“Every time Trump or members of his administration have lashed out at Europe, including Ukraine, Europeans have absorbed the blow with a forced smile and bent over backwards to flatter the White House.” (…)
“While a systemic answer to Europe’s security conundrum is not in sight, Europeans do have the levers to prevent Ukraine’s capitulation and create the conditions for a just peace.”
Which democracy is not a masked autocracy where the rich control politics?
For one thing, inequality is still way lower than it was before democracy.
https://ehs.org.uk/wealth-inequality-in-preindustrial-england/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_wealth_inequality
The gini index of the USA is at 0.850.
There was only more inequality after the renaissance. Much of that time was democratic.
Yeah, there’s estimates going both ways for conditions of ordinary people in the European Medieval period. There’s probably more than one truth - it was non-uniform and lasted a millennium. It was also a pretty poor region after the collapse of Rome, so even the rich could only be so rich. Stone age hunter-gatherers would have a pretty much perfect Gini for the same reason.
For richer premodern regions like the India and China estimates are much higher (here’s a really recent analysis on some of them). Ditto for societies before the Medieval period, although usually they just go off of house sizes for that and the results can be so high they seem impossible. It’s also worth mentioning Gini has some problems for this kind of thing - the paper I link emphasises other metrics more as a result.
Looking at modern dictatorships, Russia is said to have most of the world’s billionaires, and their official 2021 value is up at 0.880. Unofficially it’s probably worse. Other dictatorships report lower values, but anyone connected to the third world knows they’re bullshit and the elites own absolutely everything. The US is also an outlier; Canada is 0.726, Iceland is down at 0.649.
No? The first modern thing that people will even claim as democracy is the US at the the end of the 18th century, and it was very rich, male and whites-only. Before that you had the age of absolutism, and before that you had various republics like Florence or classical Athens, but imagine voting bodies at least as exclusive as the early US and pretty unstable, with periods of effective dictatorship. Ordinary male citizens gradually got rights over the 19th century, and the first unrestricted, universal suffrage appeared in New Zealand in 1893.
TBF inequality kept increasing in the democratic US, but then it went down in the postwar era, which is unprecedented in history. Being equal before the law doesn’t mean equal in practice, but it’s just kind of common sense that it would be closer.
Democracy was pushed by the bourgeoisie. Wealth inequality should be the default. A king may care about his subjects, the rich barely care about the poor.
I would assume that the unprecedented decline in inequality came from the competition with communism.
I’ll take a EU-style “masked autocracy” over an overt autocracy like Russia any day.
or whatever disgusting mess the US is sleepwalking into…
I believe that’s going to be an overt autocracy like Russia.
What is the EU-style “masked autocracy”? Can we be sure that it exists? If the EU does what the US wants there is not much EU in that autocracy.