For a long time in America, as capitalism has become hegemonic, there have been two kinds of capitalists: right-wing, or conservative capitalists, and left, or liberal capitalists.

Conservative and liberal capitalists suffer under two differing delusions: conservatives that capitalism is compatible with "tradition", the liberals that capitalism is compatible with democracy. Neither side suffers the opposing delusion.
Because right capitalists don't really believe in democracy they will throw it out at the slightest sign of anti-capitalist power. The only real difference between fascism and conservatism is the presence of an anti-capitalist threat.
(This is why Trump is not a fascist. No anti-capitalist threat! Allen Dulles and J. Edgar Hoover were fascist than Trump was. They had actual lefty threats to fight!)
Right capitalists also embrace things like family, tradition, culture, and nationalism, which they view as necessary to preserve society. And they think these things can be maintained under capitalism, that they are in some way necessary to preserving capitalism!
Of course capitalism doesn't actually care about these things like tradition and culture and family and nation. Under capitalism everything solid melts into air, all is disrupted in the name of innovation, productivity and profit.
Liberal capitalists are more comfortable with this. They are ok with the times changing, religions falling away, genders breaking down, races intermixing, the borders of nations loosening. This is progress!
But liberals thinks this progress can equalize society, give everyone rights and eliminate hierarchy. Except that capitalism, as a class-based economic system, is inherently heirarchal. As it dissolves social hierarchies of race, religion, and gender, class will remain.
And where class remains, where hierarchy remains, democracy is impossible. Democracy is ultimately not compatible with class hierarchy, or with the exploitation that hierarchy serves, for if given a real option, free of hegemonic ideology, no worker would choose exploitation.
For a bit, some left capitalists resolved this problem, when they briefly became aware of it, by pushing for "social democracy": keep capitalism but give workers just enough to get by comfortably. This might have worked if not for the continued existence of right capitalists.
Eventually the right capitalists maneuvered so as to wipe out social democrats (IE New Dealers) out, along with anti-capitalists, and we entered the neoliberal era, a period of seemingly ascendant right capitalism, with a neoliberal left capitalism replacing the New Deal types.
But that era feels like it's at a close, because while the right neoliberals seemed in control, there was capitalism, unbridled, eating very quickly away at all those traditional social bonds and hierarchies the right capitalists loved. Hoist by their own petard!
Look at the capitalist class. The real billionaires now in control. They are all liberals! But do they believe in democracy? Well...
It seems like we might be living through a synthesis of the left and right capitalist dialectic. We might be seeing a new capitalism emerge, a kind if true neoliberalism, unbound both by any delusions of tradition, but of democracy as well.
With the rejection of Trump and his reactionary base, Capital seems to have, in the Biden administration, found a kind of liberal, multicultural, diverse, tolerant, and authoritarian capitalism.
The irony of course is that this neoliberal multicultural authoritarianism is stuck sharing a political party with a small nascent anti-capitalist movement, as the second political party is still held by the fading right. Obviously this situation cannot endure indefinitely.

More from Government

1.
Act of 1871
This is VERY Long but it will end with a MEGA BOOM!
Bookmark it and read it in small bits to digest it all.

This info, comes from some reputable anons and my own digging, compiled together as a superthread!
InevitableET, IPOT... to name a few.

2.
https://t.co/udep5WEYUp
https://t.co/bnzeQek6zv


3.
The TL; DR version is they, by military force, and illegitimate legislature, amended the constitution against the will of The People and legally tricked us into becoming unwitting indentured slaves of human capital and resources to THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA the corporation)

4.
Republic vs Democracy
-They needed to get away from the Republic and create a Democracy in order to drive us towards socialism and inevitably a dictatorship (National Socialist Party aka NAZI)


5.
Flag
Which metric is a better predictor of the severity of the fall surge in US states?

1) Margin of Democrat victory in Nov 2020 election
or
2) % infected through Sep 1, 2020

Can you guess which plot is which?


The left plot is based on the % infected through Sep 1, 2020. You can see that there is very little correlation with the % infected since Sep 1.

However, there is a *strong* correlation when using the margin of Biden's victory (right).

Infections % from
https://t.co/WcXlfxv3Ah.


This is the strongest single variable I've seen in being able to explain the severity of this most recent wave in each state.

Not past infections / existing immunity, population density, racial makeup, latitude / weather / humidity, etc.

But political lean.

One can argue that states that lean Democrat are more likely to implement restrictions/mandates.

This is valid, so we test this by using the Government Stringency Index made by @UniofOxford.

We also see a correlation, but it's weaker (R^2=0.36 vs 0.50).

https://t.co/BxBBKwW6ta


To avoid look-ahead bias/confounding variables, here is the same analysis but using 2016 margin of victory as the predictor. Similar results.

This basically says that 2016 election results is a better predictor of the severity of the fall wave than intervention levels in 2020!

You May Also Like

Great article from @AsheSchow. I lived thru the 'Satanic Panic' of the 1980's/early 1990's asking myself "Has eveyrbody lost their GODDAMN MINDS?!"


The 3 big things that made the 1980's/early 1990's surreal for me.

1) Satanic Panic - satanism in the day cares ahhhh!

2) "Repressed memory" syndrome

3) Facilitated Communication [FC]

All 3 led to massive abuse.

"Therapists" -and I use the term to describe these quacks loosely - would hypnotize people & convince they they were 'reliving' past memories of Mom & Dad killing babies in Satanic rituals in the basement while they were growing up.

Other 'therapists' would badger kids until they invented stories about watching alligators eat babies dropped into a lake from a hot air balloon. Kids would deny anything happened for hours until the therapist 'broke through' and 'found' the 'truth'.

FC was a movement that started with the claim severely handicapped individuals were able to 'type' legible sentences & communicate if a 'helper' guided their hands over a keyboard.