Your profile says you're a SWE at Meta, not working at a nail salon and a daycare. You work for one of the most powerful and wicked companies on the planet, and you're here to tell us how jaded you are and how hopelessly naive the idea of keeping a republic is? The poster you're responding to doesn't sound so naive, and probably isn't as privileged either. They said specifically that it wasn't easy, but that everyone has a chance.

Here's what I see: We have immigrants from poor communities as members of Congress who influence foreign policy. We have activists on all sides organizing people into constituencies that flip our government every four years. I have a friend who owns a business, works 7 days a week, and still manages to serve on the local board of education. The mayor or my city is a small business owner. Every week it seems there are mass protests organized for some cause, and local politicians respond to them, and the causes filter into congressional debate. Not everyone spends their free time navel-gazing at their broken mind and spirit, I guess.

> trying to recover your broken mind and spirit

You have a very strange view of how most people approach jobs. And politics.

On the contrary, yours is the naive view. It's just disguised with extreme cynicism, but they are often one and the same. Everything will fall short if measured against Utopian, wishful thoughts about how democracy/society ought to work.

But there is such a rich, colorful history of regular people building civic institutions and movements in this country - from unions, to legal movements, to civil rights movements - you have to really work to not see it.

Progress is often slow, frustrating and filled with many setbacks and losses. We certainly have tons of headroom to even the odds between all the Davids and all the Goliaths, but any victories achieved on that front is probably going to be because some regular people decided they had enough and fought for it.

About 5% of the labor force works more than one job btw - and this number doesn't seem to fluctuate all that much. Not totally insignificant, but people with multiple jobs are outliers.