Imagining a Left-Populist America

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Hi all.

As you all know, my recent posts have been pro-populist posts. I believe that the problems with the world come from a lack of democracy. This lack of democracy exists because the wealthy use their money to manipulate the government and the mainstream media. I have yet to see any evidence to the contrary.

In this thread, I want to imagine the world that we will create one day. Let's say we created a truly democratic government, without any lobbying. Such a government would represent the values of the community and not the values of the elites. In this world, the media would be state-owned, so that it would represent the values of the community. What would this world be like? What would America be like?

I imagine that America would not necessarily become nonreligious. I just think that the anger and tension between the religious factions would cool and settle. Small businesses might exist (if the masses really want them) but big business as we know it would disintegrate. No longer would anyone hog the world's natural resources.

I don't think that racial and sexual tensions would be completely resolved during the revolution, but tensions would certainly cool down. In such a world, the war machine would essentially be over. Middle Eastern Muslims would calm down and Christians would probably see them as "fellow people of Abraham" or something.

The forests would grow in size. People would probably spend more time outdoors in order to breathe the clean air.

The media would be nicer. There would be no ads anymore. There would be more artsy content. The History Channel would have shows about actual history. The media wouldn't rely on hysteria in order to gain attention. Thus, people would become calmer.

In other words, the stereotypical stupidity of modern Americans is a largely a byproduct of corporate media brainwashing. Remember that.

In the post-revolution world, people would lose interest in Michael Bay films and other vile filth like that. Without any more engineered stupidity, people would be at their full potential.

Sounds great eh? Lobbying needs to be outlawed entirely or else none of this will exist.

I decided to do what the elites do and build my own personal green space.

At this point I can't tell if these are your sincere beliefs or if you are trolling.

If you somehow eliminated lobbying, it wouldn't eliminate the competitive advantages that large businesses have. It wouldn't "decrease tensions between religious groups". It wouldn't make forests larger, it wouldn't make people want to spend more time outdoors, it wouldn't end advertising (once you get under the surface, that would be a truly horrible concept!), and people certainly wouldn't stop liking action films.

What you're describing isn't a paradise, it's a hell. Why would anyone make artsy content if they couldn't advertise it? Why would removing "the elites" magically make everyone friendly? Why would people make small businesses but not big ones? Why would people abandon houses and farms to let forests grow?

This is the problem with populism: it offers up easy solutions - "ban Jews! Ban elites! Ban Mexicans!" - that sound appealing but actually achieve nothing. It is politics by idiots, for idiots.

The main problem with communism is that it doesn't take into account individual incentive, which is essential in creating superior products.

Inspiration is drowned out by "group-speak."

Marx had some nice ideas. They don't work in practical situations when human beings are involved.

Sounds like a pipe dream. If it's supposed to be a pipe dream, fair enough. But it could never happen realistically.

The people would likely vote for democratic socialism.

America wanted Sanders. The billionaires screwed him out of the position he deserved.


Religion is the heart of a heartless world. Whenever there is less oppression, there is less religion.
Additionally, Islamophobia is manufactured by the media.



The masses would likely vote for environmentalism without any corporate manipulation.
People would spend more time outdoors if the environment was cleaner.
The media wouldn't need ads if it was run by the state.
Michael Bay films are popular because the media has convinced young men that being smart is bad.


Why did cavemen make cave paintings? Art exists for its own sake.

Money supresses artistic creativity. Notice how of the cool abstract art is made by leftists. Most of the snobs who say "This isn't an art style! It's just bad art!" are capitalist snobs who think that every painting should look like a photograph.




It's not magic. People are as*holes because the capitalist system rewards that sort of behavior. People are stupid because the media encourages idiocy. That's what misanthropes don't understand.

I've read about the Piraha people of the Amazon rainforest. They are modern hunter-gatherers. In Piraha culture, it is extremely inappropriate to tell someone else what to do.

Humans are social democrats by nature.



I said "big business as we know it would disintegrate". It wouldn't be the same without all of the subsidies and tax breaks.



