The Truth about the American “System”
The statement at left has a certain surface-level appeal, but it’s inaccurate.
What’s true:
The United States was started by rich white male landowners, and its original laws were put into place to maintain the dominance of the wealthy Europeans.
The subjugation of blacks, immigrants, and the native peoples further cemented the hegemony of the upper class whites.
What’s also true:
Throughout most of its history, the U.S. has seen times where the common American somehow succeeded in grabbing a significant amount of power: the abolitionists of the mid-19th Century, the women’s suffragists, the anarchists of the early 20th Century, organized labor, the New Deal, the post-WW2 booming affluence of the middle class, Brown vs. Board of Ed., and the Civil Rights Act.
It really wasn’t until the neoliberalism that blossomed under Reagan that the super-rich forged a way to use their wealth to take control of our lawmaking processes, and the United States began its path toward oligarchy.
I don’t know a single person stupid enough to believe that schools keep the curricula secret from parents. You’re more than welcome to walk into your kids’ school, meet their teachers and administrators, leaf through the textbooks, join the PTA, and attend parents’ night. You’ll learn immediately that there is no plot to brainwash your kids.
What do you think is going to happen when, in a few months, consumer prices haven’t fallen? Answer: Fox News and the MAGA crowd will drop the topic like a hot rock, and pretend that Trump never promised to lower the prices of gasoline, eggs, etc.
America’s political sensibilities are moving to the right, along with many other countries like Hungary, Turkey, Italy, Slovakia, Croatia and the Czech Republic, and that’s sad, but it’s a choice that the people of the United States are free to make.
What we need to learn from the content of the meme here is that the majority of American voters simply don’t care that their leader is a convicted felon, and that he committed treason against our country.
Most decent people support this. But guess what? Overall, in the United States right now, it’s a minority position.
One thing we can observe about Aristotle’s writings from our modern standpoint is that we got a whole bunch of stuff wrong, and the quote at left is a good example.
The position of many of today’s self-described “patriots” is offered at left. Apparently, the United States has reached a point at which we have to make a choice between:
If you’re having trouble defining exactly what’s going wrong in the United States right now, you are to be forgiven. Yet, the words at left may be of service.
