in a very real sense it is the responsibility of the wealthy and the powerful to shape the environment they live in purely because they alone have the resources and influence to actually do so. grass roots "people power" is a democratic fantasy.
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political progress is contingent upon elite ideological alignment and commitment to working for causes that go beyond the further enrichment of themselves and their familiars.
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the root cause of political decline in society is detachment of elites from the concerns of the masses. populism is doomed to be ineffective because it takes a hostile stance w.r.t elites and provokes them into wagon-circling behavior where they feel compelled to defend.
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so what should we do to align elite interests with those of the population? this is how we're going to get broad based improvements to social safety net and public institutions like education and infrastructure.
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and what should we do to align popular interests with those of the elite? it can't just go in one direction. alignment must be reciprocal in order to get past our primate tit-for-tat evolutionary programming.
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this is basically an unsolved question. historically the conditions that produce reciprocal alignment between elites and populous are, well, not desirable in general. big fucking wars seem to be the main mechanism. can we get there without a war? sure hope so.
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we've very nearly reached the breaking point though. elite grifting has reached critical levels. this is unsustainable and has already started to break down. the problem is that the popular revolt against elite grifting has not resulted in anything good.
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this is Ortegan Revolt of the Masses with all the stupidity and ugliness predicted by that framework. The revolt either reaches its climax in fascism or it gets resolved by a historical crisis (i.e. big fucking war). It's been a long time since the last big fucking war btw.
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can it be avoided? I think it can actually. I think we might uniquely have a situation where global powers don't actually want to make war on each other they just want to pacify their revolting masses and move on with life.
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This pacification cannot be achieved without major reforms which cannot happen without reciprocal alignment between elites and the populous. this is where we're stuck at the moment. Expect continuing decay and decline until we're able to realign and move forward.
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