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Comment by wesapien | Hacker News Reader

You guys should be flipping cars when bank execs didn't get jail time for the financial crisis

Well America has plenty of outrage, but they're utterly divided and most that outrage just goes into poopooing the other side, instead of something productive like real demonstrations and protests with a real purpose. Instead we get outrage protests mainly designed for extremist groups to waste their time fighting eachother and playing at civil war.

America needs a leader who can inspire people to work with each other even when they don't agree on everything. I am quite sure you can build a significant coalition around financial issues, maybe even bigger than a super majority. But somehow people are not willing to work with each other unless they pass each other's purity tests. Thus, nothing changes and the status quo wins every time.

That will never happen in our lifetime.

Democrats can't do it, because Republicans will never cooperate with a Democratic Party president.

Republicans can't do it, because they will continue to nominate a culture warrior whose only job is to fight wokeness, so they aren't even interested in it.

This thing will keep escalating, relatively slowly, until it finally crosses the line and even the Republicans will figure out that maybe they ought to have some accountability.

My guess it will take minimum of two generations.

I agree, if this was to happen it will have to happen with a third party. But America seems to be allergic to any third parties.

For the longest time I used to think that the two party system is like a law in America or something. Like China has a one party system. When I learned that it isn't, i spent a considerable amount of time confused as to why then in all political discourse is the two party system so... enshrined. Some say if you listen to me closely, I'm still confused about this. I come from a country which routinely has 20 parties in different levels of government each with significantly different agendas (or at least we used to, sigh...). Why is this not the case in America? It seems to me that everyone is dissatisfied with their party, yet they don't want to support anything else. For a country which prides itself in its entrepreneurship and startup culture, the reluctance in supporting innovation in politics is so surprising.

Edit: btw, i disagree with you that Republicans will "start" to hold their leaders accountable. From an outsider perspective, the Republican party seems to be achieving their targets and GoP members are more active than Democratic party members. I may disagree with most of their social and financial goals, but I will acknowledge they are effective and there are severe consequences on failure.

It's the First Past The Post voting system that leads to two parties.

My country also has a first past the post system. We still had several parties. In fact till about 15 years ago all states had their major parties which had significant presence in the federal parliament too. I don't think this is a valid explanation

And what's the situation now?

Your country could gradually he heading towards a two party system.

No we are heading to a one party system. But that has nothing to do with first past the post. There are several historical and social reasons for that.

I'm sorry to hear that. No one wants to live under a one-party system.

> But that has nothing to do with first past the post.

You could be right, but how do we know the polarizing effect of FPTP isn't contributing to this change?

Everything is contributing to it. Our dietary preference contribute to this more than the FPTP system. My country is going through a dark period, and the way our elections are held has very little to do with it.

That FPTP results in a long-term two-party equilibrium (that may be occasionally disrupted) is not exactly a secret:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law

And in some cases, at least, FPTP itself is deliberately introduced by large parties to reduce the viability of their competitors. Northern Ireland was one particularly nasty case of that.

Do you live in India?

> For the longest time I used to think that the two party system is like a law in America or something.

Not a law of the state, but a law nonetheless: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law

My guess is that it will take a lot more than that, the USA needs to have a political system less reliant on boatloads of cash. Campaigns are spectacles, not political debate, spectacles are great entertainment but are very poor to foster any discussion around hard topics and solutions.

America's love of a good show made even politics like a big sport, team red and team blue against each other, fighting tooth and nail for turf (aka districts, electoral votes by States, etc.) and the team that is better funded usually will have a leg up. Just like sports.

The cultural change required to move politics away from this culture of spectacle and entertainment is way harder than what can be achieved in two generations.

And we aren't even moving away from this, we're moving farther and farther into it.

You can only think this if you ignored all of the protests in 2008. What America has is a population that doesn't get a say in American policy, unless there's some indirect sales risk for some powerful person who supports the policy (i.e. somebody is afraid that if the policy is passed, than sales at e.g. Kia or AB InBev will drop because of their association with it.) Even this can be completely thwarted by industry collusion.

That was what Occupy Wall St and Tea Party movements were. Remember that? Before each of them got infested with social-issue parasites of each pole, both were populist reactions to financial injustices.

Occupy was suppressed by the entire police state, coordinated at the federal level under the FBI and DHS [0].

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-co...

