World War II economic boom and the subsequent rise of neoliberalism.
It is basically dying a slow death as it transitions into a post-empire state as it is plagued by internal rot from a combination of the corruption of its political leadership, corporate privatization and financialization, and the military Keynesianism that the entire US economy is based on at this point.
The US will still exist for the foreseeable future, but it will continue to unwind into a backwards kleptostate ala the waning days of the Qing dynasty in China.
What kind of state was the Ottoman Empire in its waning days? Is America heading towards an “end of the Ottomans” outcome?
And if so, what sort of Turkey will drag itself forth from the rubble? Or will the Old Confederate States become a sort of Byzantium 2.0 for a while?
And what about the Indian Nations?
Ah TDS, turning the PMC mind to mush since 2016!
I have two older PMC friends from my 12-step fellowship that I caught up with over coffee a few days ago. Now for two people I consider “smart” (one’s a professor at the purple dinosaur) they first started talking about sports, which to me is as intelligible as Klingon.
Then of course the convo morphed into TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP and all the ways he’s destroying the body politic (never mind that the vital organs of democracy were harvested decades ago and the corpse stuffed with sawdust). I said nothing, because I know it’s dangerous to wake sleepwalkers when they’re ambling about).
Finally it was all about entertainment- consuming vast quantities media: netflix and other streaming shows and similar distractions (I saw Poor Things so at last I could chime in!). What I realized is and what they were completely oblivious to was the fact that everything they spoke about was the same topic. Perhaps it’s the multiple covid jabs/reinfections that have sadly spun their shrinking minds into an endless doom-loop.
I don’t get the “purple dinosaur” reference — to me that’s Barney.
I googled it and couldn’t find anything.
Cuyahoga Community College, perhaps.
Me too – I was gonna say I’ve never heard of Barney College.
But good comment though!
NYU
I work there and the kool-aid branding is all purple.
Sleepwalking. Ha. “like a fart in a trance”
(From an episode of Shetland)
Beautiful, Aaron. This paragraph ought to be stuffed and mounted:
I may steal (quote) it, if you don’t mind.
Thomas
Citing The Rev Kev above,
All real reform flows from this. But at this point I doubt it’s possible to fix the system from the inside as it were, because the means of repair have long been removed. The rot is complete. Outside of open revolt, there seems no way to remove that control without removing its source: the value of money used to buy influence and political power. Of course, this means economic collapse and extremely hard times for all, but at least some in the US are already in or close to such dire straits.
This is the corner we’ve painted ourselves into in the US. Any real reform will be thwarted by wealth, that collectively may have diverse views on social issues but is united in opposition to any move that decreases its political influence and control. Third party challenges never leave the starting gate, and the Democratic Party’s Hope and Change approach is committed only to the first, and avoids the second at all costs. Sure, eventually grifters like Schumer and Pelosi will die off, but The Money will replace them with new versions. At this point, Trump seems to be the one axis that provides unpredictability, instability. I daily wonder about the above, but can never arrive at a solution to this problem that does not involve violent upheaval and suffering.
Citing The Rev Kev above,
Until you get the big money out of the political system, it cannot be reformed.
Yes – true … Citizens United Money=speech – Is one result of the Two party system merged into one through money for so long that the justices can’t see through the puffery.
The interview artfully danced around the money issue.
If you don’t have cash, you don’t have free speech.
If an artificial entity like a corporation is given more speech rights than a ‘we the people’ well their you go
“If you don’t have cash, you don’t have free speech.” A nice analogy to A. J. Liebling’s “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one,” Liebling made that observation around 1960, when New York had seven daily English language newspapers and dozens in other languages. Fast forward to the present when most news disseminates from about a half dozen media conglomerates whose interest is to treat “we the people” as consumers rather than citizens.
So if one is an accelerationist, the only logical presidential choice is Trump. And then hope for the best.
Sometimes the tree falls where the lumberjack wants it to fall, and sometimes the tree falls on the lumberjack.
But as long as every leftist-for-voting-Trump understands the risk, they do have a case to make.
