I’m not skeptical per se. I’ve just been propagandized so fucking much—I grew up watching those propagandocumentaries on the National Geographic Channel about the DPRK, etc., fr that was what I watched instead of cartoons lol.
Pretend I’m a lib who you’re trying to convince, or something. In addition to calming this feeling in my gut like something isn’t making sense, I want to be able to make this argument, myself.
The range of options is so limited in the US, effectively the ruling class will drive it off a cliff, it isn't sustainable. So much production was done in the US, but it's going to collapse because of how much value was squandered over the decades since WW2. Virtually none of it invested into lasting infrastructure or social projects. Just war machines, bombs, and highways. Financial vehicles to exploit neocolonial relationships. There's no mechanism to reorient the system, for the average people, so the floor will just continue sliding with more labor being displaced and falling from their rungs.
North America depends upon so much unequal exchange from several other billion people, but most of its people are some combination of too disenfranchised, propagandized, or undereducated to do anything about the eventualities that will produce. That's not democracy.
Essentially everyone is coerced into benefiting from slavery, even if it's just a bit, and for those who benefit greatly that turns into propaganda reinforcing system. Its eventual decline due to inherent unsustainability makes militarism and fascism almost inevitable.