The Great Recession has also become the Great Divider, not unlike the Civil War. Now as then, America’s new great divide splits along a fault line pitting big losers against big winners, politically and economically. Such is the root cause of America’s cultural warfare. Tragically, many who call themselves winners are what capitalismincrisis.org names as […]
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According to political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, for a political party to accept losing and continue to support America’s political system as-is in the face of uncertainty about the party’s future, two conditions must hold. One, its supporters must feel secure about losing today; that ruinous consequences will not be unleashed tomorrow; and […]
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Republicans fear by sticking to conventional political rules, they’ll lose even more. Economically, they’ve already lost much. According to Levitsky and Ziblatt, authors of Why Democracies Die, this sort of “do or die” strategy is a threat to democratic stability. How so? Economics provides the underlying clue. Their congressional voting districts, rural and ex-urban, are […]
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The Great Recession defined a tipping point, politically and economically. Brookings notes that between 2008 and 2018, the economic performance of congressional districts labeled “Blue” diverged at a breathtaking pace from those labeled “Red,” given America’s fast-paced “winner-take-most” society. Intuitively, one expects economic scarcity to drive working-class voters in the direction of social and economic […]
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Richard Reeves of Brookings observes across 99 percent of human history, the belief that life gets better as kids mature would have been eccentric. Not so since the era of Adam Smith however, when a more optimistic view came into prominence within societies adopting capitalism. We call this widely held home-spun view the Great American […]
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