Just remember that no matter how bad things are, they could always be worse. And probably will be.
Yes, they will.
Bill Clinton pulled the Democratic party far to the right, taking them from center-left to center-right.
By what metric? And just to be very clear from the outset, I am a progressive (always have been) and consider myself to be squarely left of center. I qualify this because what follows is typically knee-jerked to mean I’m espousing a veiled conservative narrative and it’s not true, which is also part of the problem.
We on the left in particular have a “if you’re not with me, you’re against me” mentality, it’s just not always as obvious as it is with the right. So, caveat establshed.
This means that since Reagan, the economic elites have been waging class warfare on everyone who ins't rich for around a half century now
There has never been a time when certain members of the economic elite have not been waging class warfare. But just because a “war” is being waged does not necessarily mean anything substantive is happening as a result. It’s all in the wording. The big buzz word ever since Occupy Wall Street got monetized has been “inequality.” The trouble being that there is no such thing as “equality” as a measure of an open-ended system of wealth. It’s simply not an applicable concept; not for political or ideological reasons, but because that’s not how you measure something open-ended that anyone can be a part of if they so choose.
Iow, there is no wealth “pie.” That image itself is a fundamental misinterpretation (meant only for illustrative purposes no less) that has lead many to think that “wealth” is a finite construct and someone is keeping them from their birth-right slice, which simply isn’t true.
Anyone can choose to amass wealth. It’s not a mysterious boys-only club. Of course you first need a job—i.e., money—so obviously there is a minimum requirement just like there are minimum requirements in all forms of human endeavors, but the more important qualification is discipline to save that money and even then we’re only talking about a small percentage of every dollar.
Yes, that can be difficult. No one is arguing other, but it’s not rocket science or the result of “warfare.” This rhetorical victim-mentality is one of the biggest problems within the progressive left, imo, and it pervades
everything, such that no one can ever have a conversation about the realities of our system.
Corporations/economic elites and the whole notion of us vs. them is just the left’s boogeyman mythology and its based entirely on overlooking basic generational trends. This recent rehash with the Sanders fraud is a perfect example. The oft-repeated (and fundamentally misleading) slogan of the “99%” was incorrectly derived from the work of two prominent economists (Saez and Zucman).
In a nut? We—the middle-class punk rock/new wave Gen X and the last of the Boomers—said fuck the establishment (ie, fuck daddy) and “eat the rich” in the eighties (from a nevertheless cozy/poseur privileged position), while the preppies and our slightly older brothers were embracing junk bonds and everything Wall Street. Just picture The Wedding Singer.
Surprise, surprise, the asswipes in dayglo suits and Red Dawn haircuts got exponentially rich over the years due to compound interest, while we who worshipped John Cusack and seriously believed we’d be in the Dead by 27 club did not. That period—the mid-eighties to the nineties—was the pebble in the pond that looking back on
after all the compound interest and reinvestment of the past three or four decades is what ALL of the current economic sky-is-falling bullshit stems from and the irony of it all is that at the same time Sanders etal were looking at the past and proclaiming it high tide the people he was telling it to—the Millennials—had
already been rectifying the disparity by being much more frugal with their earnings than their parents (us, the fuck ups) were.
Iow, Sanders was pointing at a bullet that was fired forty years prior—
and aimed, ironically at his own head—as a clarion bell to people who already dodged the bullet and corrected the course for their own forty years hence futures.
After a half century, the middle class keeps shrinking and the ranks of the working poor keep growing.
Another canard that needs to go. No offense, it just so many of us on the left keep repeating these same misnomers. The “middle class is shrinking” trope fails to take into account that the reason it had been shrinking is because people have been moving
up the economic ladder, not down and the notion of the “working poor” growing is simply not true. Wage stagnation is still a problem—the last of the holdovers from the effects of the 2008 collapse—but the poor poor (the unfortunately ever present percentage of people that for purely statistical reasons will always exist) has remained where it has pretty much always been for decades (10-15%), which, btw, is still far better than anything like it had been historically.
It still sucks, of course, and we need to keep working on it always, but it’s a statistical certainty that it will always exist. As to the “working poor”—which itself is a misnomer, because what we mean by that is on the cusp of being poor poor, but really they’re struggling to stretch their earnings to compete with inflation and the high costs of medical care, etc—they are in a rut primarily due to the fact that a global economy means massive competition on a scale no country has ever had to deal with previously and we’re in a transition stage (will be for several more decades, most likely).
Iow, the scale of human endeavors—thanks to the exponential powers of technology—no longer take generations to unfurl as they did historically. Within each generation now there are sub generations, where a teenager can be outpaced by his or her younger sibling.
That’s never happened before. Gen Z are now the major influencers of the family budget and in regard to almost everything the family will buy, not just stupid kid shit like xboxes or whatever the fuck kids waste money on today. Why? Because they were born with a smartphone in their hands.
Think about that for a second. Our parents used to respect and turn to their “elders” for sage advice. Our generation said “fuck you” to our parents and grandparents (ideologically for the most part) and stood alone. Our children’s/grandchildren’s generations (and their sub generations) are now the ones we turn to and their parents turn to for sage advice.
In the course of just two generations the entire tribal hierarchy has flipped.
The point of which in regard to “working poor” is that the entire social category of blue collar/unskilled labor is pretty much gone in the US and we have shifted instead to
skilled labor, which means those among the “working poor” must adapt and become skilled or die.
Which, again, is why Democrats are so important, because if we don’t have solvent social programs in place to help those who simply will not make it in the new paradigm, that impacts everything. But that’s ALWAYS been the fight. Nothing has changed, but, again, it’s less a social construct as it is an environmental construct; a side effect/fallout of circumstances in a changing/evolving global awakening kind of zeitgeisty way.