This would prevent global warming.



Seriously? I'm honestly surprised by this awful argument.

Banning lobbying is not the same thing as blaming Jews. Plenty of Jews are in the working class. Anti-Semitism has been dubbed "the socialism of fools" for a reason.

What about conservatism? The whole point of conservatism is this" "We need to keep everything exactly the way it is." I don't see any intelligence in that. Conservatism is just anti-politics.

What if George Washington had this attitude?

"Democracy could never happen realistically."

This does not take into account human nature. Some of the bad stuff might be less but it would still be enough to be a problem.

Hell no. Half the nation is against most of this. So never going happen without lots of blood shed. your paradise is my hell. My paradise most people would be happy and continue to live.

Have you been reading Orwell recently?

Humans are democratic socialists by nature.

You won't get an accurate view of human nature just by observing civilized human beings in the modern world. People don't behave normally when the Earth's natural resources are controlled by a few people who then sell these resources to us at an inflated price.

Really? Most Americans are for universal health care.

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/279991-poll-majority-of-americans-support-federally-funded-healthcare

Most Americans want assistance. Most Americans think that the country is controlled by wealthy elites who don't understand or care about the values of working class Americans.

Poor Americans don't side with the left for a wide variety of reasons. Fox News and Infowars constantly spout anti-socialist propaganda. That is a huge factor. Most modern "leftists" downplay the concept of class conflict ... as though sexism and racism are the only issues that matter.

This is why so many lower/middle class white guys vote Republican. The "left" has abandoned them and so they fall into right-wing propaganda. The modern left needs more populism.

There is only one thing that can shatter this right-wing propaganda. The left needs to remember that class antagonism is still an important issue. It never stopped being an important issue.

The world is controlled by white male billionaires. It is true that men usually make more money than women ... but some people in the upper class make one million dollars per day.

I think that I found the real wage gap.



Nope. We need to wake people up. They'll create a truly democratic political movement. No violence will be necessary.



Whatever. I don't need to impress you. There are plenty of other people out there who will listen to me.



Really? Describe your paradise.

"Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects."
- George Orwell

"As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents."
- George Orwell

Damn right! Orwell was a left-populist, just like me!

Great aspiring - I do it too. I'll try and see what I can tell you about these ideas and where you're seeing things clearly or where you might have some oversights that need attending.


The problem with lobbying is that its an organic phenomena - ie. anyone with dollars for influence burning a hole in their pocket will use them and it would be very challenging to come up with a legal solution where, if people are exceedingly willing to pillage the spirit to the maximum degree without violating the letter, such legislation wouldn't just rearrange the problem.

As far as state ownership of the media - that's a really bad idea because it ceases to be any sort of check or balance against the state if it gets abusive, rather it just gets absorbed and shares the same fate, even accelerates that fate when it controls the national narrative. This is also why I really don't like the idea of press licences that have to be renewed yearly. It's unlikely to turn immediately corrupt in noticeable ways but it clearly gives power over what's said to the people issuing such licenses and if they're in the government it's a soft version of the same thing where the media still becomes a component of the government. A lot of people seem to have a way of laughing at concerns like that like it's paranoia but then they stack another thing just like it, and another thing just like it on top of that, and then you really do have a serious problem with very credible effect and force - its important to see the layers and foundations of that sort of thing early.

The problem I think you're trying to tackle with the media though - I think I do have a solution I might recommend that could be better. I think, what we call the FCC in the US, I don't know what it's called in other countries, should be tasked with coming up with a set of minimum guidelines as to what constitutes valid evidence to call an article in print or story on TV 'news'. Everything not rising up to that standard is called 'editorial', you're allowed to still editorialize to your hearts content but this would become something like what you have in the sciences - ie. there's a hard demarcation, like peer review, between what constitutes science and what doesn't constitute science. Similarly news and editorial should be in just as hard of buckets and anyone breaching the basic protocols of what would be called 'news' and calling it news would be in violation of the law and open to prosecution and lawsuit from the city, state, government, or whoever else is harmed from the line being violated (particularly the party being complained about in the story). The idea also would be that, if there's enough editorial on an idea and there's anything to all that smoke, someone would actually have to find a real fire to make news of it - until then it's purely rumor and opinion.