Democracy is about who rules–who effectively wields power. All the talk about this or that reform or this or that of the contemporary political architecture, finesses this fundamental point. Who rules? It’s clear that the rabble, the 99%, the “common people,” do not. The electoral system has been so sculpted–by both major parties, often in explicit collaboration, as was the case in California, when the Greens were getting too many votes–that the two-party system is virtually unassailable. Democracy? Please. Let’s have plain talk. Democracy is the last thing Trump, No-Primaries Joe, or any of the other plutocrats and their cutouts want. As with everything else, the operative question is “how much?” If you can afford it, “democracy” is available. Any solution to this has to be extra-electoral and extra-judicial–a fancy way of saying coordinated mass action, especially by working people through their unions and via spontaneous strikes. What other hope for *democracy* is there?
+100
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDyQxtg0V2w
another civil war?
Agree. Or a revolution. You can only dismantle this with violence. People can talk and write whatever they want, sometimes it’s fun to listen to or read their delusional thinking lol.
Right… Trump is the problem. Trump, who had no political influence for most his life until he was elected POTUS, then was sandbagged for 4 years and got very little done. And don’t start on the SCOTUS appointments, as the Democrats have been more than complicit in approving conservative, reactionary judges my entire adult life. Remember when Schumer cut a deal with Trump to push through his nominations so that Congress could go home sooner? I do (https://truthout.org/articles/chuck-schumer-cuts-deal-with-mcconnell-to-fast-track-trump-judges/). Then, after pointing out the problem with DINO’s in the Senate like Manchin and Sinema (those are the easy targets… no mention of decades long faux “progressives” like Biden, Hoyer, Clinton, Lieberman – a long and devastating list) Page goes on to say that only merging these reprobates with equally disingenuous Republicans can lead us to “democracy” and save us from the idiot Trump. And though I doubt I’d vote for him, I’d prefer an idiot (who won’t accomplish much) outside the tent pissing in than a corrupt, mendacious ghoul (who will continue to extinguish life in over half the planet) pissing out and on our heads.
Yeah…
nah…
meh…
Trump is a symptom of a corrupt system and desperate electorate who have nowhere to turn. The working-class have been stabbed in the back many times by the Duopoly Dictatorship. The two ridiculous freaks that are shoved in our faces are an insult. I refuse to vote for evil, lesser or no. Just write-in a candidate, or boycott the sham election PR stunt.
Wondering, in regards the title, does Betteridge’s Law apply?
(in homage to Lambert’s running commentary in Links)
From my years of hanging out in Washington I see things a little differently. I saw the close relations between members of the Clinton/Gore administration and the media honchos not just professionally but socially. Democrats changed from being a center-left party to what I would call a center-right party that substituted war-war-war for the interests of the people as a whole. To appear “progressive” the DP took on racial issues, sexual minority issues, sexual majority issues (women) as a compensation for throwing the working class at the Republicans who gladly nurtured class-resentment for their own (i.e., billionaires) interests. Due to the total capture of the mainstream and social media companies of the “national conversation” most Americans know absolutely nothing about how much better life is in most of Europe for ordinary people. Thus the “conversation” (media mediated) never seemed to focus on the variety of schemes in most countries in providing heath-care such that most people don’t know that every other developed country in the world has increasing life-spans and we have decreasing life spans and have for almost a decade.
I see no possibility at all until the mass media begins to show some diversity of opinion as well as some interest in the truth–I don’t expect more than that particularly in these times of rather dramatic anti-democratic views (censorship, lawfare, and so on) centered in the Democratic Party.
Great piece. Interesting suggestions to fix what’s a very corrupt, undemocratic system. If anyone has a chance to spend time outside the US and it’s media bubble (in this case Europe) , so many of the problems with the US have been alarmingly obvious and fixable. There’s a clear sense that the country has been in decline for some time, and like the the genocide in Gaza, US regulations have and are being bulldozed. Were it just Manchin and Synema the only impediments in the Democratic Party, it wouldn’t be so bad. The trouble is more Neocon at heart, Chuck Schumer – a Wall Street advocate , and Neocon oligarchical support of Democratic candidates who’re outwardly supporters of Biden/ Blinken policy, or else face AIPAC’s ire for defeat. Kissinger’s realpolitik entrenched in US foreign policy has been its failure. From Afghanistan to Iraq and other places, including now the naval operation “Freedom to Foreseen Mistakes” off the coast of Yemen.
