I recently heard a US journalist/author named Chris Hedges say something to the effect that the US has the symbols, the iconography and the language of a democracy, but internally, corporates and oligarchs have seized all the levers of power, and that it is reminiscent of the end of the Roman Empire. He also went onto distinguish between corporates and oligarchs, claiming that the two political camps in the US actually represent these two sides (rather than democracy vs. facism or socialism).
There is a great documentary called “The Century of the Self”, which is about the rise of consumerism in lockstep with politics in the United States.
The initial primary focus is Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, who is known as the father of public relations. He was incredibly influential during his time, having been a key advisor on most federal administrations from the 20s to the 70s. On the corporate side, early big wins were getting women to smoke at the dawn of the Great Depression, and changing the 'American breakfast' to bacon and eggs.
A core thesis of his is freedom in a large democratic state is a bit of an illusion… it needs to be controlled by consumerist impulses, or in other words, indirectly by corporations. Otherwise the all-encompassing hand of totalitarianism is needed. Without one of these mediating factors, the masses become unruly and descend into anarchy and chaos.
His late 20s book "Propaganda" is an interesting insight into his early, free from public scorn, view on the matter. It seems overwhelmingly cynical and puppet-masterish, if you will, and he somewhat stepped back from it after finding out how much it had influenced Goebbels. Still, I think it holds strongly as a guidebook for how the US evolved to present day.
What would his thoughts on India be? It is neither totalitarian nor controlled by corporoates to a level that we seen in the US. It is an extremely large "democracy" with only limited signs of central orchestration. That said, petty corruption and chaos is rampant.
Meta are a US company. They took legal action against the author in the US also. And hliyan may have trusted readers to consider if UK politics had the same property.
Are you sure he didn’t mean the end of the Roman Republic, which was the beginning of the Principate? The Western Empire would last about another 400 years.
We definitely are tracking the end of the Roman Republic. At that point, all constitutional norms had been violated so many times that they were mere suggestions, and political infighting by oligarchs was tearing the republic apart, to the point that people were relieved when Augustus took power. They still had a senate. They still had all the old offices and structures. But everyone knew who was in power.
Much like today in the US. We don’t have one Princeps, but we all know that the oligarchs and corporations own the entire political and economic process. They write the rules to suit themselves.
And they have common people fighting each other over cultural issues instead of fighting them for the stuff that matters — economic and political power. It’s a fantastic divide and conquer strategy. Unless common people start waking up to who their real enemies are, the American Republic is effectively over.
I've been hearing this for thirty years and I think that people just like to predict the end times and the Roman empire is what's taught most closely in school
Eh, since the founders were explicitly inspired by the Roman Republic, it’s always been fun to wonder “where are we on the Roman timeline”. But it was about 150 years from when the Gracchi brothers were murdered until Augustus seized power. These things happen over time, not all at once.
I don’t see any way to view today’s politics as normal. There is nothing but naked greed and hunger for power at play now. It wasn’t like this even 15 years ago. We’ve been a frog in a pot of water and it’s just starting to boil.
When corporations can lobby to influence legislation, pay to get a candidate elected, and CEOs hold positions of power, including the presidency itself, any semblance of democracy is an illusion.
This case is from the UK. Is there some quote you can pull about someone critiquing the governmental system over there and how that’s reflected in this case?
>and that it is reminiscent of the end of the Roman Empire
What a totally ridiculous comparison. The roman empire always was an explicit a dictatorial state. Its end took hundreds of years of internal and external forces tearing it apart as coherent entity. Characterizing it as two factions fighting for power is just bizarre.
That’s far from accurate. Augustus positioned himself as the restorer of the Republic after a horrific period of civil war, and cobbled together his authority from existing Republican magistracies, especially the Tribune of the Plebs. The Julio-Claudians at least attempted to maintain the fiction that the Republic was still functioning. Explicitly dictatorial it wasn’t, although actually dictatorial it certainly was.
Another way of looking at this would be in terms of the millionaire managerial and professional class holding up the Democratic Party versus the interests of the billionaire aristocratic and executive class holding up the Republican Party.
The billionaires are far less numerous, have far better ability to coordinate and summon resources, and have interests that diverge farther from the thousandaires who actually do most of the voting, compared to the millionaires.
The term "holding up" is doing a lot of work here. The Republican party has an extremely enthusiastic voter base. Billionaire money might encourage the enthusiasm but in the end the voters turn out and pull levers. They are sincere in their voting.
The Democrats are a bit less enthusiastic, at least at the moment, but in the end it's not the millionaires who pull the levers. It's the rank and file.
It's hard to tell how different it would be if we could somehow get the money out of it. But I am wary of assuming that the voters would dramatically change their attitudes. The millionaires and billionaires tune the party's message to what the voters want. They get the spoils but they're also making their voters happy, assuming they win. If they didn't do that, they'd lose.
It's possible that the Democrats are more conspicuously failing to give their voters what they want when they win. But it's not obvious to me how they could do that. Most of the suggestions I hear are naive and impractical, and come down to "do the thing I want and many millions of others will see how great that is."
For election to work you would have to read [all of] the [not legally binding] election programs, ponder the offerings and make up your own mind.
You won't find a single person who does this.
Apparently everyone votes by a different mechanism. One that involves a lot of money.
Even if everyone was well informed and able to objectively make their own choices that are truly their own. You don't actually have to do anything you wrote in your election program.
We don't become legal experts to run a business, we hire lawyers. We don’t become doctors to aid in our own health either. So too should people find ways to delegate and evaluate economic and policy analysis.
