The number of people who do not know that the America in the Golden Era (50-60s), for white people especially men, was fairly socialist, is extremely high.
Funny how it coincides with the highest union density, none of the new deal being rolled back and the rest of the world basically still being rubble from WWII.
I was going to mention some of that... but then I remembered that facts don't actually matter to them in the slightest so...
And that's the rub. One side is sending death threats and attempting kidnapping of the other, plus the whole storm the capitol thing, plus actively rooting to support not only Russia but Israel (tbf the other side is doing that too, at least the politicians even if not the voters) and even somehow North Fucking Korea, oh yeah and wanting to become fascist, while the other side... doesn't do most of those, at least to the same degree.
In WWII we fought fascism, but it went underground (cough Fox News cough) and now it's back all over again, and this time it looks to be winning. Both globally, and almost if not quite at home (it may not have "won" yet, but at best things seem to be tied, and remember that SCOTUS ruling that nobody seems to be talking about anymore...? yeah that's not exactly a resounding defeat of fascism or at least authoritarianism there, when you can kill your political opponents at will).
then Reagan set the conditions for Musk to happen
By deregulation of what is allowed to be called "news", yeah. Though if we were that fragile to begin with... I wouldn't put all the blame onto him.
Reconstructionism in the American South also played a role, in papering over some of the differences that lead up to the war, rather than dealing with them in a forthright manner, see e.g. Nuremberg trials.
And ofc before that, people outright owned people as slaves, and even today the number of people who simply don't care in the slightest is extremely high.
i.e., we aren't so much suffering from something like cancer as we are something more akin to a genetic defect, which even predated the Constitution. That is not to say this was inevitable - we've had so very many opportunities to turn back from where we've been headed... But neither we, nor the Russian disinformation campaigns directed at us, seem to want that to happen.
Good, because that's wrong, social democracy and regulated capitalism is not socialism.
Think about it: obviously I don't mean in relation to actual socialist countries today, but rather "fairly socialist" = more along the scale of socialism than the USA is currently. For instance even before there were 50 United States that joined together, the postal service allowed people to send mail to one another across vast distances of thousands of miles, from east to west coast and back again.
While today... well technically it still exists, but it's slower and less reliable than ever before, and conservatives are talking about dropping a lot of "last-mile" delivery options, in states such as Idaho where population density is much lower. This is funded by taxpayer dollars, where the government completely owns and operates the means of production of this enterprise (though capitalist alternatives such as FedEx also exist beside it). Or at least used to in the past, but this is becoming increasingly less so over time, in a variety of ways.
Or we could look at public schools, which especially with No Child Left Behind and the like, is beholden to capitalist interests that provide e.g. the standardized testing services that suck off the teat of taxpayer dollars, siphoning away much-needed funds for such things as food (nobody can learn who is hungry, most especially children - not that conservatives care about that, either the "learning", or taking care of living humans once we leave the womb, very much in direct opposition to the name of the program that I just said).
Back then, more American services were owned and operated by the government, as compared to today. So yeah, in relative terms, we were "fairly socialist" by our own internal metric. Moreover, my point was that we were so socialist (how socialist were we?:-) we were so socialist, that it rose to a degree that many Americans would consider to be outright shocking. If they could read that is (or rather, they can, they just won't).
The problem with Late Stage Capitalism is that we don't have any of that sweet delicious Terra Nullis to ruthlessly exploit. We no longer have a rich and fruitful supply of easily oppressed indigent labor to extract surplus from. And we lack the capacity for endless imperialist expansion such that all our surplus male population can be sent abroad as soldiers of fortune.
We're stuck with a degraded ecology, an enclosed commons, an armed and agitated indigent population, and intercontinental rivals that we can't just roll over while waving our bibles and firing our guns.
We need to get back to that Old School Capitalism by recreating our frontier. And to do that, we need to bring the empire back home. We need to do imperialism on our own citizens.
Anyone remember what the word for that is, again?
Second thought is a tankie, but I do agree with this.
Sometimes wisdom comes from the most unlikely of places.
That's fair. The tankies do have some absolutely valid criticisms of the rampant capitalist orgy we find ourselves in today.
Capitalists at least are human beings.
Corporations are demonic spirits incorporated into robotic bodies of flesh and machine who endlessly scream "mooaaar profit" in blood curdling agony.
That could be a Junji Ito horror manga
Would be funny if it wasn't true.
There's quite a difference from stage 1 to stage 4 cancer.