The Koch brothers supported the Federalist Society has done a number on basic individual rights, including now it’s attempt to limit voting rights.
Day off for voting, as many other countries do , is low hanging fruit. Money in politics has turned us into a feudal system, with the bankster fraudsters controlling the country’s economic, social, civic, legal direction. Should donor Bill Akerman have outsized influence to eliminate freedom of speech at Harvard?
The cost of Biden’s reelection is said to be around $2B now. Is that democracy?
“…so many of the problems with the US have been alarmingly obvious and fixable.”
Indeed. There are plenty of countries where homelessness doesn’t exist for example*. Those countries also tend to have far fewer squillionaires and don’t spend such a large portion of their national treasures on the means to turn human beings into pink mist.
*I don’t get outside the US as much as I used to and things may have changed as the Western world banked hard into its neoliberal turn. When I traveled to Greece I didn’t see any homeless back in the early to mid-90s. By the late 90s/early 00s after NATO had dismantled the former Yugoslavia, there were quite a few more desperate people on the streets of Greece, presumably war refugees judging by accents I heard and missing limbs I saw.
1. The current political dysfunction is a continuation of the American political history, as discussed above. The white nationalist/racist/MAGA group was originally represented by the southern slave culture, slave owners, and southern voters. That group and the current MAGA group gained power and influence through generally legitimate democratic means. They voted. This is what democracy looks like in the US. The democratic party is giving us a presidential nomination with only one candidate that noone wants.
2. Where would American democracy be with the Roosevelts. Where would we be if McKinley had not been shot. Even if Theodore’s actual policies were not as impactful as the bully pulpit. Where would we be if Franklin had not arrived when he did. He was not elected based on his New Deal program. He didn’t have a New Deal program when he was first elected. I do not believe in the great man theory of history.
3. The emphasis on the corruption of private money was encouraging. The system cannot be saved, ultimately, until there is some real form of public funding of the election process. That is a necessary part of breaking the power of the parties and the donors.
If I may attempt a prediction: give it, say, 15 years, give or take, and we will see mass-based, class-based political organization. Given the state of the economy for the average poor or working person, and the degree to which we are being activated politically (participation in elections has risen in recent cycles), it seems to me a matter of time before people look at the results of their efforts and try a different approach. Of course, this might also take the form of civil war, but I’m being hopeful.
I do believe that, whatever the result – dictatorship of the proletariat, fundamental campaign finance reform, or New Deal-style buy-offs, we lower classes will organize on the basis of collective interest, soon. Reading stuff like this, it seems obvious that the political class is terminally out of touch, and either has to go completely or make gigantic concessions to the public to avoid the guillotine. Here on the ground, many people are very angry, understandably; we would all benefit long-term from the intelligent direction of that energy.
I’m halfway through Dr. Hudson’s “Collapse of Antiquity” and everything discussed above has been going on for at least 3,000 years. It’s pretty simple; the wealthy want total control of everything along with total debt peonage for everyone else and the poor just want a little equity and a little empathy and to just be left alone to care for their families. The wealthy are super interested in starting wars and winning them and getting the land and the booty which they always promise to share with the soldiers doing the fighting and never do. A reformer comes along with a promise to change things and he is murdered. Repeat. See? Simple!
Michael Hudson is a God that Walks the Planet!!!!!!
It took me awhile, but I just finished Collapse of Antiquity. I have read most of his books. Like others here, I have huge respect for Hudson, but I guess I’m agnostic, so I don’t call him a God, maybe with a lower-case “g” ;-)
With all due respect to Ben Page, Sheldon Wolin’s Democracy Inc. (2010) spelled it out already. And as Yves points out, even the Potemkin PR democracy is wearing very thin. Chris Hedges, although a journalist by trade, writes the intro to Democracy Inc. and has also written a lot about this. The Death of the Liberal Class is a good start. Critics like Noam Chomsky have pointed out that the US electorate has almost no affect over policy for many years. Page seems a bit behind the curve.
