>all initial evidence is the oligarchs kissing the ring, not pulling the strings.

It was comical how quickly amazon back pedaled on showing tariffs transparently in pricing as soon as the whitehouse complained.

One thing that’s been interesting (in a Ralp-Wiggins-esque “I’m in danger!” type way) to watch over the last few years is all the “end of history” types re-learning that Mao was right and that economic might only translates into real power when you use it to buy guns. Europe spent a decade trying to tie Russia into the global economy only to find all that cheap energy meant that when Russia walked into the Ukraine, they were on the wrong side of the ledger to throw their weight around. In the US, our oligarchs didn’t realize how much they were relying on the fact that US government officials believed the same lies about the power of capital that they did, and were caught entirely off guard when Trump walked in, picked up the gun on the table, pointed it at them, and said “I’ll take your wallet, please.”

There’s a whole generation of neoliberals learning Littlefinger’s lesson these days: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifaRhL95HUM - it’s a shame the rest of us are stuck on this ride with them.

To be fair, life's better when you don't have to rely on the guns. If you're willing to work together to make the pie bigger for everyone, peacefully, you get further.

Which is why you have to occasionally knock the people willing to exploit the peaceful order, off.

Which takes guns. And back at square 1.

I don’t know that it takes guns. If we moved to, say, ranked-choice voting and a multi-party system, the more extreme elements of our country would probably be sidelined.

Did you see the bill introduced the other day?

H.R.3040 - To prohibit the use of ranked choice voting in elections for Federal office.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/3040

I did not. Talk about a blatant attempt to power grab, though. Hopefully it never makes it out of committee.

It still takes them.

You need to present it as a choice: you either bring about ranked-choice voting and a wider range of political parties so that issues can be dealt with peacefully, or, face real consequences for attempts to block the efforts at peace.

And if they feel sufficiently shut out of the political process they'll rely on their guns. If you think the US is immune from insurgent dynamics, please read more widely. I think you'd find it particularly worthwhile to look into the collapse of Yugoslavia, which also had a federal system.

Well, we did have a civil war some time ago! But given the gross imbalance of military capability between the state and the citizen, I’m not worried today about a successful violent overthrow of the USA.

That was equally true in Yugoslavia, and indeed in Afghanistan. I think it's extremely naive to assume the US is immune from this. When I told people 10-15 years ago that I thought the US was ripe for and vulnerable to autocratic political leadership nobody took it seriously either, yet here we are.

A few smaller guns used judiciously will achieve that purpose. You don't need everyone using a tank in a Mexican standoff just to have peace.

glances at the MAD stockpile I’m not sure that is really true, eh?

Completely agree. But I think something lost in this is how much violence the "end of history" state of affairs increasingly relied on to keep that "peaceful" context in place - among the reasons Russia walked into the Ukraine was that Russia considered the Ukraine to be its buffer against NATO, which it viewed as genuinely an existential threat. The Middle East has been in a state of war for 20 years now, the US drug wars in Central and South America have had absolutely disastrous consequences, and the level of environmental destruction we've outsourced to other parts of the world would preclude a lot of our current economic practices if we tried to do them at home. Even in the US, the Mangione killing highlighted this - UHC was the absolute top in denying health care claims, an activity with actual deaths associated with it. Just because the power centers aren't threatened doesn't mean there's not violence present in the system. In the west, we've relied a lot on the fact that the majority of the people with guns have typically been further out in the periphery than us, and all those guns have been pointed at other people on our behalf - our peace is not everyone's peace.

A nit: "Ukraine" (not "the Ukraine).

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-18233844

And the violence of the next system is going to be far, far greater.

But the others will have their peace.

is it not obvious the oligarchs control the globalist politicians and not the nationalists?

Is it controversial to say that if you really wanted to "fight the oligarchy", your policy positions would be pretty similar to the America first agenda (sans social issues)?

I think it's impossible to understand the relationships here without really grokking that the MAGA set is both incompetent and incoherent. The movement is properly seen as an angry tantrum - a reaction to the state of the world, not a coherent ideology and plan for improving it. The coherent ideology and plan for improving it involves actually investing in domestic manufacturing, a strong push for labor rights and unions to make sure people are getting paid, a commitment to antitrust action, and, yes, protectionism of domestic industry (as a fun bonus, compare that to Biden's economic policies), but that's not what we've got here - we've got rage and anger and personal vendettas and wishful thinking as policy.

This is what I mean when I say the oligarchs have the tiger by the tail - from the time of the Moral Majority through the evangelicals of Bush's era through the Tea Party through MAGA, the business wing of the republican party has been cultivating the populist wing as an electoral strategy. They've managed to muddy the water with enough "government bad, immigrant criminals, trans athletes" rhetoric that what you've got now is a party and a movement that can _feel_ that there's something wrong - stagnant wages, inaccessible health care, deaths of despair, and Jeff Bezos - but the right wing message machine still has enough of a hand on the wheel that they can't actually get their way to things like labor rights and social security and all the other stuff we came up with last time this kind of thing happened.

Then you get Donald Trump, who well and truly does not give a shit about anything at all, and so he's absolutely fine to grab the wheel here and yank it hard into populism land, and now the oligarchs have a problem, because they've got a mafia boss at the head of an angry mob, and no part of that has any coherent ideology except Trump's crystal clear vision of people paying him a lot of money and treating him like a king, and now you've got tantrum as policy and no actual adults left in the room.

So, yes, America First and the MAGA movement are, depending on the day and time, anti-oligarch, but they're anti-oligarch like a dog is anti-car - there's not really a _plan_ there, just a lot of noise and motion and probably some teeth marks, but I don't really think it's gonna work out great for the dog either.

Don't confuse the Goldman Sachs branch of the Democratic party with Musk/Bezos/et al bankrolling the Republican party.

Dictionary definition of oligarchy: "a small group of people having control of a country, organization, or institution."

If you're "kissing the ring", you're not in control. The people with the ring are.

To spell it out, the US is not governed by a billionaire oligarchy.