What I like about that above idea, if it's not obvious, it becomes equally hard for any interested group to distort reality - regardless of what their political orientation, belief set, etc. is. About all they could do is try to legislatively chip away at the integrity of such a legal framework.

So far the media has been able to run wild with rumor and opinion, one-sided story telling, that has to be rendered into a new stack called non-news, ie. editorial. We could also maybe have determinants for a couple different layers of editorial so that the popular editorial also doesn't turn to conspiracy theories and all kinds of smut. Still - I notice there aren't any qualifications in the media world and since politics beat honor/integrity hands down there have to be some hard/crisp lines in terms of what can be called news.


I'm not sure what religious tension you're talking about? It's still a predominantly Christian nation and with all of the other religions - Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Neopaganism, etc.. it seems like we've had the luck of being protected by oceans on either side of us which means that we're one of the few countries in the west where, if a preacher in a church, mosque, etc.. is preaching violence or sedition our FBI will snap them up immediately. We also get to skim off the top of the most peaceable emigrants from anywhere in the world.

Europe is where things are really bad right now. Think of it like this - our biggest problem is a bunch of lapsed Catholics, sometimes criminals and drug dealers, jumping the Texas border. Europe has a totalitarian religion south of the Mediterranean that it spent centuries fighting, from the times of Charlemagne all the way up through the Barbary Pirates. They conquered Spain and held it as caliphate for quite a while; it's been a battle between Europe vs. the Middle East of conquer or be conquered and, as it's been for the last 1400 years, the moment you go lacks the other side starts pulling the same shenanigans. Having Mexico and central America to the south vs. having Saudi Arabia, Libya, Somalia, to the south of you - *very* different situation. the USA also has to admit that it's not a white nation - it never was, it was founded as a melting pot, and there really isn't properly any place for the USA to declare that it should always have a white majority or any other kind of ethnic majority. Europe, OTOH, is as much where white people come from as Africa is where blacks come from, China and India where Asians come from, etc.. - ie. there is a major ethnic homeland argument to be had in Europe that can't be shrugged off as easily or ignored as they can when made in reference to the United States.

The other thing I'm confused about - large businesses disappearing? I'm not sure how you figure. There are certain types of activities and manufacture that require significant infrastructure investment and simply aren't possible on a cost-effective scale without a company not only being big enough to buy massive machinery but possibly even bridge multiple continents to move resources from one, manufacture in another, and rely on ocean freight for transportation from resource origin to manufacture to points of sale. I think what would more likely happen if we were able to take the massive corporatism out of our capitalism and stop giving massive welfare to huge corporations and jamming the small-ones with red tape; you'd have significantly more small corporations and fewer of the big corporations would be mega-corps.

What I do think you have with Amazon, Etsy, etc.. is the desire to re-modularize production and get it back to where smaller shops can exist creating the goods and then find a retailer who can get their products, particularly 'long-tail' products to market. While Amazon.com is big right now I do hear a lot about them, like I used to hear about Walmart, with regard to extorting it's vendors. I think if other online retailers treat their vendors better it will bite Amazon in the arse and they'd be forced to either come to similar standards or watch their empire shrink while their competition grows.

That's a somewhat different topic but still - I do think the growth of small business is critical because it's the bread and butter of job creation and I'd agree that it's critical to do that than trying to invest huge sums of money into companies who'll force their vendors into n90 payment terms and maybe, if vendor is lucky, pay them in six months to a year for the privilege of having done business with them.


I don't understand this jump - why would race relations calm down? Also you must have left something out about Islam, did we all submit to the will of Allah?