Even former POTUS, Jimmy Carter declared “the US is an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery”
https://theintercept.com/2015/07/30/jimmy-carter-u-s-oligarchy-unlimited-political-bribery/
DT or JB, Ds or Rs is not a choice, it is a kick in the face and an insult. http://www.politicalcompass.org places the D and R parties (and JB and DT) in the HARD RIGHT, AUTHORITARIAN quadrant. The methodology is explained, and is hard to argue if you look at policy and not the rhetoric.
Ben Page says stopping DT is important? As if the other asshole is any better? Dude starts to sound a bit ivory tower after that.
Also, the US public is likely the most misinformed, conditioned society in the world.. Any form of democracy is impossible for that reason alone.
Yves has posted articles from Richard D. Wolff, Michael Hudson and others who point out that a nation of distressed, traumatized workers, reduced to Debt Peonage can hardly be called a democracy, even loosely defined. We live in an authoritarian society where if you don’t do as you are told, you will lose your “healthcare” and benefits, income and likely fall into bankruptcy.
So democracy in the US means “do as we say and STFU”
Some people knew exactly what would happen but were ridiculed. Prophetic interview.
https://youtu.be/wwmOkaKh3-s?si=S9gYLIljRjUUNZM2
Thanks for the link.
Listening now where Laura Tyson starts the counter argument, that everything was fine. As we know now, and James Goldsmith knew then, everything was not fine.
Grifters gonna grift.
Goldsmith was an interesting character — a real original. He began his career as a conglomerate constructor and corporate raider, yet ended his life as a prophet of the dangers of unrestricted free trade.
https://www.sirjamesgoldsmith.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/The-Trap-Sir-James-Goldsmith.pdf
Sorry, he lost me when he said,” BP: Well, I think there are two somewhat separate ways of thinking about it. The immediate crisis concerns stopping Trump. Democrats need to keep talking to Republicans like Liz Cheney, who’s a tremendous force for good on Trump, even though I disagree with her about almost every kind of public policy.”
So democracy depends in part on stopping GOP former pres Trump? Alrighty, then…. / ;) (We had to destroy the Constitution in order to save it; or something something baffle-gab?)
I’m thinking if the Dem voted even a tiny bit in the material interests and well being of their voting base (not their financial base) they wouldn’t be having these fits about voters voting the wrong way. Their big idea to save democracy is taking out the Demos?
The story thus far: B still owes me $600, has cut Medicaid, cut food stamps, hasn’t reduced student debt, started a stupid war, has overseen ramping inflation…. but other than tah
Here’s an idea: overturn the SCOTUS Citizens United decision by legal means and get the big big money out of politics. That would do wonders, imo. That is the real (nonpartisan) elephant in the room.
Things weren’t a hell of a lot better before Citizens United, so I don’t think that would be an all healing cure unfortunately.
” The Corporation has no rights which the Natural Person is bound to respect.”
I’m thinking if the Dem voted even a tiny bit in the material interests and well being of their voting base (not their financial base) they wouldn’t be having these fits about voters
I thinking that kneecapping centrist bernie is the own goal of the century, betraying a vast portion of their base. I for one feel that in a sense we dodged a bullet there, but it was revealing and I won’t be voting dem again. And when i”m in a crowd of lost souls (TDS) and become exasperated I’ve been known to ask, “but what will you talk about if you finally get rid of trump?”
Something tells me it won’t be how to make the country a better place…
Sounds like he needs to read Peter Turchin’s End Times. Only an extreme crisis is going to lead to opportunities for positive reform (similar to FDR’s), but there’s at least as likely a chance that it will lead to complete social collapse.
Almost every problem we’re dealing with (failure of our nominal democratic processes, enormously expensive but increasingly incapable military, replacement of basic nutrition with extruded “food-like” substances that cause obesity and sickness, pollution of soils/water/air with microplastics/PFAS/phthalates/etc., antibiotic resistant bacteria, climate degradation caused by fossil fuels, unaffordable and decreasingly effective medical care, widening social divisions, repellent “entertainment”/”news”/”social” media that glorify egoism, bullying and violence), every one, has perverse incentives that work against turning in a sane direction rather than continuing toward the precipice at top speed. It’s a Darwinian selection process at work, where for the members of this species to “succeed” on the planet, we have to rush toward its destruction. Evolutionary dead end ahead.
