Quote:
Originally Posted by Raev
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Germany/Sweden are small and culturally/ethnically uniform. The US is large and culturally/ethnically diverse. Soviet Russia is far more comparable. In addition, if you seriously believe we have a free market here, you need to wake up and smell the coffee. The "market" moves purely at the whim of the central banks.
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Why do you think "culturally/ethnically uniform" matters?
In Sweden, they weren't always a social democratic country. They used to have big inequalities like us, until they pushed too far and there was an
electoral revolution -- and then democratic socialists were voted into power and introduced universal healthcare etc.
So people wonder why. Why would the working classes come together and create a better society for themselves in Sweden but not the US.
The reason we came up with, is because they are culturally/ethnically uniform. Therefore, politicians can't get most voters to vote against "welfare queens" and the "takers" as easy. In short, its a lot easier to split the non-wealthy vote when there all worried about thugs raping their daughters and hitting people the minute we talk about free college (see above).
The reason this countries rightwing wants to talk about Russia is obvious. Russia was a shitshow before communism, it was a shitshow during communism, and its a shitshow now. So if they can pivot the conversation to Russia -- a country that had a violent revolution an and instituted a single party dictatorship -- they derail the real conversation about why is our coverage worse than other advanced countries.
Soviet Russia is an example of
Communism -- which even then, was considered a seperate ideology from "trade-union socialism" (what they have in Germany/Sweden). Lenin lead the Russian Revolution based on the writings of Karl Marx -- but he changed Marx's view quite a bit. Rather than the spontaneous uprising of workers Marx talked about. Lenin decided that there needed to be an elite "vanguard" to educate all the factory workers and lead the revolution. He turned a populist ideology into an elitist one. Lenin forcefully argued against (and killed) people arguing for a democratic socialist system.
It kind of went downhill from there from a human right view point. Stalin (after Lenin) killed millions. Although we never really admit in the US, it was pretty god damn amazing that a country as backward as Russia was after WW1, somehow managed to surpass the US scientifically. But everyone agrees its not worth killing millions over.
Your comparing multi-party democracies to a single party dictatorships. There is no comparison -- there different systems. One is authoritarian and believes the government should create bureaucracies to allocate the resources according to "needs" (in reality according to politics). The other is a democracy with a capitalist economy that uses socialist ideas to redistribute some of the money away from the top and toward the bottom.