A grainy image of his face drew comparisons to Hollywood heartthrobs. A jacket similar to the one he’s wearing on wanted posters is reportedly flying off the shelves. And the words written on the bullets he used to kill a man in cold blood on a sidewalk on Wednesday have become, for some people, a rallying cry.
Four days after a gunman assassinated a top health insurance executive in Midtown Manhattan and vanished, the unidentified suspect has, in some quarters, been venerated as something approaching a folk hero.
Right. Everything you say is true but you don’t look into the mechanisms that sit behind and make it work. You’re not looking into why it works.
For example, you mention how people don’t want to spend their time figuring out what a politician really stands for. But why? Most people don’t have this time. Most people don’t have the training needed to critically assess the information they receive either. The system’s always worked on the basis of some level of honesty along with robust and critical media. Ultimately most people hear most of the words of the candidates through media. In the 20th century through radio, TV and in the 21st through the Internet. When you explore the media angle you can observe media ownership changes and with them a significant shift to pro-corporate, pro-billionaire and anti-worker stances dominating the landscape. In effect, the billionaires are telling the people who don’t have time or skill to seek and sift through independent information, what to think, believe and feel, and who best represents those feelings.
Then you have candidates emerge who represent those feelings and the same billionaires pour ridiculous amounts of money in their campaigns, get their media outlets to transmit the message without sufficiently challenging its factuality and effects.
You put the two together and that answers to a significant degree why people vote for oligarchs. We saw all of this play out in plain sight during the recent US election.
You can’t remove loudmouths that promise easy solutions to hard problems. They’ve always existed. If you removed their funding and their megaphones however, most won’t even know about them. That’s not to say populists haven’t been elected without being supported by the owner class, but this isn’t one of those cases. This is the owner class capturing the democratic system and electing their representative through these methods. It didn’t happen yesterday. It’s been going on for a while, getting ever more effective. Note that the alternative candidate in the recent election was also subservient to the owner class, just to a somewhat different part of it and perhaps to somewhat lower extent.
I think highlighting these processes is crucial because the solutions are actionable and efficient. It’s very unlikely for us to be able to get the majority of any society to be able to spend the time needed and have the mental tools needed to arrive at factual conclusions from sifting through the (corporate) media firehouse. I don’t think it’s ever been achieved. Removing private money from politics and media is possible and has been done before.