US Political Situation

It’s hard to tell if there are actually bad guys in the US.

If there are, they are not the Democrats or Republicans. That fight just distracts from fighting against the actual bad guys.

If there are bad guys, they are the top 1%. But not by wealth. Doing it by wealth is just a rough approximation. It’s by power. Also it’s more like 0.1% or less.

Who is powerful? The people who make decisions in government, the mainstream media, the famous public intellectuals who get lots of media attention, the people in charge of the universities, the people in charge of the huge non profits, and the people at the top of some industries including tech, oil, pharma, telecom, and military production. And their friends, advisors, etc. A lot of people are behind the scenes.

Professors and activists are mostly nobodies. They may be brainwashed, and they may be working to indoctrinate others, but they are not the root cause.

It’s hard to tell how malicious the powerful people are, and how much they’re just trying to get by in a broken system with screwed up incentives. Some are malicious but I don’t know how many. A few famous names like George Soros and Hillary Clinton are malicious (but not Bill Clinton).

Joe Biden is a corrupt pawn who isn’t malicious in any major way. Petty crimes and minor betrayals of his country – even involving a billion dollars or whatever the number on that Ukraine corruption was – are not real malice. He’s just trying to enrich himself and get power for his family, but he’s not aiming to use that power to impose a evil ideological agenda on us. He associates with China some because he sees wealth and power there, not because he hates or wants to destroy America.

Bernie Sanders is likely malicious (serious Marxists, and their cousins the anti-industry environmentalists, are some of the most dangerous), but a lot of Bernie voters are better than Biden voters. Why? Biden was an obvious pawn of the swamp/establishment. Bernie attacks the ruling class. This is why there is some Trump/Bernie fanbase overlap.

Trump got elected for being an outsider who attacked the swamp. Plus immigration, which he didn’t actually do much about, but his fans still want to elect him again anyway.

As a rich celebrity, Trump wasn’t that much of an outsider. But at least he wasn’t a career politician.

The Democrat party has anti-establishment or otherwise somewhat more reasonable people too. Yang and Gabbard got some attention last election. (Bernie and AOC also get some attention in that way, but I think their fans are being misled.) I don’t think they’re great, but the big difference is that anti-establishment Democrats lose while Trump won. Democrat voters are currently more enthralled by their establishment leaders than Republican voters. Tons of Republican voters hate Mitch McConnell, Romney, the Bush’s, etc., whereas a lot of Democrats are somehow fooled by Pelosi, Schumer and Clinton.

Democrats are currently the party of trusting science, government and other authorities.

The leftist activists are correct that the system is significantly rigged and the powerful people in charge of the country – who are mostly old white men – are doing an awful job of making things nice for everyone. There’s room for some alliances there instead of them just hating Trump and Trump voters hating them.

It’s largely not rigged for small businesses or poor or middle class white people, though. That’s one of the things the left will have to accept for an alliance to work. Both anti-black and anti-white racism are real problems, but they are not the main problems of society. Lots of black people can’t get a lot of jobs that would provide wealth and power … but white trash people and even white middle class people mostly can’t get those jobs either. The old boys club at the top rigs things for other elites, for their extended social network, etc.

The solution is not a revolution or violent overthrow. And voting in the right politicians isn’t going to fix it either. We don’t need to get the right rulers in place. That’s a temporary band-aid. The masses need to get wiser and less vulnerable to propaganda and to tribalism, and more able to agree on good ideas with 80% majorities.

1 Like

This survey is at least partially consistent with what you are saying here

— On the other hand, more than 6 in 10 Trump and Biden voters see America as less a representative democracy and more a system that is run by and rigged for the benefit of the wealthy.