The US is becoming a hollow state in which oligarchic factions wield the machinery of government to funnel money into their coffers via bloated military projects, mass incarceration in private prisons, regulatory capture, etc. Politics is pure kayfabe, team oligarch vs team state
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I don't think it was always like this, or at least not to this degree. not that everything was great in the past but that the particular form of hollowing out of the state seems to have begun in the 80s and accelerated continuously for the last ~35 years.
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incarcerated population corroborates this pretty elegantly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States …pic.twitter.com/h3S59wShg7
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Hmm is this the state hollowing out or metastasizing tho Maybe both
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Part of it is that society went bugnuts back in the late 60's/early 70's and "tough on crime" got a major boost, resulting in sentencing getting WAY harsher in the 80's and continuing to date with few reversals.
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There is an article somewhere online about Joanne Chesimard and it mentions people shooting state troopers with shotguns and getting 2 months in jail in the 70's and citing it as an example of why harsh sentencing was imposed by Congress when the courts wouldn't do it.
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that seems like a less useful example because it is both reasonable and NOT at all what is mostly responsible for the exponential rise in incarcerated population (it's like 95% drug convictions)
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The mandatory sentencing stuff has many causes, but IMO it was a general feeling of lawlessness and people getting slaps on the wrist for serious crimes that motivated a lot of it.
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Then after that, toughen up the drug laws and boom, a felony's a felony and drug convictions are SO easy to get and so, so common. Violent crime has always been relatively rare, but trying to deal with it caught the drug dealers as well.
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