The main goal of an economic system is to function, and not to provide aspiration for society. I get that. But the fact that capitalism is inherently goalless and prescribes an endless game of musical chairs where after every round, the person with the most chair will get to claim another chair, is demoralizing for the rest of the participants. As the excess wealth generated by offshoring exploitation can no longer keep up with the speed at which inequality is growing, capitalism, if continues to go unchecked, will break the environment and the people before breaking the very economic system it created in the first place.
The anger toward capitalism and the anger toward the anger toward capitalism
Capitalism is only ever tolerated in a democracy. Society must tolerate the inherent inequality between the capitalists and the workers. It can perhaps provide aspiration for certain individuals who hope to defy statistics and become rich one day. But it provides no collective aspiration for a society to better itself without seeing it through the lens of individuals. It creates a world with renters who aspire to become landlords one day but at the same time creates a world where there are fewer and fewer landlords and more and more renters. It creates a world where laborers dream of exchanging their labor for capital so they may one day profit from the labor of others. These are the lottery buyers.
But, over the past 50 years or so, younger people have gotten more educated but with disproportionally larger debt and less wealth, and lower wages after adjusting for inflation. The more visible inequality viewed by a more politically literate population means a growing discontent with capitalism. Monarchies fell as people grew disillusioned with the church and the idea of a higher power, and from that birthed the idea of governments by the people, but with capitalism, there seemed to be no replacement. The defeat of communism, however staged, seemed so absolute and thorough that the only known alternative to capitalism seems out of the question, and so people become discontent without a goal.
Capitalism is also cruel because one of its tenets, in its purest sense, is the belief that nobody deserves anything, that not even newborn children deserve happiness, and that everything must be earned — unless you already have capital. Basic human rights, such as access to water and food and shelter, and education, are fulfilled by charity and not by duty.
The gap between those who feel discontent versus the delusionally optimistic lottery buyers is also generational, because time embodies inequality under capitalism. Generally in the US, the older you are, the more capital you are likely to have. The older you are, the less inequality you are likely to experience. The older you are, the more echo-y your social circle is likely to be. The geographical self-isolation of the robust middle class that existed through most of the lives of the boomer generation also made them more reluctant to rebel against the more tolerable level of inequality they personally experience. It is fair to think that inequality is okay if it is meant to uplift more people out of poverty than it oppresses, and that inequality is okay if capitalism meant ensuring their middle-class lifestyle.
More often than not, collective ideological shifts are driven by circumstances, although most people tend to believe that it is the other way around because of how we teach morality and principles that keep up the founding myths of the US. But there is a practical reason for millennials and Gen-Zers to move to the left, because with the cost of commodities has outpaced wages to the point that the worker could no longer outrun capitalism and they would be forever renting everything from the capitalists.
The nihilism toward change and the fear toward change
The term late-stage capitalism evokes a comparison to cancer. A cancer that has metastasized. A cancer that is too late to be operated on. A cancer that has taken over the body, and, will eventually die with the body. The saying “There is no ethical consumption in capitalism” gives the similar idea, in that all our hands are collectively covered with blood and so if we revolt against the system, we would be revolting against ourselves. We will be hypocrites. We will need to be hypocrites to win but hypocrites can’t win. Thus, the growing nihilism.
I wouldn’t go as far as to say that “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” but I might say that “It’s easier to imagine the end of the United States than the end of capitalism.”
The government and the economy of the US, that it is a federal republic and that it is a capitalistic economy, is a core component of the US national identity. Take the French as an example, their government has only existed in its current form for 60 years whereas the idea of being French has existed for 1500 years. The idea of overthrowing the government — not just the current administration, but the entire government — will not invoke the same identity crisis for the French as it would for an American. Thus, for an American, the fear to change is intertwined with their identity. Because if America adopts a different form of government or economic model, it will cease to be the America as Americans know it — because the current version of America is the only America anyone has ever known.
The rub
The two core identities of America, that it is a democracy and a capitalistic economy, are anti-thesis to each other and we are seeing that conflict coming to a head. Microscopically in time, a free market is as free and as fair as a democracy demands, but over time, inequality would build up to the point that it would threaten the core principles of democracy. So depending on which one of them is more important to America, one of them must be set aside, or it will risk losing both.
