Are U.S leaders reigniting greater socialism?

Does capitalism need better advocates?

Excerpt: "Over the quarter century from early 1983 to late 2007, the United States suffered just two brief, mild recessions: one in 1990–91, and a second that lasted only from spring to fall of 2001. From the beginning of Ronald Reagan’s second administration to the end of George W. Bush’s first, the U.S. unemployment rate never once reached 8 percent. Over that same period, inflation was low and interest rates steadily declined.

Economists call this era “the Great Moderation.” The moderating influence was felt on politics too. For nearly 50 years, Gallup has surveyed Americans’ mood with a consistent series of questions about the general condition of the country. From 1983 to 2007, the proportion of Americans satisfied with “the way things are going in the U.S.” reached peaks of about 70 percent, and was often above 50 percent.

Then the long period of stability abruptly ended. Over the 15 years from 2007 to 2022, the U.S. economy suffered the Great Recession, the coronavirus pandemic, and post-pandemic inflation: a sequence of bewildering shocks.

You can see the effects in the Gallup polling. Over this period, the percentage of Americans who described themselves as generally satisfied rarely exceeded one-third and often hovered at about a quarter.

The era of moderation yielded to a time of radicalism: Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party movement, “birtherism,” the wave of militant ideology that acquired the shorthand, “woke.” In 2015, in the throes of this radicalism, Hillary Clinton announced her second campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. In her stump speech, she listed categories that described the American electorate as she saw it, offering a fascinating portrait of the politics of the 1990s meeting the realities of the 2010s.

She dedicated her candidacy equally to “the successful and the struggling,” to “innovators and inventors” as well as “factory workers and food servers.” In other words, she addressed herself to Americans for whom the world was working more or less well, and to familiar and long-established blue-collar categories. She made no specific mention of gig workers, downwardly mobile credentialed professionals, or any of the other restless social categories that multiplied after the shock of 2008–09.

... Marxists condemn capitalism as “organized robbery.” They could not be more wrong.

But who will refute them when the government of the world’s largest capitalist democracy is in the hands of organized robbers?"