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remember when there used to be all these articles about how people in europe live longer than americans because they drink red wine and eat more olive oil or bullshit like that? turns out it was universal healthcare the whole time
remember when there used to be all these articles about how people in europe live longer than americans because they drink red wine and eat more olive oil or bullshit like that? turns out it was universal healthcare the whole time
The industrialists were happy during the Great Depression and resented the New Deal. The US was always about preserving polarized power structures, just with extra obfuscating steps.
Spoiler: The same is true in Europe, but they have been smarter, possibly from centuries more experience they know the peons will only take so much bullshit.
Like we don’t share the same history? We came from over there once. I think part of our problem is that too many of us ignore history that didn’t happen on our soil, like it’s irrelevant to us even though it isn’t.
US history as it is taught in US schools is rather hagiographic, suggesting at most we borrowed a few ideas (e.g. the two-house congress), but otherwise were dismissing all that was feudalism. Even our elected officials dressed as officials and not as aristocracy.
So yeah, we also discarded a notion from classic peonage that serfs belonged to the land. Rather we had slaves and waged workers (not that we treated them particularly well.) The American Dream before the California gold rush was an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay and we were crap at that even then.
I don’t think it’s a cultural effect, I think it’s about power and wealth. As in, the US has more power and wealth at its disposal, so capitalists gain more by corrupting their government than they would other governments. So they spend more money and effort corrupting that place and it gets worse. It is slowly collapsing as the corruption gets worse, I’d say this is a large part of why any centralised power structure collapses - the corruption rots its core until it can no longer sustain itself.
So it’s basically “power corrupts” but on a governmental level rather than an individual one.
So eat the rich? Got it. If more people would understand society as a class struggle, maybe we would get somewhere.
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Or maybe they literally blew up their whole continent and got to start over again after learning how shit worked.
Europe is old, but their current governments and infrastructure isn’t.