You've been intentionally confused into conflating democracy and this brand of unfettered capitalism

Koch fully understands what the vast majority of Americans do not: that democracy is in opposition to unfettered, capitalism and its kleptocratic equilibrium. And he and his kind choose the latter.

Many on the Right fully conflate democracy and capitalism, imagining, or choosing to imagine, that they are the same thing (idiotic) or complementary (an hypothesis worth examining). The conflation is not without some history: the advocates of a capital based system have employed rhetoric to confuse the masses. "Free" enterprise is meant to sound like political "freedom," when of course it means no such thing.

Democracy is a political system -- an act of genius invented by classical Athenians, reinvented and applied by the British, the French, early Americans, and others. The US Constitution is not notable for its contribution to democracy as ordinarily understood, but for its protection of the rights of all, even when in the minority -- a valuable step forward, of course, and one to be admired when we live up to it.

The market-based system that grew up in the Industrial Revolution, and evolved into this complex system in which investors allocate our resources according to the optimization of their investment returns, has its merits, but it is not entirely consistent with democracy. One dollar, one vote versus one citizen, one vote. If you pay attention, it's not hard to see the difference.

The confusion -- and the intentional rhetoric aimed at confusing people into supporting this insane brand of unfettered capitalism that has enriched the Kleptocratic class beyond imagination because they reject totalitarianism -- has its roots, according to some scholars, in the Cold War.* As Soviet-style socialism was totalitarian and post-war capitalist systems were more democratic, the war against totalitarianism provided ideological cover for capitalism (as it was working hand-in-hand with democracy).

But socialism around the world today is much more democratic than ever before, and the world's most unfettered capitalist economies (China and the US) are now quasi-totalitarian or on the cusp, so this argument has lost its impact. Further, many of those who reject democracy (e.g., the American GOP and their Kleptocratic puppet masters) are the biggest advocates of unfettered capitalism -- fighting to kill off all democratic voice in regulating business, and thus challenging our sovereignty over our lives, our health, our air, our water, our values. As well, in the US, advocates of capitalism have become authoritarians, thus standing in direct opposition to democracy.

As social movements are more push-and-shove than coherent, this means that much of the American Left, seeing that the totalitarian right is invested in killing democracy and saving capitalism, have chosen not to point out that we could have both, as long we honored democratic processes and imposed social values on business, regulating them as do all civilized societies, but have instead decided that if they are to oppose the Right, they should oppose capitalism. There is some legitimate tradition here -- the far left has long been more sympathetic to the values of communism and less critical of its flaws -- but we are observing is not a nuanced critique of the Right's anti-democratic, pro-unfettered-and-brutal-version of capitalism men like Koch advance. Instead many on the far Left have just jumped into the fight with blunt and uncritical attacks on all market-based systems. When they are forced to acknowledge that a democratic market-system like Sweden's has its merits, they just call it socialism.

To be clear, the far Right knows that full-blooded democracy would never allow their brutal, unfettered version of Kleptocratic capitalism. The exploitation of the 99% since 1980 in the US has been an astonishing success for them. Even folks like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, characterized by the Right as socialists, are offering tiny, tepid solutions; just to recover the sort of society and system we had when the US was an exemplar for the world (say the level of inequality we had from 1950-1966), we'd have to impose wealth and income taxes that no one can offer without political death.

Yet, some version of a market-based system, doing what it does well, with a rational, economic regulatory process to impose both EFFICIENCY and EQUITY, is probably optimal. Because of our history, this centrist idea -- if applied objectively -- is now too far left to be palatable to the majority, not interesting to those on the far left who want the system dismantled, and of course horrifying to the Right, although it would be better for the vast majority of them.

And so we are left with an unfettered brand of capitalism -- a horrible, inequitable and unsustainable version that the brilliant Karl Polanyi, understanding its deadly appeal, called "a stark utopia." This system, dressed up in red, white and blue, and stripped of all civility, decency and effectuality, is our Aegean Sea, home to our sirens, whose song is too strong for us to resist.

Unless we find our own Orpheus to resist them, we will all drown.

___

* E.g.,

Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy

THE COLD WAR ORIGINS OF RATIONAL CHOICE LIBERALISM

S.M. AMADAE

Everyone has a story to tell

When some historians noted that orthodox histories did not truly tell the stories of racial minorities, some set out to tell those stories.

And many whites reacted badly.

When some historians noted that orthodox histories did not truly tell the stories of women, some set out to tell those stories.

And many men reacted badly.

When some historians noted that orthodox histories did not truly tell the stories of indigenous peoples, some set out to tell those stories,

And many desdendants of colonizers reacted badly.

When some historians noted that orthodox histories did not truly tell the stories of religious minorities, some set out to tell those stories.

And many Christians reacted badly.

The leftist claims and reactionary counter-claims you experience on social media are nothing new. The heterodoxy has been trying to tell its stories for a long time -- not always perfectly, of course -- and the orthodoxy, fearful of claims of privilege or reparations, has long resisted giving oxygen to those stories.

And that is a terrible reality.

