The system is dying and rotting and feels fraudulent and we aren't sure where to direct our rage...
Both sides are bought and paid for, our government, our media, our laws (what is left of them), we didn’t guard our institutions from influence by the rich and powerful. Maybe it has always been that way but before maybe some of the rich and powerful adhered to more egalitarian notions of what our country could be, a sense of noblesse oblige or that the social contract meant society and government have an obligation to provide and protect certain things.
Similarly our newspapers, TV stations are held by fewer and fewer conglomerations and ultrarich. Who is going to give us the truth, Rupert Murdoch’s news, Jeff Bezo’s newspaper. General Electric owning channel 4 and making nuclear weapons, Sumner Redstone owning Viacom and CBS, Disney owning ABC, Time Warner AOL, etc... The think tanks are millionaires spouting what the billionaires want. There is no independent media anymore.
Similarly in the name of freedom of speech , the Russians can make up fake stories and Facebook can defend putting them up. Radical right can make up stories about child sex rings run by Clinton and Shumer, or Sandy Hook massacre being a made up lie, and it’s not slander or propaganda or something you can sue them for or shut them down for saying, but allowed to be said … …after all free speech. Freedom to make up stories and outright lie… I can’t say we are better off than when we had Cronkite, Murrow and we all shared fewer sources of news but they were real.
The growing income inequality and feeling it is getting harder rather than easier for most in the 1st world countries leads to feeling disenfranchised. Many generations did better than previous generations and maybe that had been our expecation. As the American Empire is in decline, we outsourced our production to a nation on the rise with 4x our population, (a substantially greater population than the US, Canada, Mexico, all of the European Union, England, Japan, Australia combined).
Both Democrats and Republican told us outsourcing everything and freetrade with poorer economies was a win/win, cheaper goods and growth for everyone. They said free markets and capitalism will bring with it democracy and human rights. Fareed Zakaria (likely on the right side of humanity and a better person than me) pointed out that stagnation and growth of inequality is ok in the first world because the rest of the world, the developing world has been pulling out of poverty, growing rapidly. While the first world is stuck and frustrated, with little growth in real wages adjusted for inflation, with more polarization and far right movements taking power in Western Governments its ok, less people globally are starving, suffering or dying in childbirth. With less barriers the wealth and growth of the world is slowly moving towards homeostasis.
With rulings like Citizens United, corporations and the wealthy are allowed to give unlimited money, and further laws make it so it is a matter of privacy to be able to not disclose how much money they give and to who. In any other system if a person pays another secretly for a behavior it is bribery, however in politics we somehow are now at a point where our politicians must raise millions, tens of millions of dollars from the rich and or corporations, oil, pharmaceuticals, banks, teachers, whatever and then we expect them to represent the We The People not special interests. For a very small sum they can buy people to appoint judges to help them win, force more decisions into arbitration, get laws written to protect them and remove ones that don’t, defund institutions that protect or regulate, after all bloated government is the enemy right... corporations create jobs…
When our government serves the rich, our media is bought and controlled, and peoples lives get steadily worse, while our empire slips away, its no wonder we are all disenfranchised, looking to blame minorities, or the immoral, or the disloyal, or the arrogant coastal elite, or the religious, or the lazy takers or whatever convenient scapegoat people find. The scarier truth is the very rich use only a small amount of their wealth to control policy and ideas both. Hell for 40 years the rich have been selling the idea government doesn’t work, government is the problem, without laws things would be even better. Despite the erosion of government, people’s lives are slowly more difficult, we are scared. The successful older generation confused as to what is wrong with the lazy whiny younger ones, after all the older generation did just fine.
Angry, frustrated people look for someone to blame rather than multifaceted set of complicated issues with tradeoffs as you try to fix them. When we had the Cold War at least we were unified I guess, maybe a joint cause we can all work for, fix the environment, go to space, unify with democracies that respect human rights, I don’t know what our new unifying cause could be that makes us remember we are all on the same side.
Sorry for anyone that read my long late night screed, but in short we should be a better country than this. We don’t lock children in cages as a message to illegal immigrants, we don’t tell our allies we fought world wars they are on their own, we don’t suppress voting and gerrymander districts, we don't ignore science. We used to stand for advancing freedom, human rights, democracy and human dignity (ignoring the hypocracy in our actual actions at least we tried then). America won’t always be the most powerful or richest nation on Earth but for F!
@$ sake our legacy should be advancing those ideals.