The sooner, the better. Let’s follow the money, shall we?
Is the Two-Party System Doomed?, by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone)
A new study shows us what observation should already have made clear: a messy restructuring of America’s political parties is coming
Thomas Piketty, the French economist whose 2013 bestseller Capital in the 21st Century awoke upscale Americans to the shocking news that their economic system was not working for everyone, has written a new paper exposing more uncomfortable truths.
Piketty’s new essay, called Brahmin Left vs. Merchant Right, studied electoral trends in three Western countries – France, Britain and the U.S. – dating back to the 1940s.
SNIP
America, like pretty much everyplace else in the neoliberal world, is becoming a society split up into unequal camps. We have an extremely small group of very rich people, and a much larger group of everyone else, who may or may not be educated, but increasingly have either zero net worth, or close to it.
The numbers are getting harder to ignore.
American politicians for decades have done an outstanding job of keeping low-income voters from seeing their shared economic dilemmas. The Republicans dating back to Goldwater and Nixon have kept voters transfixed with race hatred and fears about things like gun control, while Democrats have emphasized the Republican threat on social issues like reproductive rights and Social Security.
But having two parties sponsored by the same donors simply can’t work in the long-term. The situation ends up being what a Colombian politician once deemed “two horses with the same owner.”
From Mitt Romney’s idiotic tirade against “the 47%” to Hillary Clinton’s recent remarks about how she won all the “dynamic” parts of America, our political leaders have consistently showed that they don’t see or understand the levels of resentment out there.
Papers like Piketty’s are a warning that if the intellectuals in both parties don’t come up with a real plan for dealing with the income disparity problem before someone smarter than Donald Trump takes it on, they’re screwed. Forget nativists vs. globalists. Think poor vs. rich. Think 99 to 1. While Washington waits with bated breath for the results of the Mueller probe, it’s the other mystery – how do we fix this seemingly unfixable economic system – that is keeping the rest of the country awake at night.
