USA politics following Trump's election

[marooned]

@shotgunfingers that's probably the best argument - certain corporations need the cheap labor and open borders and they can Trojan horse it as a humanitarian issue, which it is, but that's not why they want it. It is a move on one front for power. On another front they continue to soften government's power (they don't want its regulations). This is the one thing both left-leaning and right-leaning corporations probably agree on (less regulation). Once government is weak enough, corporations will be the actual rulers, and that's the end of democracy because there's no voting for which corporation is most in power (I do not accept that we vote with $ as legitimate).

All that said, it still is a humanitarian issue. Both the governments of nations like the US and their corporations create the humanitarian crises to begin with. It's all such a mess, so I'm left with only the individual. The US of the 1800s and 1900s became an immigrant nation. If any nation can handle large influxes of immigrants, it's this one. But the more authoritarian it goes, the less able it will be to do that. It was able to take in millions of people in the 1800s and 1900s, and granted it was smaller then, but it's still a huge country. I really don't know what philosophy to adopt also when I see how bad the overpopulation problem is. If our birthrate is going down, that's freeing up more space, and that's good on a planet on which the species is overpopulated.

Maintaining stability is crucial, but it will never be maintained by a bunch of it's us against them crap. It can be maintained by holding to founding ideals which act as unifiers. But what also must be understood is that undermining the individualistic spirit too much will also bring down those ideals. Anyway, it's such a disaster. It doesn't have to fail at all, it can work just fine, if people would stop being so selfish (lol, the irony). Another irony is that often immigrants bring in a revitalization of these ideals (many people want to come here because they believe in them).

The problem is it takes sacrifice from the wealthiest and most powerful, and they don't wanna sacrifice. They just need to stop being "gods" and start being people. If they make it less difficult for the citizens here to survive (the economy needs to be less brutal), no one will feel there isn't enough for everyone. The zero-sum game specter in our heads will dissipate and haunt us no longer.

It's all so frustrating because what the US is currently suffering from IS the corporatocracy. Our government isn't representing us. It's become weak. Then that opens the doors for phony "strong men" like Trump to come in and be like "I signs exec orders, I makes govt stwong again!" His horrifying weakness (one of the most ego-fragile men on earth) comes off as "strength" to some.

I still don't fully understand populism, but it seems to me thinking of it as "bad" or "good" is not useful. What it seems to be afaict is what occurs when a system is failing. The anti-establishment view recognizes power is out-of-balance, and emerging populist viewpoints in people's heads reflect that the system isn't working for them. Populism can't be "bad" or "good" when it's a symptom. Yet when those with all the power screwing up the system won't change, what other way do we have?

This was why I really liked Andrew Yang. His ideas presented a way to ditch these models and do something else, like let's just have a neo-enlightenment period instead. It was risky (and probably all the dinosaurs in government would have made it impossible), but it felt sane. It felt like pouring vitality back into the masses.