wsj.com
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This is more about growth and its folly in real time.

LONDON—One lesson from an unprecedented year of elections around the world is that voters in industrialized countries are particularly unhappy, ready to boot unpopular leaders out of office and making it more difficult for politicians in power to enact bold programs of change.

Rarely have the rich world’s political leaders been so widely disliked. No leader of an industrialized country other than tiny Switzerland has a positive rating, according to a survey of some 25 democracies by pollster Morning Consult. Ruling parties that went to the polls this year largely got a drubbing, including in the U.S. and U.K.

  • SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml
    9·
    5 days ago

    What’s happened? Have leaders gotten increasingly bad, or have voters become increasingly impatient/hard to please? ^(And we’re not talking about US specifics here bc it’s happening everywhere)

    • Hamartia@lemmy.world
      20·
      5 days ago

      What is happening is the consequence of private aggregations of wealth, at a scale possible to distabilise democracies, wrestling for power. Waning is their fear of the masses, so now they turn on each other. Democracy is now sufficiently captured. Through idividualised propaganda they can mold the zeitgeist in the minds in a significantly sized block of the electorate against any movement to rebalance society.

      • HubertManne@moist.catsweat.com
        5·
        4 days ago

        yup. income disparity high equals less enjoyable society. income disparity low and everyday life is better for everyone. Its not rocket science. there does need to be some but like 100x is quite sufficient as far as motivation goes.

    • MrMakabar@slrpnk.netMEnglish
      10·
      5 days ago

      We are talking rich countries only. Those got hit from decades of neoliberal policies widening the wealth gap, weaker unions and globalization taking away certain jobs.

      As for why long term effects of Covid namely inflation, reduced real wages for a lot of people, in Europe energy crisis and the Ukraine war, boomers are retiring everywhere, Trump having won in the US leading to spending on similar groups around the world hurting centrist governments, propaganda from dictatorships becoming more common and a bunch of other reasons.

      The problem is that the way to solve it would be to tax the rich and hand over the money in form of more social spending. However that would require a war with the wealthy elites and that is risky for politicans.

    • Snot FlickermanEnglish
      11·
      5 days ago

      Democracy has been purposefully gridlocked by parties who want to make sure Democracy can’t work. So if they undermine it enough, make it so forward movement can’t happen for 40-50 years at a time, the citizens get restless and angry. That’s on purpose, too, because when people are restless and angry, then you can go balls to the wall and declare martial law.

      There really should have been some laws on the books at some point that if you were clearly trying to undermine democratic principles that you could and should be blocked from being elected to or holding any type of office. Instead, we’ve just let the guys doing this shit do it worldwide for about 50 years now, and their plan worked, the whole shebang is about to fall apart.

      Literally they spent 50 years running on “let’s prove democracy doesn’t work by fighting to kill democracy” and literally nobody stepped up to say “maybe we shouldn’t let these guys fucking do that??”