“Every time Trump or members of his administration have lashed out at Europe, including Ukraine, Europeans have absorbed the blow with a forced smile and bent over backwards to flatter the White House.” (…)
“While a systemic answer to Europe’s security conundrum is not in sight, Europeans do have the levers to prevent Ukraine’s capitulation and create the conditions for a just peace.”
Good argument
The promise of socialism is its own value. The USA needed the lifestyle to make people accept capitalism.
What gave the voters then the opportunity to make better decisions for themselves?
Thanks!
The voting. If it’s anything like Canada, there have been socialist fringe candidates all along, it’s just that there hasn’t been much interest.
You could say people have been railroaded into not supporting socialism, but they don’t. No amount of extra democracy will change that.
I don’t fully understand your last paragraph. You mean people once improved their conditions but now they don’t, despite having all opportunities?
Correct, most voters don’t understand enough to demand effective redistribution policies. Speaking from experience, if you get involved in politics this becomes the bane of your existence.
There is some redistribution now, and it’s gone up recently in Canada, although I’m not sure off the top of my head what the global trends have been. It’s just slower than the natural self-accumulation of wealth.
How the New Deal got so much traction in the US is a big mystery, honestly - it really was a unique event. People weren’t smarter or more educated back then, and on the other side of the Atlantic they just elected fascists, who can tell a hell of an emotionally appealing story. (The USSR definitely managed redistribution, although they came straight after a brutal monarchy and a war without a significant liberal democracy phase, and struggled to keep growing over time)
To keep workers happy.
Yeah, but usually there’s other ways, right? Blame immigrants or minorities, or let the wealth naturally move away from the poor slowly enough a casual voter won’t notice. That’s what everyone else did the whole time, and the US itself before and after.
Even today, with all the information you need at your fingertips, a lot of the people in the US who want a shift left on wealth issues are actually in the 9% after the 1% (which ironically is the class that owns the most stuff). The real poor lean pretty pro-Trump.
They couldn’t risk having people have the sentiment that Capitalism wasn’t the best. They didn’t know the limits of communism. So they had to assume that if a strong communist movement had been established, everything would have been lost.
Yeah, maybe. Or maybe that’s at least a part of it. There definitely was rivalry, even if an American communist revolution was never remotely close.
Nice talking to you!
Likewise!