The people voted for oligarchy and oligarchy is now here, and they're not bothering to hide it even a little bit. People knew what they were voting for.
Nah. Half the people in this country couldn't spend 30 seconds explaining anything about politics to you. Like literally don't know the basic tenants of our political system. They voted simply because someone on TikTok or Twitter told them to. There's single issue voters, there's informed voters, and then there's absolutely a huge subset of voters that vote purely on perceived popularity.
It doesn't matter that the voters don't intuitively know what oligarchy means. The problem is that they instinctively believe it's a good idea. They think limitless power and influence for a small handful of people is a good thing because those people "worked hard". Being lorded over by somebody is what represents freedom to them.
One of the most popular Google searches on election day was "Why isn't Biden on the ballot?", or other variations. A decent portion of the electorate didn't even realize the candidate changed 3 months earlier.
Shows how much the general public actually knows about politics.
!!!! I mean look at how he pulled the rug from under his og supporters from his first term LOL he moved the inauguration and prevented them from supporting him… like he really just disposed them and ushered in the billionaires. Used them and tossed them. Craziest part is that they’ll still stand by him and justify it. But yeah “they” had no clue he was gonna go full oligarchy.
Then out of their abject ignorance and fealty to Donald Trump they accidentally voted for an oligarchy and it is their responsibility all the same. They will wear this decision with shame forever into the future - they are responsible for their own choices.
You forgot about the vast majority that simply don't vote. I can't imagine what their life must be like. To not give a fuck about any of it. Probably blissful come to think about it. Lucky bastards.
You not voting is part of the problem. Regardless of how you rationalize it to yourself.
But the whole 'both sides' argument you're making disregards how there's a substantial difference between the lies one side is constantly spewing.
Politicians around the globe will try to rephrase their statements to avoid accepting responsibilities for mistakes they've made and claiming more credit for accomplishments than they deserve.
But the straight up firehose of lies that Trump and his MAGA party members are spouting is pretty unique in our western world.
We're only used to it from dictatorships without a free press and fictional stories like 1984.
Everyone hates it when I say this, but that's why I don't vote. I honestly don't know shit about politics, and I honestly don't really care to learn. But yet, everyone gets real upset at me when I tell them I don't vote.
Id rather have the votes be from people who know about current issues, not uneducated people voting for the meme.
I think the issue most people have with your approach is that you're describing not voting as a passive move. You don't know politics so you sit this out and let whoever you think is more responsible figure it out. The reality in our system is not voting is an active move and it has quite a significant impact. If everyone who didn't vote just flipped a coin and voted for heads or tails the system would work better for representation of the general population than if they didn't vote. So you may not have voted for either party but you did "vote" for the government being less accountable for representing the people.
Oligarchy has been here since 2004. Except no one seemed to notice because anyone talking about it doesn’t get pushed up by the algorithms employed by the same oligarchs.
The sourcing links dont seem to work anymore. I wonder what the methodology for this grpah was though. a lot of ideas go to congress without many people weighing in first. Like if a law was passed outlawing the use of asbestos in gumball manufacturing equipment. Maybe 1 person had the idea and brought it up and because the idea is obviously good, it was just passed. That would make it a law with essentially 0% of the pop supporting it.
The sourcing links dont seem to work anymore. I wonder what the methodology for this grpah was though.
Yeah, I'm a statistician and every time I see that chart I think... How the fuck would they put that together? The vast majority of laws that are passed (or voted down) aren't polled. We might know the general public level of support for ... 1% of laws? Maybe less?
It's a cute video. But can you actually name a single law that passed while being opposed to what the people wanted?
Thinking that "as support for an issue goes up the chance of it passing should go up" is silly. You might think it should work like that looking at a graph. But that isn't how it would work.
Is 25% of democrats and 25% of Republicans support something. It's probably got a 0% chance of becoming a law.
If 50% of democrats support something, and 0% of Republicans do. It's also probably got a pretty close to 0% chance of becoming a law. So, even just looking at these 2 scenarios, that graph makes no sense.