Trump derangement syndrom is dangerous. It truly diverts otherwise intelligent people (and idiots too) from real issues. The article claim that Trump would disenfranchise groups that oppose him, while this is done on state and local level, because franchise rules are set by state legislatures, and county authorities decide how to make voting inconvenient in poor areas, when they are so inclined. That was happening before Trump appeared on political scene and continues.
Secondly, Democrats became anti-democratic. They spend enormous energy on lie-based Russia-gate, and hated Trump most for his erratic attitude to fomenting wars — not a pacifist, but not a monomaniacal war monger either. Second, they short-circuited primaries in 2020, and it seems that they want to abolish them outright in 2024, just to have a controllable puppet on top. Third, they are pro-censorship, and while anti-Trump Republicans are even more rabid on that point, Nikki Halley who wants to close Tik-tok, purge universities etc. We got two anti-democratic parties, and bi-partisan consensus on issues where lobbies reign supreme.
Perfect. Haley is a disgrace. It’s Trump vs Biden and and I don’t want the brain dead Alzheimer senile old man there.
which one? either way, we’re fkd. The writing has been on the wall for a long time.
Anyone who thinks either Trump or Biden is going to make their lives better in 2024 is delusional. The reason American democracy does not work is because it was designed not to work (by wealthy landowners in the 18th century). Mr. Page is correct, the undemocratic Senate, based on geography and not population, allows for a disproportional “veto effect” on democracy. And lastly a culture that focuses on celebrity (individuals) and not social cohesion is destined to fail.
There’s an important reason for the Senate’s makeup. The geography is otherwise known as states. The Great Great Compromise:
“The Virginia Plan, drafted by James Madison and introduced to the Convention by Edmund Randolph on May 29, 1787, proposed the creation of a bicameral national legislature, or a legislature consisting of two houses, in which the “rights of suffrage” in both houses would be proportional to the size of the state. When delegates from small states objected to this idea, delegates from the larger states argued that their states contributed more of the nation’s financial and defensive resources than small states and therefore ought to have a greater say in the central government. This proposal also reflected a vision of national government that differed from the government under the Articles of Confederation in which each state had an equal voice. Madison argued that “whatever reason might have existed for the equality . . . when the Union was a federal one among sovereign States, it must cease when a national Government should be put into place.”
Delegates from the smaller states insisted on preserving the equal vote they had enjoyed under the Articles of Confederation. “A confederacy,” New Jersey’s William Paterson stated, “supposes sovereignty in the members composing it & sovereignty supposes equality.”
https://www.senate.gov/about/origins-foundations/senate-and-constitution/equal-state-representation.htm
I understand the history. The scheme is still an undemocratic system for control by wealthy landowners in the 18th Century. It does not promote democratic control of national policy. Then or now!
What I see is just the consequences of a whole heck of a lot of bad karma. When one considers the entire history of the United States going back to the 1600s there should be no surprise that the nation is essentially a train wreck. That’s what genocide, slavery, wars of conquest, war crimes, crimes against humanity wrought. As bad as things may seem now they are sure to become far worse as there is an enormous amount of bad karma to be reckoned with. Myths about the exceptional and indispensable nation will not ameliorate the pain and suffering to come.
I’ll pretend that I’m a billionaire and provide what I think might be their rationalization for their refusal to share more of the wealth with the working class.
What follows are obvious class stereotypes, but is there a grain of truth here? —
1. Capitalism has been redistributing globally–this has raised the living standards of the world’s poorest. Isn’t that a good thing?
2. Give the U.S. working class more of the wealth, they’ll just spend it on boats, RVs, guns, exotic cruises, drugs, booze and other wasteful (or worse) stuff.
3. The U.S. is an economy built on incentives. A big incentive is fear of homelessness; another biggie is hope to climb another rung. Therefore, more homeless and envy are a feature (not a glitch) if we want more STEM graduates. Much better salaries and working conditions for the PMC are therefore the “deal” if you want to live well in the USA. Everyone understands this. It’s your choice.
