A capitalist dictatorship will not improve your living conditions.
Money in politics is proving to be a bit of a problem. The USA is the worst example, “corporations are people” and therefore can sling as much money as they want at campaigns. Probably one of the worst interpretations of free speech a court could have landed on. All that money results in politicians too used to the status quo to pitch something different, and too scared of potential economic consequences of chasing after bad actors. Like the companies that get to be incredibly profitable and pay no tax, neat.
I also believe that democracy is not the default state of humanity. At least not at a high conceptual stage of a nation, the kind of thing that exists because we believe it exists and will it into being. A functional democracy is difficult to maintain, it requires a large amount of infrastructure on both the public and private ends to keep citizens engaged and holding existing powers to account. Limiting power into a few hands is far easier to do. Limiting information on what the government is doing and what alternative parties are saying is relatively easy as Hungary has proven in recent years. We are in an interesting point of time where pretending to be a democracy is a kind of public performance, only a handful of countries don’t call themselves democracies, but a lot of countries don’t really live up to the ideal.
We love the idea of old Athenian and Roman democracies. Both failed for different reasons. I don’t think democracy will ever go away, but that doesn’t mean it can’t fail.
I think to some degree we even understand that democracy is hard. President Zelenskyy is stuck in a war and hasn’t held an election since it started, for some context the UK did the same during WW2 holding no elections between 1935-1945. Canada and American democracy fared better during the world wars since the continent wasn’t being bombed, but democratic norms are usually put on hold. There’s a lot more secrecy expected of a government at war, and usually a rally behind the flag that boosts incumbents which arguably gave the USA its only four term president (while that was not illegal at the time this kind of break of convention needs a firm limit. Once your conventions start falling like dominoes your democracy won’t likely fair well). It is simply more efficient to be less democratic.
The allure of authoritarianism is usually that “our” people win. And maybe initially they do, but an eternal need for enemies doesn’t fulfill that desire forever. The circle must either expand to an external threat, or contract the definition of the enemy within. Is the MAGA movement happy to call the crusade done at illegal immigrants when they don’t seem to care on proving if they actually are illegal already? How tight can the circle be?
I think Bernie Sanders and AOC are correct in viewing the larger shift to be an oligarchy. Corporations already have more influence than individuals, because money buys influence.That is a fake democracy we could end up with. Where the people are so limited in power that an election doesn’t matter, the decisions are all the same no matter who wins. All that matters is that enough of the population thinks the people won. Class repression dressed up as a culture war.
US Republicans don’t really pitch policy ideas that help, it’s a capitalist free-for-all wrapped in a Christian rule of law veneer. And any belief the Republicans had in their democracy went out the window after Trump proved to have enough of a following to attempt a coup. Allowing him to run again is not rule of law, it’s self preservation. But the Democrats don’t fare much better, turns out if you pull out the populist messaging you aren’t left with much to run on besides the status quo. They at least seem to still believe in the husk of their democracy. And yes having a leader that can look competent to sell your message helps a lot, it should have been knives out for Biden the moment it was clear he wasn’t in a position to run again. Biden as a human being might not have deserved it, but if you believed there was a threat against your democracy the sacrifice would have been worth it.
From CBS. There might not have been a bigger failure in democratic ideals than the 2024 debate of two people too old to be coherent. Trump never sounds smart but he can pull funny and quippy, Biden had nothing in him at this point.
Canadian elections are still based on some ideals. Carney at least had a pitch for national building in the headwinds of outside economic threats. Put up against Poilievre’s “cut it all” policy it seemed to work to build a bigger coalition. Then again “cut it all” looked better before Trump and still built a coalition that normally wins elections. Lets just hope they all keep believing in democracy.
We are losing news in this tech money future, it’s too expensive to produce good reporting. The news we get the easiest access to (like an internet blog, heyo) has no kind of accountability if it turns out to be false. The algorithms demand good profitable content, preferably AI based so no one gets paid. The end result I fear is one where we give up everything to make job numbers look good, but 100% employment does not mean those jobs are good.
NS Politics 