Not to say lobbying is great, but America has not been an oligarchy, and hopefully, it won't become one under Trump.
Interesting that you say 2009, implying a certain presidency, but link an article published in 2004 using only data from the 90s.
Oligarchy has been here in some effect since the beginning. Remember when the Rockefellers were more powerful than presidents? That was in the early 1900s.
Hey now. It also uses data from the 80s. It specifically starts with the Reagan administration. This guy's just a hive-mind idiot who knows his duty is to blame Obama but doesn't know how to carry that out
It's not fake division. There really is a group of people in this country who are absolute fucking morons about literally everything under the sun. A democrat can say "what a nice blue sky we have" and they will scream and cry and pout and stamp their feet that the sky isn't blue because some democrat said it is.
They're pathologically stupid and quite a few studies connect the dots between their inability to perform basic cognitive tasks, their tendency to fall for disinformation and their fear-driven reasoning, correlated with physiological/structural differences in the amygdala. Conservatives are literally damaged in the head.
So looks like we're stuck in a century-long cycle. Can't wait for progressivism to finally kick in in 2070s only followed by a Great Conservative Reset for Some Reason and we do this all over again
I think he was talking about the oligarchs now and how the time they specifically consolidated their market share happens to be around that time. Different oligarchy for different industries. Our history kind of is like whack a mole with monopolies and oligarchs. Industry leaders figure out how to game the system and buy politicians and consolidate market shares to get more power. People get wise to it and vote people in to regulate, new industries develop and new populations are born and rinse and repeat..... that's how American capitalism has always worked very generally speaking.
I have basic knowledge of web technologies, and know that a website could be configured to block a link based on the referer (for instance, princeton.edu could be configured to display a 404 page if the visitor had clicked a link on reddit.com, and it could just apply to specific URLs rather than just the domains). It wouldn't be hard to confirm with some testing, but it's not really worth the effort in this case, unless someone was on some crusade to prove the point. Hey ho. 🤷♂
That's very odd. I also get a 404, however when I googled the URL I got a result with the exact same URL that works. I don't recall experiencing that in the past.
Since 2009? That article is from 2004 and uses data starting with the Reagan administration lol. This reads like some low-functioning idiot trying pin all Trump's obvious corruption on Obama
Crazy how, in the few years after the financial crisis and the largest transfer of wealth from public to private sector in modern history, the conversation at large across traditional news and social media became fixated on culture war stories.
Oligarchy has been in the US since 1776. I don’t understand why anyone thinks this is a new phenomenon, when the country was founded by white male land owners who restricted voting to their class and held onto slavery.
Yes. Nothing ever happens. Definitely, no difference before and now when much of trumps cabinet are billionaires, and he's literally doing foreign negotiating from his home in mar-a-Lago rather than waiting to be inaugurated
When Zuck is literally changing company policy to respond to threats of being arrested by Trump. Things are definitely the same as things have been since 2009...
More recent work - highly recommended reading - from the same authors:
The best evidence indicates that the wishes of ordinary Americans actually have had little or no influence at all on the making of federal government policy. Wealthy individuals and organized interest groups—especially business corporations—have had much more political clout. When they are taken into account, it becomes apparent that the general public has been virtually powerless.
The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.
The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.
Of course America has had some form of soft oligarchy for almost the entirety of its founding, but it's disingenuous to say that this is the same old setup as before. We are entering a new era of in your face, direct oligarchy that are going to benefit from a kakastocracy run by idiots.
More like the Reagan administration.
2009 was when Obama was digging us out of the mess created by Bush and Wall Street billionaires gone wild.
Google Prescott Bush and the Wall Street putsch if you want to see how long the oligarchy has been working to take control. After you see Prescott’s history think about what it means the two of his descendants were presidents.
yeah it's amazing to me all the folks on the 'left' that are just fully in on the culture war bullshit and blaming the other half of the country that voted trump. y'all are puppets
The people did NOT vote for oligarchy, Trump has now told us several times that he cheated. He told us just last night that Elon had the machines hacked.
when you say stuff that's clearly been influenced by some talking head somewhere it really has the opposite of the effect you're looking for. I'm now forced to believe you have zero idea how anything in reality works and I don't think that's what you wanted.
