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King-Aaron ◴[] No.44314612[source]
I'm impressed at both how quickly the United States is falling into blatant authoritarianism, and also at how many people seem to make excuses for it.
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energywut ◴[] No.44314633[source]
Quickly? This has been the path we have been on for at least 30 years, probably longer. Plenty of folks have been calling this out for longer.

When you have two parties in control, and they are both staunchly pro-capital, anti-worker parties, one party will push conservative and the other will ensure "nothing fundamentally changes".

Obama, Biden, Bush, and Clinton all had parts to play in empowering the executive, normalizing political violence, demonizing and silencing the left (the actual left -- socialists, workers parties, anarchists, etc.), and ramping up the militarization of the police.

This isn't some sudden moment, it might be the first time it's affected people you know, but this has been happening for awhile now.

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Herring ◴[] No.44314792[source]
I think it's actually kind of a miracle it didn't happen earlier. This country has been all about getting rich since slavery. Concentration of economic power generally leads to concentration of political power (ie non-democracy). There are tons of pathways, eg lobbying, campaign finance, media ownership, threat of capital flight, regulatory capture, to name a few.
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1. boroboro4 ◴[] No.44315153[source]
It didn’t happen earlier because before gilded age the US (among whites..) was actually quite good with equality, and then every time we were getting close the opposite force was taking over: once in the beginning of 20s century with worker rights / antitrust and once in 1930s with FDRs New Deal. Interestingly both times things were getting quite good afterwards for the people.

Not sure it’s gonna happen time though.