4. We’ve always been a plutocracy. It’s in the Constitution’s DNA. Don’t fight it, deal with it. Prosper with it.
5. Politicians always want to give away free stuff. The wealthy class is an essential check against that.
6. So what if there are deaths of despair among the white working class? Economically, it pencils out OK.
7. So what if your local factory moves to China, leaving your poor working class town bereft. All you’ll do with your resentment is vote Republican and rant while you watch Fox News on TV. You are the plutocrats’ natural allies in this project of protecting the status quo. Where is the downside?
8. The nanny State is turning us all into weenies and whiners with too much time on our hands, addicted to TV and social media. Get to work and save yourselves! And maybe the planet too!
Bottom Line: From the Billionaire’s perspective, they can argue that a fairer distribution of the pie via safety nets and give-aways will accomplish zippo for the betterment of the world or even the US working class.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch….
From Krystal and Saagar BreakingPoints, utube.
Dems SHUT DOWN Primary For Biden
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2HuTv7u0KQ
How can democracy or any other issue be discussed without including the impact of climate disruption? Am I missing something? People discuss Ukraine, Gaza, China-US-Taiwan and don’t mention climate change. It’s here, it surrounds us, it’s going to be bad.
By the same token, though, one may well ask how climate disruption can be discussed without including the impact of war and military operations — including things like the huge methane release from the sabotage of the Nordstream 2 pipeline, which the mainstream narrative has swept under the rug?
If the U.S. and NATO-vassal government elites truly accept that AGW (anthropogenic global warming) is real, why is their response not merely BAU (business as usual) but an expansion of arms trade and investment — and all sorts of actions alienating Russia / China / RoW (“rest of the world”) rather than promoting international cooperation, and indeed, seem designed to kick-start a third world war?
Here is a recent Beau of the Fifth Column videotalk about 4 minutes and 39 seconds long. It is titled:
” Let’s talk about Trump and Godwin. . . ” ( the Godwin who formulated Godwin’s Law). Apparently Godwin is still alive. So “Politico” contacted Godwin for an interview and asked many things, including whether comparing Trump’s recent “vermin” and “poisoning the blood” rhetoric was Nazian, or whether saying so is a Godwin’s Law violation ( or whatever we call it). Apparently Godwin said that since Trump has used both formulations at different time. he knows he is getting it from legacy-Hitlerian sources and is doing it on purpose to see if it appeals to his base or potential new recruits to his base. And if he thinks it does, he will use more of it , knowing exactly where to find more of it to use.
Beau suggests that this indicates that Trump and Biden are not equivalent. Here is the link.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1S0REyJing
Here is the link
Well, when it comes to rhetoric with possibly genocidal implications, why aren’t more people drawing the obvious New Testament analogy?
Look around — everyone is “straining at a Trump while swallowing a settler-state (a Netanyahu).”
https://biblehub.com/matthew/23-24.htm
Big corporations, now declared to be “persons”, have been in the process of identity theft for a generation. Long enough to expand their ideology past the boundaries of mere people making personal choices to actually co-opt politics itself. Witness the BS those with simply too much money to invest for a greater return, because they have killed a sane and gradually paced capitalism, when they actually try to assume the shroud of sovereignty itself by a blatant coup to control sovereign money. Those guys are actually proposing the legal acceptance of “private finance.” We should find a nice polite way of telling them that we welcome their spending their own excess wealth on good social and environmental projects, but let’s not allow them to get confused about the term “sovereign.” Sovereign currency represents the blood, sweat and tears of a constitutional pact of people striving for their own improvement. Sovereign currency should never guarantee the financial pursuits of oligarchs. There’s no such thing as private finance just there is no such thing as private equity. And just because PE got its nose under the tent doesn’t mean it should exist. Because it should be illegal. Imo.
Those people who are attracted to government and power are quick to use the so-called democratic system to gain power, but then are loath to reform it to remove the corruptible flaws – of which there are many.
Democracy – as in ‘by the people, for the people’ is a fantasy. No country has ever had a system that gets anywhere close to being fully representative with all the necessary checks and balances to keep the system and its members honest.
American democracy can’t be saved because it wasn’t democratic in the first place.