In short, it’s an inevitable result of transition, not an orchestrated global conspiracy (any more than there are always such attempts). But there are no better alternatives. As Sanders’ own bullshit demonstrated, without economic elites, there can’t be any funding for social programs on massive scales.
If we don't turn this ship around and go back to the way things were between FDR and Reagen
Can’t happen, because the
reason it started to change under Reagan (with Japan leading the way) and then more fully under Clinton is because Clinton understood that the market was/had already shifted to a global one, not a local or national one. That genie can’t be put back in the bottle as we are seeing abundant evidence of in everything
Putin Trump is attempting.
Clinton realized that America did two things; manage businesses and manufacture goods. Globalization meant we would no longer be able to manufacture goods, so that meant the only way we—America—could remain competitive was to shift focus on being global managers. It was either that, or economic collapse and let consumerism—that had already impacted us because of Japan/globalization—be our only fate.
He literally had no choice. And that hasn’t gone away. There is no way America can ever be a dominate labor force unless and until conditions here get so bad that workers will gladly accept $1 an hour as a minimum wage. Iow, never going to happen. So while it’s certainly fashionable to shittalk Corporate structure (and I detest it with every fiber of my being), it isn’t a cabal or the result of the illuminatti; it’s the result of social evolution.
Of course there are those trying to influence how that evolution benefits them the most. That’s why Democrats exist; to reign them in and regulate them to the best of our flawed system’s ability. But there is no other option as you pointed out. We’re still waaaaaaaaaaay too primitive a species (on the order of centuries) to get past our greed and petty need for competition.
Unless and until the promises of nano-technology can be obtained and even then there will always be those who will seek to manipulate things in their favor. That’s just the power-dynamic at play and short of genetic engineering or actual warfare, there is no way to remove whatever the fuck that is within us. It can only evolve out or, more likely, never leave. Yes, there are other countries that have managed to implement stronger social contracts and I’m all in favor of fighting to implement them here, but, again, that is ALWAYS on the Democrat’s platform.
Keep in mind that the Republicans are not only depleting in numbers, they have to commit
massive election fraud to stay in power.
If the House (at the very least) falls in November, then that’s pretty much it for what we know of as the Republican Party in its current endgame iteration. If we lose, then it only means they get one more round, because no matter what there will be no way for them to win the WH in 2020. They didn’t have the numbers in 2016 and Trump has done nothing but lose numbers ever since.
ETA: Here’s an interesting piece that’s a bit tangential, but applicable:
Remember that study saying America is an oligarchy? 3 rebuttals say it's wrong.
Tl;dr snippet:
Bashir and Branham/Soroka/Wlezien find that on these 185 bills, the rich got their preferred outcome 53 percent of the time and the middle class got what they wanted 47 percent of the time. The difference between the two is not statistically significant. And there are some funny examples in the list of middle-class victories. For instance, the middle class got what they wanted on public financing of elections: in all three 1990s surveys included in the Gilens data, they opposed it, while the rich favor it. That matches up with more recent research showing that wealthy people are more supportive of public election funding.
So it's hard to say definitively, based on this data, that the rich are getting what they want more than the middle class. And it's hard to claim, as Gilens and Page do, that "ordinary citizens get what they want from government only when they happen to agree with elites or interest groups that are really calling the shots." Even when they disagree with elites, ordinary citizens get what they want about half the time.
Branham, Soroka, and Wlezien also look at which specific issues spur disagreement: Do they fall down on ideological lines? Sort of, but not dramatically so. The authors find that the middle class got 26 liberal policy wins (either a bill they supported passing or one they opposed getting blocked), 20 conservative wins, and 29 ideologically neutral wins. The rich got 28 liberal wins, 26 conservative wins, and 37 neutral wins. The rich's wins are slightly more conservative on average, but not hugely so.
Okay, but maybe those conservative wins for the rich were all on issues that mattered most to the rich. Maybe the middle class wins occasionally on social issues, but the rich succeed in preventing redistribution and other economic policies they don't like.
Again, not really. The researchers found the rich’s win rate for economic issues where there's disagreement is 57.1 percent, compared with 51.1 percent for social issues. There's a difference, but not a robust one. "The win rates for the two issue types are not statistically different from one another," Branham, Soroka, and Wlezien conclude.
They also looked at the views of the poor — those at the 10th percentile of the income scale. Here, too, there's lots of agreement. The poor, middle class, and rich agree on 80.2 percent of policies. But here they find more evidence for differences in income-based representation. Bills supported just by the rich but not the poor or middle class passed 38.5 percent of the time, and those supported by just the middle class passed 37.5 percent. But policies supported by the poor and no one else passed a mere 18.6 percent of the time. "These results suggest that the rich and middle are effective at blocking policies that the poor want," the authors conclude.
Bashir's paper prods at the Gilens data even more and finds a number of holes. Bashir concludes that strong support from the middle class is about as good a predictor of a policy being adopted as strong support from the rich. "In the original data set, change is enacted 47 percent of the time that median-income Americans favor it at a rate of 80 percent or more," Bashir writes. "Yet change is enacted 52 percent of the time that elites favor it at that rate."
And the two groups fare roughly as poorly when interest groups are pitted against them: "The rich get their favored outcome despite the combined opposition of [interest groups and the middle] at a rate of 32 percent; meanwhile, average Americans’ favored outcome occurs 30 percent of the time that they face combined opposition from interest groups and the wealthy. "
That's from Vox, btw. Much more in the piece.
See, it's exactly that kind of "us vs them" bullshit I was talking about. We can't ever have nice things because any time "weatlh" is ever mentioned in these places it degrades instantly into ad hominem.