The last Hail Mary pass for democracy and free speech is being thrown by those demonstrating against Genocide.

There are similarities to the 1930s and 2024, but there are also differences that make this time a more dangerous period in history. Unlike 90 years ago, political solutions today offer two choices: neoliberalism or outright fascism.

Photo by Tristan Sosteric on Unsplash

Authentic Left-wing politics was eradicated from the equation of how to build better societies because it has no established political party that champions the Welfare State except when it fundraises on past socialist glories now discredited by its leadership. It's insulting to the memory of FDR and his New Deal when the corporate news media compares Biden to him. Biden neither has the intellectual depth nor the moral courage to revolutionise the USA and make it fit for purpose for the ordinary worker. He is simply neoliberalism's continuity man whose legacy besides enabling genocide in Gaza, will be helping to increase the wealth of the 1% to over $44 trillion and counting whilst increasing the amount of Americans living in poverty to over 40 million.

Our entitled are now as cynical and theft-prone of state assets as the elites in the Soviet Union during the last years of Brezhnev. Our future is as dismal as the present because Western democracy ran out of road after it became corrupted by oligarchs and the special interests of the 1%.

The absolutism of wealth has oozed out from the US to all of its allies. Canada's economy is run by a cartel of tycoons and a handful of billion-dollar corporations. A plutocracy of billionaires or their corporations control most key industries to Canada's economy.  Its grocery sector is in the hands of three domestic companies and two foreign corporations that have made record profits- while the worst cost of living crisis in decades has decimated affordability for millions of Canadians. The cost of living crisis has hastened democracy's demise in Canada, the US, the UK and the EU. Much of that is because top wage earners don't understand what it does to the psychology of a citizen who is food insecure, housing insecure or worried about paying for the drugs they need for chronic illnesses that afflict them. 

People who don't flinch at regularly paying $300 for dinner in a restaurant either aren't able to imagine the precarity of life outside of their communities gated by large incomes and asset wealth or are indifferent to the suffering of others. The problem is those are the people who govern us in politics, and business as well as the news media, the uncaring and the unseeing. It's no wonder that those whose solution to the housing crisis, cost of living crisis and climate crisis are slogans, money to the private sector, xenophobia or summits find themselves caught in the high beams of Netanyahu's Genocide in Gaza. They are paralysed by their unbending support for neoliberalism the way Britain and France once were to Empire when the concept had gone far past its best-before date. 

The university student protests for disinvestment in Israel to decouple Western economies from that nation's annihilation of Gaza have seen 1400 dissidents arrested. Whereas it took 3 years to charge 1200 people for January 6th an attempted coup against the US government. The Biden administration and the entire American political class see university students in tents on university campus lawns as the greater threat to the status quo than fascists storming the Capitol building in 2021.

Authoritarianism is coming to America. It was always neoliberalism's destination. It's coming whether Trump wins in November or not because the times we live in aren't like Weimar Germany. We don't live in an era with cabarets Avant-garde art, progressive literature and left-wing politics that did offer a means to save society from totalitarianism. We live in a DYI Dystopia that we assembled ourselves like it was a kitchen island from Ikea.

We are already halfway into the mouth of authoritarianism because the times we live in normalised personal data collection by big tech along with facial recognition and AI. Our society things it is profound and immortal because it has  Costco, Starbucks, Netflix, Prime and Pornhub. So, be warned- the last Hail Mary pass for democracy is being thrown by those students demonstrating against the genocide in Gaza- who if their dissent isn't crushed by the state- may be the spark that sets alight- a new renaissance of left-wing politics.

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