Krystal Ball had a piece on millennials that I thought was worth highlighting here:

It can't be a surprise that neoliberalism, which produces pseudo-solutions which have as their main purpose the endless resuscitation of capitalism, would impact a generation of human beings who are beginning to recognize that they have nothing to gain under capitalism, because they are locked into the bottom tier of a "two-tier economy" and that the future brings nothing besides the steady shrinkage of their own net worth. Their situation, as Saagar Enjeti mumbles at the end of this video, is a "recipe for radicalism."

I dunno, maybe Krystal and Saagar think they are pitching this to a specific audience or something, but it seems to me that the "recipe for radicalism" needs further exploration. So back in 2018, when I was in southern California taking care of my dying Mom, CNBC, of all the corporate hack sites, put out this piece: "Most young Americans prefer socialism to capitalism, new report finds". Now, I don't particularly care that the young Americans who were discovered by this report did not have a distinct idea of what socialism was; what's important is that they preferred it to capitalism. So even before the pandemic one could see a growing disillusionment with the status quo and the garbage arguments used to promote it.

Anyway, here's my question: why isn't everyone a radical? It seems to me that it's not just the immediate losers in the economic game who should be recognizing the distinct possibility of further collapse at this point, or for that matter the compound nature of the crisis, from economics to politics to medicine to education to priorities to the climate. At some point there should be some sort of mass awakening to the reality that mass-media-promoted cheap and easy solutions are not going to retain the smallest appearances of relevance to anyone who doesn't live in the bubble of wealth in which the super-rich hide.

I'm sure the answers for why this hasn't happened yet are all tied into the whole notion of traditional voters, voters who vote for X because they voted for X in the last cycle, or that there's some sort of bandwagon effect going on, or that, having once-upon-a-time pledged allegiance to the status quo, they find it hard to dissent. Eventually, though, the whole (D) versus (R) show, with its rotating elites and its chains of command and its client system wherein money buys all of the people who supposedly persuade us -- eventually the public faith in all of that has to collapse, along with all the public's faith that any of the bought-and-paid-for politicians or their corporate clients are worth anything more than their mass-media PR. At some point, after absorbing X number of lies, people wake up and recognize: hey, that's a lie. No?