Looks like we are getting aligned. Billionaires play a role in this, but it is easy to put the blame at some distant billionaire, in my opinion. We want things cheap, we pick the website that offers the same product at the cheapest price. If that means that the driver has to pee in a bottle we tend to ignore that. That is exploited of course, but we are all in it together. Maybe we need to be happy with a C and not jump on the barricades when something is not A+. In my opinion, this is what turned everything sour. It gave magas energy. Democrats kept feeding that by demanding A+. Et voila, here we are. Not sure how we get out of this loop. Definitely not by posting a paragraph about it on an internet forum. That would be nice.
I think we agree on some things, but I don't know why you're downplaying "some distant billionaire" and their role. People have weaknesses like prioritizing their convenience over others' dignity and even over their own freedom when their part in losing those is hidden from them enough. That is human nature and it's not changing that quickly if at all.
But specific billionaires, chiefly Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos and Thiel, as well as close associates like newly prominent Ellisons, Soon-Shiong (LA Times owner), Cambridge Analytica owners the Mercers, Andreeson and his VC ilk, along with a few hundred others, are actively orchestrating the degradation. They're not just bribing politicians while also blackmailing some of them, they're using their own businesses to orchestrate coordinated disinfo campaigns. They're working directly with foreign enemies of US democracy like Russia, China, Israel, Iran, N Korea, Turkey and others. This oligarchy is newly powerful, especially by dominating US and global media more concentrated than ever before, supported by AI and think tanks in a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.
The oligarchy is smaller than human nature among the masses. Its means of exploiting the masses' nature is new, primarily tech. All of which is contrary to the democratic culture of the USA and most of our allies, and indeed contrary to laws and highly ramified processes - all of which this new and unprecedentedly powerful oligarchy is ripping apart on the daily.
So while you're right that human nature is to blame for people destroying their own freedom, and that's a valid complaint, it's not a tractable target for a solution. While undoing the oligarchy's power over us, starting with its power to exploit our human nature against us, is the tractable target. The masses of exploitable humans are just as "distant" or not as are the oligarchy's billionaires, or rather the billionaires are closer because there are fewer of them and their privilege is more vulnerable to change than is human nature.
And posting paragraphs to each other, aligning however much we can, is exactly how we get out of this. Along with the rest of our grassroots communications, which are the fabric of democracy. Aligning without total agreement, but aligning on the priorities for targeted change, is how broad grassroots coalitions work, and perhaps counterintuitively contain resilience through flexibility around disagreements that aren't showstoppers.
FWIW, I don't know why you're portraying Democrats as demanding perfection, rejecting anything less as unacceptable. Democrats rarely make the perfect into an enemy of the merely good, indeed are more at fault for accepting half a loaf where 3/4 could be taken by more aggressive action rather than precompromising as distinguished Obama and Biden, or by triangulating to be "Republican lite" as Clinton did so often. It's Republicans who are far more prone to overreach, which is often their undoing. Democrats overall are hardly "jumping on the barricades" today, especially Democratic officials and their management class, and thats while under the (often literal) gun of increasingly extreme abuses, an F not a C. It's that characterization where I think you and I are least in agreement, and I don't understand why you are portraying Democrats that way.
