Like any vestiges of the new deal have been nuked. There’s just the extreme poor and the extreme rich. The immigrants who do all the work are being deported. The big push is to automate everything via ai. So like I get all that, and I can see the usa just being a like “luxury” country that exists as a haven for the epstein class and gusanos, right? Am I wrong? Where does that leave the poor born here? Will they just stick us in concentration camps?
Like Tony Soprano said, we all were born after the good times.
good times for who? Blacks Indigenous and Asians were never born in America’s good times.
That’s true, I guess I still have some brain worms kicking around from ideolizing the new deal without realizing for a lot of people it never benefitted them.
I think it’s a figment of human psychology to center our own experiences, but that’s why we hang out and remain open to our comrades who will bump us around a bit when we drop that awareness.
I don’t think that’s necessarily brainworms because you’re not wrong just because the benefits of imperialism were always withheld from minority groups in society. There has been a very real shift especially since the dissolution of the USSR away from placating the majority of the proletariat with the promise of a decent, stable life. Wage earners as a single block in the US in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and into the 80s and 90s really did have significantly better prospects and stability in stark comparison to the kind of precarity faced by everyone below a certain wealth threshold now, with that threshold continuing to creep upwards. That doesn’t mean there weren’t always sizeable segments of society for whom that wealth and well-being was withheld because of course it was. But it is also true that the number of people on the “have-nots” side of the ledger is increasing and deepening and you are not wrong to notice it.
People coming in this thread and saying only “Reshaping?” as if your observation about the growing wealth disparity is inaccurate and always how it has been are engaging in bad analysis because yes, there has been a massive reshaping of the social strata into an even more obscenely top-heavy form, it’s getting worse and it’s accelerating. We can recognize the role that the spoils of imperialism played in allowing for that relatively affluent proletariat in past decades and we can recognize how black and indigenous people were always prevented from benefiting from it without having to say “don’t believe your lying eyes, things haven’t changed, they’ve always been this way.” The New Deal has been rolled back, the livelihoods of vast swathes of wage earners have been corroded, and pointing that out is not brainworms.