Bye Capitalism - Democracy Bye
What we are witnessing is the result of the collapse of two intrinsically flawed systems: democracy and capitalism.
Both of those systems were destined to fail from day one, as neither of them ages well.
Democracy:
Democracy is a very frail system. With time, it becomes easy to manipulate, resulting in what we have been seeing in the past few years in ALL democratic systems: elected officials winning for differences less than 1%. This means that HALF of the population does not feel represented. With time, this would unavoidably result in polarization, which is what we have been witnessing in the Western world the last decade or so. Polarization results in weak and dysfunctional systems. Weak and dysfunctional systems result in angry people.
Capitalism:
Capitalism is a VERY powerful system. It is what gave power to the west, after all. It also drives a lot of the innovation we see today (mostly in consumerism and entertainment though, as capitalism can't drive real innovation) ... Except, it works against the benefit of 98% of the people. Capitalism simply doesn't work over long periods. Like democracy, it is destined to collapse over itself. Over time (decades) .. capitalism slowly moves wealth from most people to the top 1%. There comes a point where most people become too poor to purchase what the capitalism is selling them.
Despite what you might think, people in the west are poor. Especially in the USA, the mastermind of capitalism. Homelessness is over the roof. The lucky person has only $20,000 in debt. $50,000 debt per person is the average, and I am not talking about public debt, I'm talking about personal debt. Most Americans live and die in debt.
If you don't think that the west is in the weakest state it has ever been, it's time for you to start digging and researching and learning.
Democracy and capitalism were both born with an expiry date. And that expiry date turns out to be now.
Democracy, capitalism, and every other social-economic-political framework is an invention of humans. The solution isn't necessarily their opposites. Our world is changing quickly, and we need to work together on creating new economic and political systems that can potentially be sustainable. If that is even possible. Unfortunately, our kids and grandkinds will be the ones to find out if it is.
Maybe we should consider altering our systems as needed. Capitalism for 20 years to build .. then something else for 20 years to sustain. We need to get creative, and that is only possible when we learn to be less ideological, and more pragmatic.
Also keep in mind, this isn't a 500 page research paper Of course there are plenty of other factors at play. Of course things aren't black and white. Of course there are examples of success and failures.
Also keep in mind the specific context: long time spans. I'm not saying that democracy and capitalism are bad, period. It's easy to take a snapshot in time where they thrived. I'm saying that when projected over decades, they are both destined to self implode.
Why ideologies don't work: I think they don't work due to their very inflexible nature. Ideologies assume many constants. They work great in constrained societies that don't see a lot of change.
Our modern globalized civilization sees change and challenges on a daily basis. ANY ideology will eventually fail under such conditions.
Can we have an ideology that of accepting that ideologies can and NEED to evolve? I know that this defeats the core definition of an ideology. But we set the definitions anyway :D