The US banking system captured the benefits of the industrial revolution prior to 1920, but allowed the people enough of those benefits to present the illusion of prosperity through the roaring 20s. Of course, they were financing that prosperity themselves and couldn't make the payments when economic growth abruptly ended in '29, ushering in the great depression.
The people retaliated by taking back control of money creation in '34 when FDR ended the domestic restraint of the gold standard and used the constitutional authority given congress to create money without restraint to fund the New Deal and, later, the WWII war effort. That spending of new money, along with being the only economy not bombed to smithereens in the war and the birth of the labor moment, gave us the longest period of economic prosperity and growth in the history of the world.
The oligarchy created some minor hiccups in our energy supply chains and an ill conceived war in Viet Nam that drained off much of our productive capicity, creating a self feeding inflationary cycle in the '70s and exasperated that with lousy monetary policy. That generated a general mistrust of government and gifted us with an even worse fiscal policy course under the guise of "fiscal conservatisem", otherwise known as "trickle down" economics.
In spite of a history that shows that fiscal spending in excess of taxation is required to fund real growth in the economy and population, we have been stuck in a political quagmire of propaganda predicting economic disaster should we ever attempt to recreate the conditions that history suggests will benfefit the working class and protect the poor from actual physical demise.
This is a failure of the left that is now habitually rolling over to appease an ever growing cult of economic ignorance while sustaining itself politically with cultural battles involving identity politics. As if it matters what pronouns our masters refer to them by as future generations enter indentured servitude should they be missed by the mass shooters in their school and actually reach adulthood. Even then, they will never reach economic freedom as they will be further enslaved by the cost of financing their own education demanded by their masters to enable them the privilege of serving.
I don't see an avenue of potential escape for the people from this. With the left safeguarding the right from any real challenge of ideas we certainly can't vote our way out. Potential candidates who simply offer what every other advanced democracy in the world takes for granted are accused of being crackpots and radicals. I'm afraid that outright revolution and armed rebellion are much nearer than we might imagine, but the people who currently promote such drastic action are even further to the fascist right than we now have in leadership.
It could be that the Achilles heel of democracy is - - -democracy, and none of us is as stupid as all of us. We may just be screwed.