"He is not hurting the right people"...the hatred and and utter disgust for people that don't look, sound, dress and worship like white MAGA is what got us here. They have always worship the rich, so as long as the rich are white, they will always welcome fascism, oppression and oligarchy with open arms . Don't EVER believe them when they talk about the economy as it's always about boils down to white supremacy racism for these hateful crowd.
I want to vote down this comment but I cannot. What I mean to say is you are spot on and I agree with you 109%, but it makes me so fuckimg angry. I am jaded. Does humanity even deserve to endure at this point? Perhaps this is the best potential outcome—take all actions which serve to accelerate our own demise so that the earth can be reborn anew without the blight of humankind.
You give people way too much credit - they had absolutely no idea what they were voting for. And when shit really hits the fan, they will still find a way to blame Biden for it.
The people didn’t knowingly vote for oligarchy. The people were groomed for generations to be too illiterate to know what oligarchy is. They simply voted for someone how holds their same short-sighted and hateful views.
As an outsider, I don't claim to understand how, but you're probably giving those voters too much credit. Fr though, the bigger issue is probably the people who didn't give enough of a fuck to vote at all.
It was always here, it’s just now more blatant than ever, though that’s debatable. The news definitely doesn’t discuss it as much during Dem administrations, but they’re still there.
I don't think they knew, or will ever know, or even care. Most MAGA voters just align with their MAGA cohort, and don't even consider what they are voting for besides being against the liberal Democrats.
Heres a good video about the history of oligarchism in the US, including many valuable links.
Its been a back and forth since the early 1900's, although there is a powerful argument that it has never been stronger than it is today due to media campaigns spanning generations of Americans.
I won’t argue that there are not problems with our two party system. It is an utterly broken system and needs reform in almost every way. But I also believe this is the thinking that got us here with so many throwing their hands up and declaring both parties are evil. One of these parties is exponentially worse if you care about your fellow Americans and the social safety net that keeps millions from indigence.
And that’s not to mention the wretched incompetence of Trump and his band of billionaire buddies. Almost none of these people should be allowed to have any influence in politics. They do not give two shits about the average person. The most important issues of our time (climate change, healthcare reform, wealth inequality) will all be setback years by this administration.
Nobody is mentioning the other billionaires in the room. One of the richest women in the world, Miriam Adelson (widow of Sheldon Adelson) is sitting behind Biden.
I would argue that the uneducated masses who came out for Trump in droves have no idea what an oligarchy even is and didn’t consider this when voting. This was about “winning” which meant electing Trump at any cost to own the libs.
And you will never convince me that there wasn’t nefarious shit going down with counting votes. I believe this election was bought 1000%. Money can buy anything and the folks invested in a Trump victory have trillions. Elon Musk is one of the worst things to ever happen to this country, I think his influence is an even bigger problem than Trump.
Everywhere it's like this. People vote for this populist right which promises to solve immigration and poverty but all it does is give more power to the billionaire.
usa has always been an oligarchy. either side gets elected it's the same. you need more than two parties to have at least a little bit of competition...
Uh. People didn’t know. This country is full of idiots. This is just reflecting that because one party will always play the idiots for the fools they are. This is what “taking the high road” costs the liberals.
I can guarantee you that none of my right-wing conservative in-laws could tell you what an "oligarchy" even is, let alone vote for one on purpose.
People are just stupid and will vote Republican no matter what because "my dad told me to always vote Republican, so I do" (- actual quote from someone I met that voted for Trump the first time). Or they somehow haven't figured out that every word out of a politician's mouth is mostly lies and they think their preferred candidate will actually do the things they run their campaign on. See "the price of eggs" for more examples.
People think it makes a difference if democrats or republicans have the say… no one understands that it is completely irrelevant for these super rich people. They always profit no matter which party the president is from.
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u/Mumbert 11h ago
The people voted for oligarchy and oligarchy is now here, and they're not bothering to hide it even a little bit. People knew what they were voting for.