thanks for your review, it helps shine a light on america, and there's a good parallel here in europe, where it also feels as if the middle class is shrinking...
Sure thing. And yeah I believe you. I wish people would rebel against this, I mean, it's not like having a strong middle class was something that happened in ancient times, and we're not even sure if it happened at all - it was within living memory. I even remember it from when I was a kid, things felt very different than this, and were a lot better. And there was a sense that things were going to keep getting better too - not this sense of doom and gloom and everything continuing to get worse. There was a sense that we really turned a page, and the "bad old days" were history.
The problem today is that so many people still identify with the billionaires, even if they aren't wealthy themselves, because they want to identify with the people or the side that's "stronger", and a lot of them have the authoritarian/dominant/a-hole personality. These kinds of people will just go along with what the billionaires want, even if it makes their own life worse, out of this backwards need to hate and punish. A lot of people will side with the billionaires, because these people are one-issue voters, or they'll just vote out of spite to punish the people that they don't like. And the billionaires have basically been churning out propaganda since the '70s, and have conditioned a lot of people to mindlessly repeat the propaganda instead of thinking critically, and to write off anything that goes against the billionaires' agenda as "communism", even if it really isn't.
Another problem is, there are still a lot of people that are comfortable enough with the way things are. They might not be actively for it, but they don't feel that impacted yet by how things have regressed. They're still doing fine themselves, so they don't see any of what's been going on as a problem.
I think we need to remember that things like middle-class lifestyles, reasonable working hours, weekends, holidays, sick leave/vacation, etc., all this stuff we take for granted as "normal life" didn't just always naturally exist, or magically appear on its own, or exist as a result of "productivity" or "innovation", or was given to us out of the goodness of the billionaires' hearts - people had to actually fight for these things, sometimes physically. If the upper class could have gotten away with it, they would have given us nothing - no 8-hour days, no weekends, no work-life balance at all. Most people would be little more than slaves, at best. "Normal life" shouldn't be taken as a given and should always be guarded, because if it's not, it won't be long before they try to take it all back. If there was anything wrong with "the good times", it was that they made people too complacent, lulled them into a false sense of security and made them think class conflict was over. It wasn't, by a long shot.
The problem is, big business became heavily involved in politics more than before, and as a result the government went from the people's lawyer, to big business' enabler/enforcer. I feel like just like government itself, capitalism needs checks and balances to function. In government, checks and balances keep one branch of government from having too much power. In society, the government was supposed to check big business' power, and keep it doing the right thing, working for the interests of civilization. Unions also help check big business' power, but they have been on the decline for decades now. We need business to produce goods and services and employ people, but we need government to protect people from the profit motive, because the profit motive doesn't put people first. And if all this isn't to benefit the people, then what is it all for? Today big business exists for itself, its shareholders and owners, and any benefit to society is an afterthought. The rest of us can go to hell for all it cares, and the government isn't going to make it care anymore like it used to. I don't believe any of that nonsense about how the billionaires are the "leaders" of society and care the most about it - they care about themselves, maybe their immediate families, and that's it. If they really cared so much about society, they would stop supporting regressive policies and impeding its progress.
But yeah, it's really disappointing to me to see how we've gone backwards like this. Things might get better in the future, as more young people realize that something is wrong with "the way things are". But the problem is, I still feel like that's a long time out, if it ever happens at all.
... rest of the world #2
