Contrary to all the tendentious happy-talk pumped out by the corporate media, the U.S. has regressed economically to the level of Britain in the 1850s; i.e., to the functional equivalent of a Third World country. This heavily-suppressed fact smacked me in the face as I was reading a history book written in 1975 - before the elitist looting and government wrecking got started. All quotes below are from that book: Eric Hobsbawm, "The Age of Capital 1848-1875" (1975).

Let's start comparing.

Both periods had massive working class job and income insecurity, with very few salaried positions, and a lot of people being jerked around by part-time schedules that treated workers like bits of machinery:

If any single factor dominated the lives of 19th century workers, it was insecurity. (emphasis in original). They did not know at the beginning of the week how much they would bring home at the end. They did not know how long their present work would last or, if they lost it, when they would get another job or under what conditions.

Both periods offered workers minimal health insurance, and very little provision for being physically incapable of working:

They did not know when accident or sickness would hit them, and though they knew that some time in middle age - perhaps in the forties for unskilled laborers, perhaps in the fifties for the more skilled - they would become incapable of doing a full measure of adult physical labour, they did not know what would happen to them between then and death. Theirs was not the insecurity of peasants, at the mercy of periodic catastrophes like famine... It was a more profound unpredictability, in spite of the fact that probably a good proportion of workers were employed for long periods of their lives by a single employer. There was no certainty of work even for the most skilled...There was nothing that corresponds to modern social security, except charity and relief from actual destitution, and sometimes little of either.

In both periods, workers had almost no savings to fall back on (Today, half the country can't find $500 for an emergency.), and the majority of workers lived below the poverty line:

Unlike the middle class, the worker was rarely more than a hair's breadth removed from the pauper, and insecurity was therefore constant and real. He had no significant reserves. Those who could live on savings for a few weeks or months were "that rare class". The wages of the skilled were at best modest...it did not take many weeks...to reduce such a family to charity. The normal or even inevitable road of life passed across chasms into which the worker and his family might an probably would fall: the birth of children, old age, and retirement. In (some town), 52% of all working-class families with children below working age, working full time in a year of memorably good trade, could be expected to live below the poverty line...

In both periods workers' lives were "precarious" (Note that Hobsbawm used the term 40 years before David Graeber coined the "Precariat".) while the barriers to entering the elite bubble became almost insurmountable:

(workers) were united by their growing segregation from a bourgeoisie whose wealth increased dramatically while their own situation remained precarious, a bourgeoisie which became increasingly self contained and impervious to would-be entrants from below. For there was all the difference between the modest hillocks of comfort which the successful worker or ex-worker might reasonably hope to climb and the really impressive accumulations of wealth.

In both periods, the physical and mental stress on workers is extreme and many, even among the best off, are literally too tired to think; they have little comfort except religion and hopes of "another world":

(Beatrix Potter) would describe the ("comfortable working class") as physically overworked during times of busy trade, as eating and sleeping too little, as too physically exhausted for intellectual effort, at the mercy of "the many chances of breakdown and failure meaning the absence of physical comfort". The deep and simple puritan piety of these men and women was, she saw, a response to the fear of "warn-out and failed lives".

" 'Life in Christ' and hope in another world bring ease and refinement
into a mere struggle for existence, calming the restless craving after
the good things of this world by an 'other worldliness' and making failure
'a means of grace' instead of a despicable want of success."

-----

These quotes merely confirm for me the futility of working "within the system". "The system" wants what I just described - rolling society back 150 years and re-establishing a cruel, violent, parasitic, untouchable elite.

The U.S. today is a failed society. It is a Potemkin Democracy, with a fake president and a McResistance doing a Kabuki dance on behalf of our three crime families: Wall St., the MIC, and the oil industry. It has a political system run by massive bribery, a propaganda machine in place of genuine journalism, a brutal militarized police force, an intrusive security state seamlessly integrated with monopolistic corporate data miners, and a huge Gulag-like prison system that undercuts honest labor with slave labor (rightfully called "The New Jim Crow"). Our elites are busy suicidally destroying all environmental regulations and arming to the teeth for aggressive warfare. By the next election, given the Democrats willful self-destruction, the GOP will get its Constitutional Convention; and America will become the world's biggest banana republic/theocracy.

Even if we manage not to nuke the planet, the next generation will have never experienced a secure working class life. They will have been ill-educated as children. They will face a lack of meaningful, non-precarious employment opportunities, the unavailability of affordable housing and healthcare, and rampant drug abuse and gang warfare in place of community. In a generation, if we survive, Americans by and large will be locked into their new station as peons, peasants, and wage slaves. Their lives will be brutish, nasty, and short. They will be functionally illiterate and innumerate, too misinformed, uninformed or net-distracted to play their role in a real democracy.

And the elites want it that way. They have spent forty years destroying the middle class that the New Deal Democrats created. With Trump and Hillary as choices, the 2016 elections were "Mission Accomplished". No organized political force survives to stand against the neolib/neocon elites. Any attempts to work within the formal democracy are either co-opted (see Bernie Sanders quixotic attempt to get justice from the Democratic Party) or smashed (see Occupy, Dakota Access Pipeline).

AFAIAC, the game of gentlemanly politics is over until this system rots from corruption or blows up into superpower confrontation. I'm with Chris Hedges regarding the "Death of the Liberal Class" and the lack of alternatives to street demonstrations and work stoppages. I recognize that many on this board still believe that some corner of "the system" can be salvaged, and that politics as we have known it can continue. I salute you for your optimism, but I do not share it.

My only consolation is that, on our present course of environmental suicide, in a generation, the planet will be so screwed that not even all the money the 1% has looted will be able to fix it. Instead of lording it over their newly minted slaves, the elite assholes will burn, starve, and asphyxiate along with the rest of us.

Cold comfort; but its all I've got. In closing, let me say: Fuck TPTB.