The country isn’t idealogically divided along regional lines - the main idealogical split in America today is rural vs. urban, not north vs. south or east vs. west.
I don’t see a violent revolution on a large scale in the US. Because we have democratic institutions in theory those should take a lot of the steam out of any efforts at revolution. It was my understanding that revolutions more occurred in authoritarian states where the public had no real means of expressing their desires in government. If people have genuine (emphasis on genuine) power via elections they will use that first.
However our federal government has been captured by plutocratic interests and elections don’t mean much because of it. It doesn’t matter who you vote for on the federal level, the plutocrats get what they want first either way (income gains still almost all go to the top under Obama, same as Bush). So I think this will lead to a lot of demoralization, but it could also lead to a swelling of involvement in civics on the city, county & state level (where fighting plutocrats is easier) and more involvement in groups not tied to political parties directly (OWS, labor unions, tea party, etc). I don’t know if a meaningful third party could rise, but its possible. Its possible a third party that has a lot of both right and left opinions on economics could rise up and be independently funded by both small donors and large ideological donors who like the platform (anti-immigrant, pro-minimum wage, anti-wall street, pro-public financing, pro-health reform, etc)
Plus in the US poor people are taught to blame themselves. So there is no real class consciousness here, poverty and economic insecurity is seen as a consequence of character flaw, not a side effect of a rigged system.
Plus our standard of living is fairly high. People aren’t starving or dying of hypothermia by and large.
I think you’re wrong. When the masses feel like they have a problem, they’re going to look for somebody to blame - and when the problem is that they feel like they don’t have enough money to make ends meet, then the wealthy are going to be an obvious target. Right or wrong, the idea of “the reason we don’t have enough money is because that person has too much” is an easy sell.
Problem 1 : within the system, the “1%” hold all the cards. They have the funds to pay for all the political campaign advertising, they pay all the lobbyists, the attorneys, and so on. Radical changes that make the tax system actually even or stop the tax shelters they abuse or change union rules…are unlikely. Socialized healthcare is something that has been talked about for 40 years, and only now do we get a crappy implementation of it.
Problem 2 : Anyone who doesn’t work within the system is going to be facing the strongest military on the planet. When you read about armed revolts, generally, they are against governments who were weakened by something. The Bolshevik revolution was against a Czar weakened by WW1, who already had a relatively weak central government to begin with.
You can joke about civilians owning guns and armed revolts, but it’s just not going to happen unless the issue were so divisive that a significant fraction of the military joined the rebel side.
And it wouldn’t even get to that point. An armed revolt would spread like a fire, and if the early leaders could be detected and send to federal prison before the revolution really got started, then the civil war would never happen. What if the NSA and the FBI and the ATF had been around before the American Civil war. How many arrests would have it taken to stop the war cold?
I think a more realistic outcome is that the inefficiencies of the US system will bring it down slowly over time. The income inequality is an inefficiency. Those kings at the top collecting billions of dollars generally did not really perform billions in goods and services - the money should have gone to better compensate the harder working middle managers, engineers, and line employees who made large profits even possible.
The U.S. system has other nasty inefficiencies, such as a disproportionately large military, expensive medical system, expensive legal system, expensive education system, and so on. All these things rob the country of economic power output.
There’s also something to be said for an economy failing if all the wealth is concentrated at the top, because it means there isn’t any money for the lower class to purchase goods and services to drive the economy forward. I’m not 100% on this one : theoretically, the rich should spend money to make up for it, driving the economy to produce more caviar and mansions and fancy cars.
I don’t think the term “the masses” really describes any group of people in the United States today. As a basic point, the majority of people living in the United States are among the wealthiest people who have ever lived, and certainly much wealthier than most of the people on the planet. And they know this. That’s the basic fact. That’s why Occupy Wall Street and similar groups don’t have the appeal necessary to start a mass movement. Most Americans are well aware that we have it good, and we wouldn’t want to start a violent revolution because it might lead to the loss of the good things we have.
As I said above, I don’t think a violent revolution is in the cards. But a major political shift? I feel that’s possible. The essential truth is that average Americans don’t compare themselves to starving Africans and think how comparatively well-off they are. The average Americans compare themselves to wealthy Americans and think “those guys got a lot more than I got.”
Now for the most part, Americans have passively accepted income inequality. But I don’t think the situation is as inherently stable as you argue it is. I think it would be possible for some demagogues to push the idea that “the reason you don’t have as much is because those guys have too much.” I’m not saying this idea is necessarily true but I am saying it could be made to sound convincing.
The result wouldn’t be a violent revolution and blood in the streets. The American people still have political power when they choose to use it. So if some populist anti-rich movement gets fired up, the result will be a Congress and President eager to actually enact the kind of wealth distribution that conservatives have always been claiming is happening.
Smapti is correct, the country is not divided along regional lines at all. “The West” is not really liberal when you look beyond the urban-rural divide.
This thinking is part of the Red State vs. Blue State fallacy. And fallacy it is. If you look at the map at the top of the page in the next link it appears clear that the country is split along ideological lines.
The truth of the matter is better illustrated by the 4th map on the page that shows election results by county rather than by state.
Hardly. Much of the industrialized world is better off in most ways. Healthier, more socioeconomically mobile, with more freedom and more rights.
Actually, fighting plutocrats is even harder in city, state and country governments. The wealthy are proportionally more powerful compared to them, and they are both even less competent and more corrupt than the federal government. That’s why the Republicans are so much against the federal government; they are rabidly plutocratic, and the Federal government is the hardest part of the government for the plutocrats to control.