The terrifying reality is that there is no one to delegate to.
If we would magically spawn the theoretically ideal candidate who plans to do everything exactly the way you want it done then there is zero chance you will vote for them.
This goes for all voters. Exactly 100% of them without rounding anything.
You can't argue you don't need to know any of them because they aren't popular enough.
Democracy badly needs a better formula for discovery or some other means to add signal to the noise like a license to drive the country or some financial reward to get a diploma.
Maybe we could train an LLM to interview the voter.
> it's not the millionaires who pull the levers. It's the rank and file.
“People can vote whichever side they prefer, as long as their opinions are based on fake news.” It's difficult to talk about rank and file pulling the levers, when millionaires manufacture the news.
You say that because you know that the news is fake, and you know that because it's not really that difficult to figure out at least an approximation of the truth. You know who are the abject liars (because they routinely tell outright falsehoods), and you know who at least tries to get it right even if they sometimes fail at it.
It's not that hard. People seek out the fake news; the millionaires and billionaires are just providing slightly better versions of it. They could be doing really sophisticated propaganda but they just don't have to. People are pleased to believe the most outlandish lies if it affirms their egos.
It's not that hard when you have proper education, scientific practice, understanding that you don't have to succumb to the fear pumped by those in power, and surplus time and energy to put everything in perspective in a constantly changing world. Otherwise, I'm afraid it's difficult to break out of one's echo chamber.
Corporates understand that a strong economy is important for the system to be viable long term and that some kind of middle class is a necessary part of it, which they can skim off the top of. Oligarchs don't care about that nearly as much, and are more acutely focused on accumulation of power and wealth and are happy to disassemble productive capacity and force the middle class down to an a working poor class in the process.
It's basically the difference between "every one of my workers needs to be able to buy one of my cars" industrial Fordism and what Varoufakis coined techno-feudalism, which does not utilize markets or independent workers but tries to extract value from what are effectively serfs directly. Zuckerberg et al. are obviously emblematic of the latter.
Why wouldn't they fight? Some level of conflict always occurs within all groups or affiliations. It would be completely unnatural for there to be no conflict.
I wouldn't say corporations and oligarchs are going to fight. I'd say elites infight all the time, but they all agree that the other humans are simply "human resources" and they have the common interests to extract as much value from those fellow humans as possible.
Exactly the same model for pretty much all large countries, each with a bit of different "flavour" that the elites learned throughout the centuries, and conveniently serves as one of the topics to divide the human resources.
I prefer “workforce” over “human resources,” and I believe lots of people voluntarily choose to remain a member of the workforce, as they would rather have a family and live a “simple” life than spend effort to become some kind of entrepreneur or politician.
I would say that the distinction between the two groups is, roughly:
"Corporates" are the leaders of the many large corporations in this country. They want broad protections for corporate power against labour, corporate profits, lowered regulations, etc.
"Oligarchs" are the leaders of the few titanic corporations, like Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg. They want to become the zaibatsu of modern America, essentially being given total control over the economy divided up between them.
There are many things they want that are in common (for instance, the removal of regulations), but that prime desire of the oligarchs is directly at odds with the continued existence and livelihoods of the corporates.
It's dangerous to make sloppy comparisons like that.
Augustus seized all the levers of power to create the Roman Empire and even developed a cult-like following.
Similarly, claiming there aren't two political camps is sloppy in the current environment.
Corporates and oligarchs are a completely different animal, and they deserve treatment as such.
They are not some homogenous, totalitarian entity: they're more akin to what Rome was before the Empire--a melange of senators fighting about everything while trying to stay rich.
Octavian was given the levers of power by Julius Caesar. Pompey and Crassus teamed up with Caesar to breakdown the republic. They made huge amounts of cash doing it.
I think constantly repeating negativity that undermines faith in institutions and our ability to effect change is harmful because it’s self fulfilling.
Great, I love to debate. Does that mean that you have faith in our political institutions then? If so, how do you justify that faith?
From my perspective, it’s self evident that our political institutions are hopelessly corrupt, so I can’t imagine what it’s like to have faith in them. And since I’ve lost faith in our institutions, I see criticism as positive, not negative.
I don’t see how pointing out flaws is self fulfilling. It’s the only way to improve anything. My guess is that an internet comment has less effect than the wishes of billionaires who are able to control our political institutions using their economic power.
If you admit that our political institutions are in a bad state, how do you propose we begin to fix them without voicing negativity about them?
You have moved the goalposts from government institutions to political institutions. The department of education is not a political institution. USAID is not a political institution. The IRS is not a political institution. I have faith in these institutions and in congress. I have less faith in the electorate selecting the best people to operate these institutions, largely because of the constant barrage of negativity they see online.
I think the department of education does good work and has been critical in creating an education system that people from all over the globe strive to access. From school lunch programs that support local farmers and provide nutritious meals to students to stewarding our world-class universities.
I think USAID did a great job minimizing suffering in-situ, thus reducing refugee crises and allowing populations to flourish to the benefit of everyone.
I think the IRS was doing great work developing their own e-file system that gives US taxpayers an alternative to predatory commercial options like TurboTax.
When you say “political institutions” I assume you mean congress, which is undisputedly democratically elected. You can engage with your elected leaders to effect change. People do so all the time. You can get involved in the political process and get someone more aligned with your interests elected. This also happens all the time.
So where’s the corruption of our institutions you are so certain exists? If you can’t be specific then I think it is just toxic and lazy to repeat the negativity.
