I certainly hope wealthy America will one day no longer successfully stoke infighting amongst the plebs, but there are few signs that such is on the horizon. I'm not alleging that it's always a conscious "stoking" from the wealthy, at the individual level, but it's certainly happening at an institutional level.

Anarcho-libertarians say: "See, the system sucks, we should abolish it completely", but offer no way to first either 1) enforce a more equitable distribution of wealth before the suspension of all gov't, or 2) convince me that a free market alone imposes enough accountability on any wealthier asset-owners. In fact, point #1 is not a goal at all, for many. Wealth inequality is considered righteous and necessary. I agree that some wealth inequality can exist in a perfectly healthy society, but I consider the current distribution absurd. Truly fixing things might require a cultural revolution, but the US is sooooooo not there yet. The cultural volatility is around, but it's been effectively harnessed. On both sides of the political aisle, to an extent. One distinction? The progressives actually have policy ideas. The GOP has unity behind a demagogue, though, which turned out to be a surprisingly effective vehicle to help them preserve minority rule.

Giving voice to this sense of accelerating economic polarization and concomitant political trends, Malcolm Harris in his book Kids These Days says of his own generation that they will end up as “fascists or revolutionaries, one or the other.”

It does seem like the millenials and gen-X'ers that scrutinize American politics and economics the most have decided that some radical new approach may be necessary. Stabilizing the climate is necessary. How the free market alone fully manages that before things get catastrophically worse is still unclear to me.

I will concede that "good" cultural shifts could make the free market work, in a lot of cases. But "good" cultural shifts make sense; They are based on reasoning, e.g. a logical response towards a threat, working towards something better for oneself and/or others. Although there is certainly a lot of culture shifting going on, our objective reality has been poisoned with mis- and dis-information, and so the process of responding towards things like worsening economic conditions is very much disrupted. Fox News sucks, but I'm convinced that social media will prove to be the real tipping point. We may be forced to restructure society because of how disruptive the internet has been.

In a skit about some of this, someone would give a speech from a podium in which they use the word "capital". An attendee looks it up in their Marxist Language Dictionary. Of course, it's there. The doxxing begins, and after the speaker is kidnapped by an angry mob less than one minute later, the attendee is questioned by police and contests any responsibility for the kidnapping on the basis of "free speech suppression". Because first amendment references are a magical password, the police leave immediately, and to defuse any and all possible joke whoosh'ing, the attendee explains to the camera that people can't be using Marxist language. The police reappear, and join in denouncing commie bastards. One officer's gun is engraved "Karl Marx's Last Kiss".

disclaimer: am_Unition is an anti-libertarianism bot trained on Hubski propaganda submitted by viewers like you. No but I did enjoy the article, thank you. :)