I feel like the most significant cause of Occupy's burnout was the fact that it was so poorly organized and had no concrete goal. I don't recall any specific legislation or reform that they were calling to enact and there was a cacophony of voices each calling for some kind of societal revolution. Eventually the local Occupy demonstration turned into a homeless encampment with some signs propped alongside the roadway. I certainly won't deny government meddling but I honestly think the movement was doomed from the start.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahMGoB01qiA

Peter Schiff did a man on the street with some folks of the Occupy movement, and basically proves your point - the desired goals were so scattered and sometimes even contradictory.

When there is concerted effort to undermine a populist movement, that's how it will end up looking: disorganized, chaotic, unproductive, and eventually dead. It very well could have failed due to deliberate interference where it might have had a substantial impact otherwise. How much would you bet that there weren't covert agents working to put it down?

I don't know if it was from infiltration, or what, but one of the biggest talking points of Occupy was that they were a leaderless organization, and they would establish rules of order that required near unanimous consensus to make decisions. That's a great way to avoid making any decisions.

I remember this comic that ridiculed the "Occupy Wall Street doesn't have a goal" talking point, one of the many corporate-pushed talking points meant to discredit the movement: [1]

1: https://images2.dailykos.com/i/user/2722/TMW2011-10-12colorl...

I feel like the movement could have overcome the "corporate talking point" by actually having an organized and focused goal.

At some point, it starts to feel intentional that every time an issue that could bring us together begins to gain traction, it’s diverted into some media concocted idea about how (left wing or right wing group) is out to destroy (social thing).

It's only starting to feel intentional, eh? While it may not be a result of coordinated and direct pressure, like a secret ban on promoting non-partisan popular causes or something... I don't believe for a minute that our cultish, deadlocked political landscape is just an emergent phenomenon resulting from good faith participation in our system. It's the result of powerful people and institutions throwing around their weight, buying allies and generating propaganda, in order to dominate and shape said system.

Occupy Wall Street was the beginning of that but the media and their allies in the government decided to push for a race war in the 2012 election. It’s not a coincidence the oppression Olympics were turned up to 11 at that time.

That’s not to say that there aren’t issues with race in America but they pale in comparison to the socioeconomic ones. A nation obsessed over race and culture has little time to confront other issues.

And most people are oblivious to this simple observation, allowing the situation to continue. Feels like the war is already lost a long time ago.

Race is the modality by which class is primarily expressed in America. There is no way to resolve socioeconomic problems without dealing with race at the same time, clearly demonstrated multiple times in US history. The failure of Reconstruction -- an "Unfinished Revolution" as Eric Foner puts it -- was precisely white workers' rejection of class solidarity with Black workers in favor of post-war white racial reconciliation.

Crab mentality and revenge seeking will keep people from true progress. We need to crush the idea of victim hood as a privilege.

> We need to crush the idea of victim hood as a privilege.

"Victim hood as privilege" is a right-wing strawman of the idea of intersectionality. You're suggesting throwing a punch at an obvious feint.

Intersectionality is simply the idea that certain groups experience unique configurations of more general problems, and that counteracting those configurations contributes to resolving the general case.

Do you think a coal miner with black lung who organizes for compensation on that basis is claiming "victim hood as privilege"? I hope not. It should also be clear that coal miners organizing for their own workplace safety helps ALL workers. That's why OSHA exists after all.

The same applies to racial issues.

It was called Occupy and it got shut down with extreme prejudice and we're still living in the psyop environment that is a response to it.

Eh. We still have our entertainment and comforts to distract us. But with the greater and greater divide between the haves and have nots flipping cars might look tame when things change.

That’s hardly effective and those cars belong to other citizens, who would just then hate you and never support your ‘cause’. Tantrums don’t get rewarded.

America does not seem to be a place of collective action (anymore?). Instead everybody is blaming themselves and each other, fuelling a mental health crisis and social malaise. It's not pretty to watch.

I don't think destroying the property of innocent others would help.

We're talking about sins so great that it defines the lives of every younger generation after 2008. It's just as unconscionable as the Iraq war and long term occupation of Afghanistan. Our lives are short and a lot of people have been robbed of time.

The American banking system is highly regulated in spite of some of the things you'll read here and other places. It's very hard to start a bank, and banks only allow some products because of regulation. The problem comes when the politicians slide into the back pocket of the bank execs who are all too happy to keep the status quo. In that respect the politicians are just as guilty as the bank execs.

>flipping cars when bank execs didn't get jail time for the financial crisis

It wouldn't have done any good. Those that benefitted would have started flipping houses anyway.

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