This is not what it said. It said it was about the same 100 years ago. It improved for a long time before going back up.
Accepting "the purpose of a thing is what it does" is important for these times. So is avoiding the epistemic traps of disingenuous actors.
50 years ago? Perhaps some of what you describe applied, in very limited form and only if you view a small segment of the media/political landscape with extremely rose-tinted glasses, but go read more of U.S media history to see how completely off base you really are.
Media in the United states has spent most of its history being absolutely saturated with extremely yellow, scandal-mongering political hack journalism of the absolute most dishonest kind you can imagine (yes even in the age of social media). This was the case throughout the 19th century, the whole early part of the 20th century and it certainly applied 50 years ago, which would be roughly the late 60's to the 70s.
Overall, i'd say you have no idea at all of what you're talking about and pulled this funny notion out of nowhere for the sake of forcing an alarmist point.
For decades the vast majority of those who even knew Trump existed were aware from the beginning he was a fake and it was just so curious to watch him take the pratfalls that he set himself up for. He only became widely known because he was such a complete failure compared to ordinary businessmen, and he would not shut up about how successful he was, it just emphasized how much he didn't have a clue and he was all PR. It was so cringeworthy people could not help but notice. Some things never change.
But under those media conditions he was merely a comic figure for the longest time. Bragging about how rich he is when he's actually bankrupt in more ways than one.
It just wouldn't have been very easy to build critical mass among people who would be willing to take him the least bit seriously. Especially about anything concerning money.
Now it's too late.
I get that the establishment also sometimes does good things like create the EPA but it seems like those good things only ever happen after there's a huge amount of public screeching and that the default behavior is for the establishment to wage war and enrich itself.
The establishment should not be in bed with the media IMO. While the current fragmented media landscape is causing turbulence in the short term it is a good thing in the long term IMO.
Today at least, if anything, people have access to a vast plurality of views that despite many of them being absurdly mistaken at least through the mechanism of their existence let massive cracs rapidly open in any official or propagandist narrative. On the whole, this is what major media truly hates, while couching its complaints in fear mongering about misinformation.... Much of that fear mongering surged especially strong during the recent pandemic, while media at the exact same time promoted several major official narratives that were obviously politically motivated rather than being based on any thing resembling solid editorial standards.
Maybe he tried?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverside_South,_Manhattan#Tel...
America's political class got complacent and lazy, and forgot that they have to sell what they were pushing to the American people. They never even FOUGHT the battle of ideas. As they age out/get pushed out new Ben Franklin with their own printing press types will rise.
Say again? If we're talking strictly about the United States as per the article that inspired this post, the U.S. is a case study of a prosperous, remarkably stable democracy steadily increasing its prosperity, wealth, influence and power while also for the vast majority of its history investing for the long term and in vital infrastructure. This process hasn't been constant or evenly incremental but it has been there for (now) literally centuries.
The same could be said of Britain and many other developed countries on shorter but still reasonably long scales. On the other hand when you look at dictatorships in the wider scope of the modern era, the vast majority of them either invest explosively only to fail catastrophically at some point before reverting to some other variant of government, or countries that see their biggest failures happen during periods of dictatorship, and their major socioeconomic successes happen during periods of something at least approaching democracy and openness.
There are exceptions to the above tendencies in favor of democracy, but China can't yet be called such. It has had only 80 years under its present dictatorship (preceded by decades of warlord rule, weakness and chaos) and of those only the last 40 have been ones of relatively stable growth, investment in major projects AND concurrent increases in prosperity. Under Mao it invested in certain major projects, but at nearly cataclysmic social, economic and human cost. Hardly a model, in those days, of dictatorship being applied to patient, wise planning.
>Concerning the USA, the divide between the extra rich and the general poor is nowadays too large to have a functioning country.
Really? Feel like sharing the mechanism by which these claims of overly severe wealth inequality will make the US collapse any time soon?
Note also that as another comment above this mentions, the U.S has had more or less similar levels of said inequality for the last 100 years.... in which it functioned as a stable, relatively peaceful, democratic, increasingly prosperous society in which overall standards of living in absolute terms have gone up enormously.