laugh all you want at electoralism, but it is how they are achieving their goal
This is a silly article. 'Mainstream news editors seem to forget they are highlighting a disinformation artist'? Mainstream news editors ARE disinformation artists.
Yeah, Koch is a huge problem. Billionaires are a huge problem. Businesses are a huge problem. Singling him out and pretending he is a particular problem is ignorant at best, deceptive at worst.
Koch is very much ahead of the curve, he doesn't approach this as your typical dilettante lackadaisical donor he approaches this like someone with three engineering degrees from MIT. This network and its campaign are his unique creation and much of what is happening couldn't be done by others, Heritage and ALEC pre-date him but what had they achieved before merging with him?
The Republicans have been doing this bullshit forever. Anhauser-Busch literally runs Missouri even post-merger. His reach is far larger than any previous singular Republican creation outside the RNC, but the blueprint is not unique. Trump took a huge chunk out of the Koch plan, because if it was up to them, Scott Walker would have been president. He's fucking evil, but he is a recognizable evil, not special.
Trumps cabinet and administration was stacked with Koch cronies, the core policies of his term came from the Koch checklist.
Some were related to the Koch machine but most were just Republican insiders who swing wherever the money is coming from, with no specific personal allegiance. The fact that Paul Ryan even quit in 2019 is a sign of DC political weakness within the Koch infrastructure because he was a bought and paid for Koch guy. The most success they have really had was with the Heritage project, and that is going to fucking hurt, but it's already done and gone until the next Republican president And even then the major thing that enabled the Koch machine to exist to the extent that it does was the Citizens United case, which was not specifically a Koch project.
And they've been gone for two years and many of those policies are still in place and some have been expanded. It's almost as if it's not specific to Koch, but more of an alignment with his class interests?
honestly, it was over for US "democracy", to the extent that it really existed in the first place, when the USSR was dismantled. There was no comparatively progressive global economic project for the US to compete with. There was no longer an incentive to do even the most tepid social-democratic reforms in the United States. China is rising, but doesn't have anything close to the nuclear arsenal of the USSR, and its military budget still fluctuates between 1/3 and 1/5th of the US budget. since 1991 America has passed egregiously evil shit like the PATRIOT act, the "hague invasion" act, repealed glass steagal (removing any regulatory barriers between commercial and investment banking) legalized unlimited campaign donations, neutered unions, and rolled back womens' reproductive rights. None of this reactionary shit shows any signs of reversing any time soon. The country would sooner balkanize than solve its own contradictions at the federal level. "Death to America" is more of a casual observation than a defiant chant, at this point.
spoiler
obviously amerikkkan "democracy" never really existed, and amerikkka is a great satan built on top of the corpses of african slaves and indigenous first nations, but i mean even within the very narrow confines of white bourgeois settler-colonial "democracy," it's over.
Technically 🤓 democracy doesn't have to be popular, even if that's the colloquial meaning (certainly the one chuds go by with their "republic not democracy" shit). Lenin even pointed that out with his example of the ancient Greek city-states. So long as "the people" (the ones that matter) are allowed to vote for representatives and/or direct laws, and participate in assembly.
But yeah, semantics aside, American Bourgeois Democracy is failing even in its primary functions of orderly managing the affairs of the Bourgeoisie and securing legitimacy in the population's eyes.
That is what they are doing with their voter disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, and Constitutional Convention plans. Ensuring their radicalised voter base are the only ones getting a say.
capitalist takes advantage of political system designed to be taken advantage of by capitalists
:shocked-pikachu:
well yeah electoralism works for the right wing bc they don't pose any threat to capital
In the dictatorship of the bourgeois, bourgeois electoralism benefits the bourgeois. Whoda thunk it
The Billionaire Kingmaker (Still) Dividing the Nation
Which billionaire? Which nation? Multiple examples :agony-4horsemen:
