If you find yourself agreeing with authoritarians, it might be time to reassess your views.
Calling the people you disagree with as "authoritarians", "-phobes", "racist", "nazis" and all kinds of slurs, without any arguments, doesn't work in your favor or help the conversation in any way, on the contrary.
Agreeing with common sense takes doesn't make one "authoritarians".
Learn to do critical thinking and augmenting, instead of heard mentality parroting oppressive slurs against people you disagree with, just because you convicted yourself (or propaganda has) that you're on the right side of history, and everyone else with contrary viewpoints is evil reincarnate that needs to be crushed or silenced.
In general it's not authoritarians that are winning everywhere, but anti-globalists - which is disingenuously framed as authoritarianism. Globalist views were adopted on a wide scale, and they simply didn't lead to positive results, and so it's an ideology which is on the decline, ironically - globally.
The stock market, and your housing and investment portfolios going up, didn't mean that everyone was happy, just the asset holders like yourself and those in your bubble but you're not majority of the working population.
You need to learn to differentiate between "the stock market" and "the economy". Working class people can easily be getting poorer while the stock market is going up. So of course they're mad.
>People who got a yearly raise over the inflation correction for a decade
Huh? Who? Where? When? Maybe in your tech bubble but in the real world a lot of people's salaries haven't kept up with inflation, let alone consistency get raises ABOVE inflation. In France for example the average pension is now higher than the average salary.
>while I count my blessings and money globalist stylez.
Top 10%er can't understand why those bottom 90% without assets who got screwed by globalism and saw their jobs offshored and salaries and savings obliterated by inflation caused by endless money printing are mad at the globalism that caused this massive wealth transfer from the working class to the upper asset owning classes.
You can't make this up. The sheer ignorance of reality of most people and the "fuck you I got mine" attitude is shattering. No wonder young people are flirting with communism.
-- a young-ish person flirting with communism.
In a contemporary democracy we could, at least in theory, completely vote out literally every single pro-corporate, pro-war talking head in the next election. Now of course this won't ever happen, but at least in theory its an option. By contrast in communism, if one ends up unhappy with the system you have very little ability to change it.
Furthermore, in a capitalist system one can even start a communist sub-society. In fact there are many communes throughout the country, at least in the US. But in a communist system, you can't simply start a capitalist sub-society. The centralized nature of the system entails limits on freedoms, to ensure that every person is contributing to society as a whole. And this, in practice, trends towards dystopic authoritarianism in terms of how non-compliant individuals are treated.
The reason that people always claim that various efforts at communism weren't "real" communism is because the concept and theory of communism doesn't, and probably cannot, survive first contact with the interests and whims of humanity. By contrast I'd look at the overwhelming majority of the history of the US as an argument for capitalism. It's only relatively recent times, particularly after 1971 [1], that things have gone so terribly wrong.
I disagree with this assessment. The reason systems are breaking are inherent contradictions in capitalism that inevitably lead to crisis. See Crisis Theory [0] for a more thorough description of the mechanisms at play.
Communism doesn't need to be authoritarian either - Salvador Allende famously tried for a more democratic socialism before the CIA couped him away - can't have the systemic competitor look good...
This was a radical economic shift. And at first it yielded massive returns as one could expect with the ability to suddenly have infinite money in a world where, to date, money had been very "real." But over time, it turns out that pumping endless 'funny money' into an economy causes lots of bad things to happen, even when we can export much of the immediately apparent inflation.
Essentially the modern economic system we have only truly began in 1971. And it's separate from capitalism itself. The powers that be wanted the power to print unlimited money. And so they claimed that power. Prior to that year we lived in an entirely different world. For instance one interesting inflation index is a can of Campbell's tomato soup. From its introduction in 1897 to 1973 it cost about $0.10. Today it costs $1.24.
Labor value and market value have been out of sync since the beginning of market capitalism. You might have a point about the end of Bretton-Woods making it worse, but it has been broken since the beginning.
This is why the older generations were initially so aloof about the economic state of the US. They grew up in a time where they could go to college, graduate debt free, have a decent car, and even enough saved up for a down payment on their [first] house - all on income from a part time job.
You literally could not get a much more fair compensation for labor, because that's a huge chunk of the entire GDP being derived from median wages! Of course now we live in a time when the median wage is something like $50k and the GDP/capita is $90k. And many critical things, like housing, have increased in cost way beyond the rate of inflation, to the point that a median house is now something like 7 years of median labor which is just lol stupid driven by funny money that, again, mostly did not exist before 1971.
But getting back to 1960 - how would this, in any way, seem to suggest an out of sync labor value? If anything the flaw in my argument is that labor compensation was perhaps unsustainably high, because wages that high were only possible when you had a relatively large chunk of the population not working. On the other hand if we're going to create a society with a sustainable fertility rate and well raised children, then it's completely sustainable.
This is the context for Kennedy stating things like, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." Now a days even a pretty ardent nationalist would have to hold back a groan on hearing things like that, but it was a different world in the 60s.