Not for Americans. Most Americans revere the rich as near-gods; they are far more likely to blame the poor (even if they are poor too), and people of the “wrong” race.
It doesn’t work. Even the most indulgent rich person can only eat and drink so much, and can only use so many toys. So you end up with a distorted economy. And, the rich spend proportionately less of their money as well.
I disagree. While every westernized country is better than the US in some area they are worse than others. Europe is notriously bad regarding immigrants and is more anti-Semetic than the US. I am, however, willing to concede that most westernized nations are comparable to the US so I will amend my statement to this: no citizens of any country in history have ever had it better than current US citizens.
Isn’t that what Obama was supposed to do?
No social revolution. Still the best system and close to the best country on the planet.
This simply isn’t true. Money is not a finite resource. You or I or anyone else earn our money because of the value of the effort we put into it. Your education, skill set, industriousness and/or ability to recognize and act upon opportunity is what determines the amount of money you make. You will not earn one dollar more if every billionaire in the country were to suddenly lose every dime, and you won’t make one dollar less if every billionaire in the country were to suddenly double his wealth.
The only way rich people’s money can be of direct benefit to you is if the federal government takes it away from them and gives it to you.
No serious revolution in America for the foreseeable future. Most revolutions happen when a majority is oppressed. America’s underclass lives in poverty and is growing but it’s nowhere near a majority. Furthermore, different groups of the underclass are trained to hate each other. Blacks vs. Puerto Ricans; low-wage earners vs. unemployed “moochers”, etc. And there’s no geographic split on which a revolution can be based. (With 40% of red-state voters voting blue and vice-versa, the red-blue divide is something of a misconception.)
What did seem possible for a brief optimistic moment was that people collectively, middle-income and poor, might unite to seize political power from corporations and the super-rich. It is a travesty how Wall Street, whose greed left the economy in shambles, became the primary beneficiary of government response to the 2007 crisis, while inequality and lack of opportunity will increasingly be the U.S. norm.
Occupy Wall Street was a hope that died prematurely. I think American ignorance (which I’ll blame on lazy and co-opted mass media) is a big problem. (For example, isolated in rural Asia with only the N.Y. Times for information it was clear to me circa 2000 that Enron shenanigans had raised California’s electricity price yet my sister – more liberal than me – blamed the price hikes on PG&E, which is almost a quasi-governmental entity. :smack: )
You guys think a hike in minimum wages, slight increases on taxes for the 1%, and rationalized national health insurance are a social revolution?
That’s not a social revolution.
Even things like national health insurance aren’t a huge transfer from the wealthy to the non-wealthy, because corporations pay huge amounts for their worker’s health insurance already. We pay twice as much for health care in America as most other first world countries, with no noticeable improved outcomes, in fact for most health outcomes we trail the pack. We already spend as much per-capita on government health care that only covers a fraction of the citizenry as most countries pay for coverage for everyone, and then we pay as much again in private insurance.
National health insurance isn’t against the interests of the corporate fatcats. It’s a way to outsource their expensive private insurance schemes and let someone else worry about it. And if a few moochers and bums get health insurance it’s still cheaper that what we have now, especially since we already pay through the nose to treat the moochers and bums anyway, just not in an effective and rational manner.
The “is growing” part is debatable.
There are increases in the poverty rate during recessions and declines during economic boom times, but overall there hasn’t been much change in many years.
Recent increases in the poverty rate are considerably muted if you take into account assistance programs like Medicaid, food stamps and the earned income tax credit.
More here.
I agree. Better than violence, anyway. 
I guess I’m just too passive and submissive, as I just don’t really feel in the mood for much social revoluting at the moment.
Those are some rather diminished expectations. “Hey! Hey! LBJ! How 'bout raising the wages today!”
It’s as equally likely to happen to the US as it is for any modern Western country.
Some countries are probably more likely than the US - the French, for example, seem to have no problem just throwing the entire apparatus away and starting over.
I don’t think an armed revolution on the part of the masses will happen. One main reason is that we currently have two large groups dissatisfied with how things are: one on the left, and one on the right. They are not going to team up to effect change, and one is a counterweight to the other in support of the status quo.
I think we have severe political and economic malaise that isn’t going to get better soon. One thing I can see happening is the right digging in deeper and fomenting a Constitutional crisis, as they have almost done already with their attempted debt ceiling extortion, among other shenanigans.
Malaise can last a very long time and have deep consequences. Japan (where I lived 8 years) never did manage to get its act together, and the birth rate there is catastrophically low–to the point where the population is expected to decline by a full third by 2050.
Manda JO mentioned the high cost of having kids in the US. Well, this is what can happen. (Sometimes people will glibly say, “Well reducing population is a good thing!” Sure, when that’s the intention of the society and it’s done in a planned, orderly way. Japan faces social upheaval and lots of economic problems because of this unplanned, unintended decline. People just feel they can’t afford to raise kids in that society. Not a positive thing.) In fact, I would go so far as to say that not allowing average people in a society to afford to raise children is a violation of human rights.
The case of Japan shows us that time won’t necessarily solve the problem. The country has been down in the dumps since the bubble burst in 1989–25 years ago. I think the hope of Abenomics bringing about a permanent fix is a pipe dream. The economy of the country needs to be deeply restructured. (Right now, everything is designed to make old people’s lives comfortable and not bruise the egos of the deadwood middle aged guys who run business.)
I think we currently have a country in which large percentages of the population are not on the same page and want to try different things. I think the choices now are breaking up the country, getting on the same page and moving forward, or facing decades of more malaise.
Sounds like a Mexican standoff.