But all disagreements have not been acrimonious. For example, during the anti-war demonstrations at Columbia during Vietnam, Richard Hofstadter was against them while one of his prize doctoral students, Mike Wallace, supported them -- yet they remained lifelong friends.

The only thing new is that every Tom, Dick and Harry now has an opinion about it all. And more heat than light leaves little room for finding common ground. Of course, the stories of everyone must be told and heard respectfully, but the first stories must be respected, too.

We must be patient for everyone to tell his or her story, but we must also be firm in acknowledging that everyone has a story to tell.

Calm reflection is now guilty by association and the implications are not good

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity

--Yeats

There was a time when calm reflection was a better sign of moral character than accusing, disgusted outbursts and cries of moral calamity.

But something has happened.

The ascendance of sociopathy in the US has revealed a ruling class of calm and cold-blooded killers leading a clan of angry, violent ignoramuses. Men like Ben Schapiro and Steven Miller and Mitch McConnell act without conscience but also without fever. (Lindsay Graham, Donald Trump, Jim Jordan and their ilk are sociopaths, but not fully socialized sociopaths, so their outbursts put them in a second tier.)

What this has meant, it appears to me, is that many on the left, especially many liberals who once valued independence of thought, honest reflection, and respectful discourse, have come to associate cold-bloodedness with evil, and this seems to have loosed the tide of frenzied blood-letting in leftwing discourse. That is, once the liberal class started to associate calm discussions of painful, social problems with reactionary rhetoric and immoral character, respectful interaction became guilty by association, and the feeding frenzy was fed steroids.

Social media is now a piranha tank. Piranhas don't kill each other, but when another fish tries to navigate through, it is bloodied in an instant.

Facebook has explicitly or inadvertently tried to incentivize balkanization. If someone who disagrees with you reports you -- I have been "canceled" by Fox Viewers three times (and yes I appreciate their hypocrisy)-- FB banishes you. It makes their business model work best if we all block anyone who disagrees with us, and swim in homogeneous pools of like-minded souls who confirm our biases and support our craziness.

As confirmation bias is one of the key flaws of an irrational mind, Americans have taken up a challenge, and social media has supported that effort, to become as ignorant and irrational in as short time frame as possible.

While most are reading with the idea of emotional tagging -- they're in a mad race to decide if the meme is something to applaud or attack -- the few who are left trying to figure out whether the idea is right, wrong, or in need of amendment are criticized for lacking revolutionary zeal of one sort or another. The Left is famous for its tests of loyalty -- and it is clear today that there is little room for respectful disagreement on the Left --- but the Alt Right has done great work becoming all clan and no mind, with proclamations of RINO and brutal attacks whenever a Republican wakes up with a conscience. With few exceptions, Republicans who spend 24 hours afraid of going straight to hell are so lambasted by the Alt Right ideologues that they rush back into their putrid dens as fast as Punxsutawney Phil after seeing his shadow.

Trump's defeat in 2020 means 10 million of us will not be dying of Covid-19 and sucked dry of any future by Plutocratic thieves, but even sans Trump we can't actually survive as stupid as we are. For example, the 1.9T relief package needs to be paid for eventually -- and if we don't return to pre-1987 tax rates we will have essentially crippled our children's future in this country. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

The arguments on social media are, frankly, so poor that fewer than 1% of the time the proponent of an idea has actually organized his or her logic and evidence to make an honest claim. Critiques are about as well organized, so most disagreements degenerate into nonsense.

Further, everything is out of proportion. In New York State, for example, we have suffered a serious and tragic setback with covid-19: many deaths and economic devastation. I am skeptical that NYS can survive fiscally. Our governor is doing 2-3 crisis jobs, most above his head, frankly. He is clearly overwhelmed by the impossible budget crisis he must solve over the next month. It is discouraging that people who imagine themselves to be morally mature think that the lives lost and the damage done by distracting him in the midst of these crises are justified by their moral absolutism. He should be investigated, as most moral people will agree, but if Trump's prosecutions could wait years, Cuomo's can wait until we are out of the fire. Attacking Cuomo at this moment is akin to slapping the driver of the car because you learned that he was guilty of something upsetting and you cannot wait until the car arrives at its destination.

Until we learn to interact with those we disagree with and learn from one another much more effectively, we will not grow. Further, until we learn to cooperate with one another, we will not be ready to solve the existentially-threatening climate crisis which is about to reach a lost endgame from which there is no coming back.

Where we are now

We have now reached the perverse moment in intellectual history in which tens of millions of people with average capacities for imaginative inferential reconstruction, and lacking a thorough grounding in theories of modern institutions, awaken each day, seize upon one new datum, perhaps reflected in a meme, merge it with an ember of ongoing frustration, and proceed to advance a complete and dynamic schematic for the whole of human existence in the realms of politics, economics, culture and prejudice.

To add icing to the cake, their one paragraph summary of what should be, but is not, a five-volume update of Das Kapital or Fountainhead, is advanced with a stern admonition that anyone who fails to fully and immediately embrace this tsunami of insight is immoral or stupid or both.