Can one still claim that the USA is a liberal democracy? Where do you draw the line?
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Yes.
Really and truly, yes.
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.
When Eisenhower warned of Military Industrial complex, US was already an oligarchy, and the warning was the declaration of defeat.
JFK assassination was deep state stuff, followed by more pandering to oligarchy with Regan. Media was always in charge of who won elections. That the veil of pretense for liberalism is removed doesn’t change the nature of US empire, and its autocracy over meaningful rulership. Trump simultaneously threatens the US empire’s covert colonization of world, while threatening to subjugate world even harder. Naked Oligarchy, and explicit anti-liberalism as treason, is a hallmark of incoming rulership through.
Agreeing with this individual. The US has been an oligarchy for a while and late President Carter said it himself “It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s 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. So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over. … The incumbents, Democrats and Republicans, look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves. Somebody’s who’s already in Congress has a lot more to sell to an avid contributor than somebody who’s just a challenger.”
True. We’ve had J. Paul Getty, JP Morgan, Wm. Randolph Hearst, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Howard Hughes, Aristotle Onassis up to George Soros and Elon Musk. Since long before Citizen Kane and actually since the founding of the nation, it has been wealthy families, companies and individuals wielding the actual power in the nation and, honestly, across the world. It’s not like millionaires from billionaire families have never been elected senator or president before.
The people that are called “oligarchs” in the news and across the internet, though, are amateurs, puppets or patsies. Especially, the new Russian, Chinese oligarchs. The real powers don’t hold office and they try to keep their names out of the news.
Yes, it has
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.
Oligarchy, kakistocracy, kleptocracy take your pick.
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!
There are political cartoons from over a century ago where they’re talking about how much of an oligarchy it is. Look at this one: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e5/The_Bosses_of_the_Senate_by_Joseph_Keppler.jpg/1920px-The_Bosses_of_the_Senate_by_Joseph_Keppler.jpg
The land of the free enslaved it’s inhabitants.
Sure you can. Until January 6th.
The people saying “always has been” have really short memories or’ve forgotten about the Roosevelt administrations.
There is a decent argument to be made that the USA is a de-facto oligarchy. However, it’s a de-jure liberal democracy and Constitutional Republic for the time being.
Fdr was the exception to the rule. He pushed against the fascist oligarchs to prevent violent uprising of the proletariat.
“To prevent violent uprising of the proletariat” are you actively trying to phrase it to make it sound like even when someone does something good it was actually bad?
Not at all, i just think FDR was more complex than people make him out to be. He wasn’t so much the savior of working class people as he was someone who placated both sides to achieve the best possible outcome. But given the vitriol he inspired from the wealthy its easy to see why he is still so revered by the struggling masses to this day.
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.
The closest thing we have to democracy is our ability to begin democracy by fighting against first-past-the-post voting systems
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.
