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Has the USA turned into an oligarchy?
(lemmy.zip)
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this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2025
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It's at least a Soft Oligarchy yes. There's no legally or extra legally enforced class system. If you can make it into the upper classes, by guile, luck, or sheer bastardry they'll accept you and let you run some things, maybe even political offices. See J.D. Vance, a millennial from Appalachia who has risen to the Vice Presidency via guile and sheer bastardry.
But it's a Soft Oligarchy because opportunities are far from equal. Before anyone starts screeching, equality of outcome isn't an expectation here, merely equality of opportunity. In the large majority of cases your zip code can predict your future socioeconomic level. And not because rural areas are cheaper, that just means middle and upper class start at lower numbers there. Those classes are still not being obtained. Along with this are several studies over the last couple decades telling us that socioeconomic mobility is all but dead, both individually, and more recently, intergenerational mobility.
So while you aren't going to be killed or imprisoned for earning too much or asking for stuff above your station, it is very rare to access those levels without being born to them. Thus the "soft" in Soft Oligarchy.
Lol wat?
US has a strict class system. There is owner class and working class, they get treated differently under the law.
For example, look at how owners get taxed v how regular people get taxed. That's legally enforced class.
Regime propaganda relies on these stories to justify the class system. Every generation gets a few of this class traitors so pedons can be told... You see loser, if you worked harder, daddy would reward you too! Now back on the planstation, start making daddy some mother fucking money.
The tax system doesn't care where you came from. In a Hard Oligrachy it would. You would never escape the working class tax system or justice system and those systems would be designed to prevent you from changing classes, to the point of destroying anyone with the pretensions to try. The fact that you can access that other standard of treatment means the class system isn't enforced. If you want to say it's highly encouraged I would agree with you, but this isn't some conspiracy to have a couple winners that get highly propagandized, and there's no law against socioeconomic mobility.
Examples of Hard oligarchies are countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia. In Russia you will go out a window because someone powerful didn't like your competition and you have no protections; and in Saudi Arabia you will be arrested for pissing off the Royals.
The US is bad enough without exaggerating shit to make it seem like the worst. That leaves us unable to see what we might want to keep. Like the way the justice and healthcare systems treat rich people, we should all have that.
This is practically how it functions, working class rarely becomes owner class.
There is a set of laws that protect owners property, they get cash transfers from the government budgets, their legal entities get preferential tax treatment. Sure anyone can start business technically but capital is needed...
US increasingly doesn't have social mobility, you parents social rank correlates strongly with your own out comes.
Boeing milled its whistleblower, nothing happened.
Esptain committed "suicide"
JFK, mlk and malcom X got killed by the ruling class.
So it's conspiracy theories.
Have a nice day.
Lol, they are about as valid as whatever the government is shilling. It does make one wonder why so much of government records related to these murfers are classified still...