Erika3sis

Erika3sis , 2 days ago to Politics in Why American left is so right-wing?

False consciousness, as we say, is very widespread in the United States compared to other countries. I think that one part of this is that the United States is built on the stolen resources of exploited countries, including its very own territory, which is occupied illegally in violation of treaties with indigenous nations. These stolen resources allow the United States to essentially "buy" the loyalty of its citizens. I also think that another part of this is that the United States isolates its people from the rest of the world in various ways, for instance that monolingualism is very widespread in the United States, or Americans consume less foreign media, et cetera, and this means that Americans exist in more of a bubble compared to other countries.

In the ruling class of the United States, the furthest left that you get is Bernie Sanders, because people like Bernie Sanders or historically FDR or Huey Long etc exist to facilitate that buying of loyalty that underpins the whole of American society. That is, they exist to make exploitation less apparent and hardships more bearable, without addressing the conditions that lead to exploitation and hardship in the first place — so they're the political equivalent of a smoke break or office pizza party, basically.

Erika3sis , 9 months ago to Politics in Separation of Powers: a primer for our "friends" from hexbear.

What I’ll never be able to understand is why people seem to think that stuff like this is going to convince anybody to change their views on… well, anything, really.

All of this stuff is stuff that we’ve heard repeated ad nauseam in school, in educational video cassette children’s cartoons, in political commentary on TV and in print editorials, in public speeches by government officials, in conversations with people we know, and so forth. Belief in the separation of powers and checks-and-balances being effective as implemented in a liberal democracy, is such an ingrained part of mainstream understanding of politics literally since early childhood, that anyone who believes to the contrary must necessarily already be familiar with the arguments for it, and have rejected them.