“Every time Trump or members of his administration have lashed out at Europe, including Ukraine, Europeans have absorbed the blow with a forced smile and bent over backwards to flatter the White House.” (…)
“While a systemic answer to Europe’s security conundrum is not in sight, Europeans do have the levers to prevent Ukraine’s capitulation and create the conditions for a just peace.”
Democracy was pushed by the bourgeoisie. Wealth inequality should be the default. A king may care about his subjects, the rich barely care about the poor.
I would assume that the unprecedented decline in inequality came from the competition with communism.
Sure, because it weakened the aristocracy over top of them, not because it was a better way to keep the proles down. Marx, who you probably respect, held that, and it has strong support from modern scholarship as well.
So, again, that’s not real history. Now most people of a given high class start in a slightly lower class and get lucky, while monarchs are raised in a system of open extreme violence and either knew they were an almighty heir from the start, or were willing to kill and betray friends and family to usurp power. A look through history books will confirm they tend to be more brutal than guys like Paul Fireman (who’s boring enough you’ve never heard of him) or Amancio Ortega (who you also probably haven’t despite being number 9), on average.
I doubt it was driven by competition, since the USSR was never close to lifestyle parity, and the US was never at any real risk of pro-communist unrest. You can’t really make the policies of the period (good or bad) have nothing to do with American voters.
Good argument
The promise of socialism is its own value. The USA needed the lifestyle to make people accept capitalism.
What gave the voters then the opportunity to make better decisions for themselves?
Thanks!
The voting. If it’s anything like Canada, there have been socialist fringe candidates all along, it’s just that there hasn’t been much interest.
You could say people have been railroaded into not supporting socialism, but they don’t. No amount of extra democracy will change that.
I don’t fully understand your last paragraph. You mean people once improved their conditions but now they don’t, despite having all opportunities?
Correct, most voters don’t understand enough to demand effective redistribution policies. Speaking from experience, if you get involved in politics this becomes the bane of your existence.
There is some redistribution now, and it’s gone up recently in Canada, although I’m not sure off the top of my head what the global trends have been. It’s just slower than the natural self-accumulation of wealth.
How the New Deal got so much traction in the US is a big mystery, honestly - it really was a unique event. People weren’t smarter or more educated back then, and on the other side of the Atlantic they just elected fascists, who can tell a hell of an emotionally appealing story. (The USSR definitely managed redistribution, although they came straight after a brutal monarchy and a war without a significant liberal democracy phase, and struggled to keep growing over time)
To keep workers happy.
Yeah, but usually there’s other ways, right? Blame immigrants or minorities, or let the wealth naturally move away from the poor slowly enough a casual voter won’t notice. That’s what everyone else did the whole time, and the US itself before and after.
Even today, with all the information you need at your fingertips, a lot of the people in the US who want a shift left on wealth issues are actually in the 9% after the 1% (which ironically is the class that owns the most stuff). The real poor lean pretty pro-Trump.
They couldn’t risk having people have the sentiment that Capitalism wasn’t the best. They didn’t know the limits of communism. So they had to assume that if a strong communist movement had been established, everything would have been lost.