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Wages are stagnant and cost of living is ridiculous. Are we headed for a crash? (piefed.blahaj.zone)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
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[–] 1 point 1 year ago* (5 children)

There is not a single competent politician with a history of working for the good of the many in an electable position in the US at the moment.

The closest was Sanders and you saw what the Democrat Establishment did to make sure he was stopped.

Also, I'm sorry but I was in investment banking at the time of the 2008 and after seeing how he unconditionally saved the worst abusers in that industry, I don't think Obama counts as a good guy, so Bush to Obama wasn't really a pendular move between extremes: by the time of Obama the choice for anybody other than the well-off and the rich had already been reduced to Greater Evil vs Lesser Evil. Obama was a masterful speechmaker, but when it come to actual policies he was just another neoliberal working for the 1% and once in a while making a show of throwing some crumbs to the riff-raff.

IMHO in terms of working for the many, America hasn't had anybody anywhere close to Eisenhower as President since JFK.

Expecting that there will be a white knight president elected this time around given the state of Politics in America is pure Hope with almist nothing to back it (the closest is the guy who won the Democrat Primaries for NYC Mayor, and he hasn't even been elected yet and we're talking about a major city filled the people far more educated and worldly than the average American, so it's unlikely that his likely victory will translated to anywhere else in America than maybe one or two other similar cities).

I think the problem this time around is systemic and "bipartisan" (in that both main parties stopped representing most people and just use different styles Propaganda to herd the sheep or just turn people of from voting altogether) and also linked to the natural end of the period where the US was the dominant nation (basically, in the schedule of the Rise and Fall of Empires, the US has already been long enough in the peak dominance period to have reached the Fall stage) and as I meantioned in my last post, if you look around at other nations that were once great, they tend to fall quite a lot and then stagnate for a couple of centuries before they start recovering and none ever gets back to its peak.

This isn't really an America-specific problem it's a much broader Human Societies problem, and whilst the details are different the general pattern is the same (corruption, pretty much all of the elites making money of unproductive activities and political connections, people in general having delusions of superiority that vastly exceed the actual present day achievements and so on).

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (4 children)

    the problem this time around is systemic and "bipartisan" (in that both main parties stopped representing most people and just use different styles Propaganda to herd the sheep or just turn people of from voting altogether)

    Definitely. We're well and truly overdue for the Republicans and Democrats to go the way of the Whigs and the Bull Moose.

    if you look around at other nations that were once great, they tend to fall quite a lot and then stagnate for a couple of centuries before they start recovering and none ever gets back to its peak.

    I really don't think we have enough data points to be sure about that. It's basically just Rome and China. (And Egypt, but iirc we don't know enough about their internal politics to know why they fell) The US hasn't reached that kind of peak. But either way, I'm fine with the US never reaching the same heights it once had. If it were to become a regional superpower instead of an international one, but treat its people better, I'd be totally okay with that.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    On that last point, Rome, Greece, China, Egypt, Spain & Portugal (from the Discoveries time), several Middle Eastern nations several times (from the Babylonians to the Persians and even the Arabs - back in the 12th Century the most advanced people in the World were Arabs, then known as Moors) and so on (if I remember it correctly the Mayan civilization fell before the Spanish Conquistadores got there, which would make it yet another one that fell to internal problems rather than external factors).

    It's a pretty common dynamic.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (2 children)

    Greece

    Greece was only ever united for a grand total of 15 years. When Alexander died, they returned to being a loose collection of city-states.

    Spain

    Totally forgot about that particular empire, I admit; but their peak was in the 1700s and their "fall" was, like, a few years before I was born in the 1970s, so I don't know if they necessarily support your point about a necessary fall and long recovery as such. In fact, lower-class workers in Spanish colonies in the 1800s were eating better than middle-class citizens in France during that time; and far from taking centuries to return to a functional status, it's basically a world economy again.

    Portugal

    Did Portugal ever fall? They divested of their colonies, and the monarchy fell, but those two events happened more or less independently of one another. You're right that Portugal lasted for a long time; but my understanding of the revolution is that there wasn't a prolonged period of economic pressure on the citizens of Portugal and that the revolution was mostly ideological.

    Babylonians [...] Persians

    Those have about the same trouble as Egypt in figuring out the internal reasons for its fall, in the case of both the Old- and the Neo-Babylonian Empire as well as the Persian empire and Achaemenid empire.

    Arabs

    Each caliphate only lasted for a few decades, maybe a century or two. I don't know enough about them to be able to speak intelligently on their internal politics at the time of their fall.

    Mayan civilization

    That one definitely lasted for about 4,000 years, true, but like Greece they were an interdependent network of city-states rather than a united empire. The Classic Maya civilization declined precipitously due to unknown reasons, and the post-classical civilization was conquered by the Spanish, so there's no real evidence there that would point toward anything here.

    So yeah, common-ish dynamic; but we can't really divine any historical information to inform our current situation from any of them, for one reason or another. At least I don't think we can conclude that long-running or wide-ranging empires are or are not regularly destroyed by internal unrest due to economic disparities.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (1 child)

    I'm Portuguese.

    Portugal fell so far down that in the XX Century until 1974 it was under a Fascist dictatorship and was so poor it got food help from other nations in Europe (but the dictator sure liked to celebrate the "Time of the Discoveries").

    In our divergence of opinion, at least specifically when it comes to the timing of the fall of the US from its peak, time will tell.

    PS: I don't think the destruction due to internal unrest is merely from economic disparities - that's just one of the symptoms. I think it's mainly social, cultural and structural factors that create downstream problems like said economic disparities and keep on doing it because the problem is structural, not merely economical, and those things sustain themselves (for example, corrupt politicians aren't going to put in place structures to fight corruption, quite the contrary). The fall is not merely from economic disparities, it's because the whole society has grown "fat and lazy" - the spirit of people and, maybe more importantly, of the power elites who control how the country operates, is that they are "winners", but all of that is anchored on the successes of their ancestors (in the US case, one example of that is American Exceptionalism), and that kind of posture doesn't self correct and the nation itself is too big and powerful for it to be corrected by external actors. The whole thing is a bigger version of the very commonly story told all over the World in various variants about how Wealth goes in cycles of 3 generations: the first builds it, the second consolidates it and the third blows it away - having been brought up in wealth the third generation doesn't have the same spirit as the people who built the wealth in the first place.

    Anyways, this is just pseudo-Philosophical thinking and, as I said, time will tell.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    I'm Portuguese.

    In that case I stand corrected.

    in the XX Century until 1974

    So, about 3-4 generations before people got fed up, then? I think that actually supports my original point: people don't suffer economic injustice for longer than a couple of generations ("couple" in this case used more loosely).

    PS: I don't think the destruction due to internal unrest is merely from economic disparities [...]

    I think we may be in a chicken-and-the-egg problem here, where we disagree about which is the cause and which is the effect, but otherwise we agree.

    Anyways, this is just pseudo-Philosophical thinking and, as I said, time will tell.

    Yeah, and it seems pretty clear that in any case, it's going to kind of suck for the people who live here.

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