I honestly hadn't thought about Europe that way, but I always did know that I liked the cut of their jib.
Hearing this is both heartening and depressing: heartening because a neo-feudal system already exists; depressing because it's precisely the neo-feudal part of the world that has a neo-fascism problem...
India and China aren't too far behind. The former enables religious extremism and the latter hammers public opinion into a blind acceptance of the solitary ruling party.
Here's what should concern you more: the 20th century was the age of strong states, from the active citizenry of the imperial United States, to the Communist dominance of society in the equally imperial Soviet Union.
The 21st century is the age of the corporation. This forum salivates at a man whose goal in life is to retire on Mars, presumably in a society of his own creation and ownership. Everything in this age is available at a price, even control of society.
My instinctive rejoinder to "the age of the corporation" is to ask how many bayonets the corporation has, but the answer is increasingly "not zero."
This also causes me to notice something else: what if neo-fascism and its Asian counterparts are becoming popular precisely as a way to coerce corporations -- because nothing less than that can bring them under control?
This sounds very plausible, and it's not a pleasant thought. You'd think that the international business class would know what _noblesse oblige_ means, and would realize that they need to not antagonize the planet, but that would be giving them more credit than they deserve; I've read books that casually, in passing, praise the merits of tax havens and condemn all social-welfare programs...
That's a really good point. Perhaps the Achilles heel of mass democracy is that it is easily manipulated in a capitalist economy where our interactions with the world can be exclusively private.
Think about it: we can spend our lives at home, work, and the grocery store. Except they deliver. And so do restaurants. And so does Amazon, so that's everything. Can't deliver love but you can download and swipe, good luck.
When do we interact with government? For the most part, when we: pay taxes; get a ticket; go to the DMV. Some of us even vote.
Then again Australians have to vote and they get proportional voting so their desires scale with support, and it all seems to work out rather well.
> Perhaps the Achilles heel of mass democracy is that it is easily manipulated in a capitalist economy where our interactions with the world can be exclusively private.
That's not a problem with democracy and capitalism. That's how people learn. We learn something and form an opinion about it.
The opposite is censorship, and we know that doesn't make people happy
In a democracy, society chooses where they're comfortable making sacrifices. We have free speech and also decided that libel and impersonation are punishable.
Even corporations have checks and balances that aren't codified. Every year, corporations find that the public cares about some new transgression that wasn't a problem the previous year. Bad press isn't good for oil companies, Apple, Goldman Sachs, etc, and the populace seeks to elect people who will be tougher on these businesses going forward. Failing that, the companies themselves realize they aren't all powerful.
The system is not perfect and was never supposed to be. Things are always changing. The trick is to give everyone their due attention despite their racial or economic background. I think the US does a good job of it compared to other nations. We can do better, and we may learn during this election cycle that we haven't paid enough attention to a widening wealth gap.
Hearing this is both heartening and depressing: heartening because a neo-feudal system already exists; depressing because it's precisely the neo-feudal part of the world that has a neo-fascism problem...