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jmyeetyesterday at 11:51 PM0 repliesview on HN

Just looking at the US, one can certainly point fingers at conservatism (rightly so) but I think that's missing the forest for the trees. Why? Because the so-called opposition party, the Democratic Party, is complicit is everything that's happened to get us to this point.

The problem isn't conservatism per se. It's neoliberalism (IMHO). Even more broadly, it's capitalism. There's a meme in this space that basically goes something like "when you learn about capitalism, you become either a communist or a liar".

I read something recently about how people fetishize the 1950s, particularly on the political right. A big part of what made that possible was exploitation. Obviously we had a permanent underclass since segregation was still alive and well. A lot of these "middle class" families had "help" or "a girl". But another form of exploitation was oil. We were basically stealing oil from the Middle East for pennies on the dollar.

And then Iran came out and said "maybe we don't want you to steal our oil", we couped their government, we installed our own puppet government, we continued stealing oil and this all ultimately lead to the 1970s oil crisis and the Iranian Revolution. And here we are.

Back to the US political landscape, just look at the "opposition" to this war. It's either nonexistent or it's process-based ("Congress should've approved it"), not substantive. No mainstream political force is saying what we should be saying, which is that our Middle East policy is a crime, the sanctions on Iran were and are a crime and that continued exploitation of this region is unsustainable.