I am being absolutely serious here with the Weimar Republic comparison. Because people are fucking miserable and it’s fucking terrifying.
A hundred years ago, broke people in big cities would go to fascist rallies because they were free, and because sometimes the organizers gave out free food and beer, and because people had nothing better to do.
And they stayed because hate feels good when you’re hurting and simple violent solutions appeal to the angry monkey parts of our brains.
And the fewer community connections you have - the more the economy strips your life down to work and sleep, or to job hunting and sleep, or to scrounging in the gutter to survive and sleep, and the less you go out and socialize with actual human beings - the more appealing the fascist illusion of unity, of being part of a powerful group, becomes.
And the only difference today is that the fascist rallies are beamed directly into your home.
People are really going out of their way not to see the demand destruction phenomenon for what it is. My experience is that older people think the economy is doing great because they all had explosions in their asset values over recent years. The youth on the other hand complain about being broke and finding it difficult to keep up with basic living costs. There is a total breakdown in communication between these two groups.
The K-shaped economy in action.
The rich get richer, the poor get poorer.
And when young Americans finally lose their fucking temper - when we get “Occupy the Suburbs” instead of “Occupy Wall Street”, when the rhetoric is turned against the 10%, whose stocks and bonds and 401Ks ballooned in value as a side effect of the hyperbillionaires looting and pillaging the American working class in the greatest wealth transfer in history - those old fucks aren’t going to have the slightest idea why most of America hates them.
And the hyperbillionaires who maintain their power by dividing Americans against one another are going to laugh all the way to the bank.
Dang, when did we inflate 1% to 10%? People driving BMWs but still working for a living are easier to throw rocks at than real villains?
They’re the enablers.
John Kenneth Galbraith’s excellent book “Culture Of Contentment” speaks to this
https://bookwyrm.social/book/1805003/s/the-culture-of-contentment
When the 10% who have savings and stock market investments and 401Ks are getting richer and richer, seeing their personal net worth rise, and feeling pretty good about it.
And the 90% who don’t have savings and investments and are working paycheck to paycheck are seeing mass unemployment and salary cuts and hyperinflated rents and grocery prices and are struggling harder and harder and just getting further and further behind.
And then the 10% tell the 90% “I don’t see any problem, the economy is great”.
I don’t think we’re there yet. Hopefully the American economy pulls back from the brink. I don’t want to live in a country where being upper middle class means living in walled compounds and having armed bodyguards escort your kids to private schools to keep them from being kidnapped for ransom. But frankly, I think that’s where we’re going - a United States where the people lucky enough to own stock see those stock prices go up, and up, and up, while the wealth of the people goes down, and down, and down, enjoying their enclaves of wealth while surrounded by more and more of the desperate poor.
Because, I mean, you may not have helped the hyperbillionaires screw over 90% of America to pad their stock prices, you may not have orchestrated the biggest wealth transfer in history from the poor to the rich, but you sure as fuck didn’t try to stop them.
There is no middle class. There’s labor and capital. Confusing the two only helps capitalists