There were just short of 325 million people in the US as of 2016. We've got a big enough habitable land mass that we're not insanely overpopulated. My question here I guess - where are these forests growing? Did something in the above list cause massive depopulation and a population decrease down to 100-150 million? Did we find some radical new technology to green the deserts even where the Rocky Mountains are stopping the flow of cloud formation and water off of the Pacific Ocean? Do we have some radical new way of farming that's condensed the space needed to feed the people of the US and meet agricultural export demand to the point that we're able to grow these crops in mines or big towers and reforest most of our arable farm land?


What incentives do you put in place to make that happen? The people who want to advertise their products and have the money to advertise their products will need a venue to make the public aware of their product and that they're selling it. If they can't sell anything people don't have jobs. Also what kinds of funding sources is this new media going to have? Also, and this is a big one, making it 'nicer' - what does that mean and how do you do it? Do you not report homicides anymore? Do you not report it when North Korea launches test missiles or when the FBI busts a major child trafficking ring? Do you just demand that such bad or ugly news be reported in a nurturing manner?


Personally I believe in Darwinian evolution.

The problem with your analogy about corporate media is that they'd have to be the product of some unknown non-human force to not be manifesting some aspect of the human psyche or propensities. That's what I think anyone has to be overlooking when they say 'Get rid of x and we'll be free!'. If it's not grays or lizard people enslaving us then it's us enslaving us and whatever's causing that is not a foreign substance - it's something everyone carries around with them. To me that means that the only way to fix it is to identify what that thing is that everyone carries around with them, understand that it needs an outlet (it's not necessarily with is by choice - it just helped keep the human species alive at some point) and that outlet has to be better integrated into a better structure that achieves its goals with much less violence against other things we want in our civilization.


Are you just saying badly directed movies or are you saying no more super-hero films? If it's the later you're in a spot of trouble - ie. the superhero genre runs right through the core of what it is to be human. It has a lot to do with our limitations, our red tape, what we don't get to do or be, what we wish we could do or be, and we love it if and when someone is able to portray all of that in such a manner as satisfies us that it told the tale of the broader human psyche and just how much we wish we could fix the disorder and chaos that is the human condition.


I've got an ancillary thread proposal and I might start it tonight or tomorrow if that's okay with you. It would be the question 'What would an effective legal abolition of lobbying look like?'. At heart I'm with you, just that the 'effective' part is a real doozy.

But why does it happen that most of the time humans are controlled by the wealthy elite? Must have something to do with human nature.

No they wouldn't. You've never voted for democratic socialism, even before the mass media.


No, America wanted Clinton. That's why she beat him. Sanders drew his support from relatively wealthy Americans, while Clinton had the support of the working class.


Islamophobia pre-dates the media. Ever heard of the Crusades?


What makes you think that?

What makes you think that?

So what, the state is just going to force you to watch the films that a bureaucrat decides are most deserving?


Nonsense.


True, low-level, low-effort art will always exist.

High-quality art that takes time and money to produce? That will not exist at nearly the same density unless people can profit from it.

Notice that there is much more high-quality art today, when people are spending more on art, than at any other time in human history. While state funding certainly has a role, it's relatively unimportant compared to getting people into the cinema for the new Christopher Nolan film, or the festival for the new band.


No, people are as*holes because people are as*holes.

How does your system explain all the as*holes in non-capitalist systems? Kim Jong Un, Josef Stalin, Pol Pot, Chairman Mao?


No it doesn't. Idiocy is portrayed very negatively in the media. It is strongly discouraged.


Social democracy is a form of capitalism.


So? People don't care very much about global warming. Even people like me, who are quite worried about it, are only prepared to make small lifestyle changes and lobby governments to make big changes. People will not abandon their homes in order to stop life being a little bit worse for future generations.



Seriously? I'm honestly surprised by this awful argument.

Banning lobbying is not the same thing as blaming Jews.[/quote]
It works on the same principle. You are blaming an easy target for all the problems you perceive. You're not interested in actually understanding the problems. You have no understanding of economics or behaviour psychology or indeed politics. You are just blaming an unpopular group rather than solving the problems.


That's a bit of a simplification, but being opposed to conservativism does not mean you have to accept populist anarcho-primitivism (itself a rather conservative idea!).