Mo_reese wrote: ↑September 10th, 2024, 10:03 am
Sy Borg wrote: ↑September 9th, 2024, 6:05 pm
Inequality is a major challenge for the US. The "left" is now inherently hostile towards the US and its interests. The let actively wants to dismantle the US's systems.
Why? Because inequality has reached a point where many people are locked out of "the American dream" (the same could be said for many western nations). The implied social contract was that, if a person studied, worked hard and saved diligently, they could buy a home a raise a family. With enormous student debts, forbidding housing prices and rising rents, that dream is largely gone.
As a result, those who have been effectively locked out of the system have no loyalty to the system, no reason to support it or want to see it continue. However, anarchy - which results in nations effectively being run by competing crime gangs that rule with naked violence - would be vastly worse for the average person. No matter which way things go, the middle class will continue to shrink.
I agree that inequality is a major issue for the US, not that CNN or NYT would recognize it. I also agree that anarchy will lead to a worse situation because as you say, if the anarchists bring the system down the result will be chaos with the most brutal taking control. But you mention the Left as being hostile towards the Elite Class that currently runs the government. This is true but the Left is a small minority while the Right Wing are openly and actively advocating bringing down the government.
What I think will happen is that the Elite Class will stand by as the Right Wing acts like Hitler's Brown Shirts and reek havoc on the US until the point where the Elite Class declare martial law and crack down on the Right Wing Brown Shirts and establish a “temporary” dictatorship but call it something else.
I do have an active imagination
The elite class are globalists, who seek to break down the west, especially the middle class. As Klaus Schwab said people will "own nothing and be happy". This from a person with a net worth of between $25 million and $100 million.
The aim is control. If you rely on a UBI, then you must do as you are told at all times. Resistance is futile.
I note that there is a push in the mainstream media to limit young people's access to social media in the west, ostensibly because it promotes anxiety. Yet nothing makes young people more anxious than mainstream media's sensationalism, misinformation, cover-ups and negative focus, which has been going on for years.
Ultimately, this is an attempt to control the narrative and the mainstream media is trying to hobble its competition, in a quid pro quo with certain politicians. Such a move will require the end to anonymity online, and have the same effect as a digital ID.
I am leery about claims made about Trump. He's flawed but he's not bringing in the Brown Shirts, who strike me as more aligned with cancel culture - the destruction of "offensive" material. Preventing illegal immigration and securing borders and preventing unauthorised immigration is basic governance, not racism. A failure to secure borders is a failure to protect one's own citizens, an abrogation of the responsibility of a nation's leadership. The tendency to label those who seek secure borders as "far right" is simply wrong, but that's the game being played at present.
The west should not hate itself. There is no nation with a better system than western capitalism, which is why people from socialist countries are flocking to capitalist ones and not the other way around.
Capitalism is flawed too, of course. The unchecked growing inequality - the shift in wealth from individuals to corporations and its government vassals is deeply problematic, but not as problematic as what's happening under all other political systems. I suspect that we are facing what economists call a "wicked problem", a problem with no good solutions, only least worst ones.
About forty years ago I was quite enamoured in socialism and, while at technical college, I was talking about it before class. A student who was a refugee from Vietnam became quit animated and told me I was wrong.
He drew a column chart on the whiteboard with two columns. One was labelled Capitalism and the other labelled Communism. The Capitalism column had three bands - a small upper and lower class and a large middle class between them. The Communist column had a tiny upper class and a huge lower class, with no middle class. That opened my eyes. He was speaking from experience, not theoretical ideology.
Thanks, I didn't realise.