Edit: It's unsustainable to have the top 1% holding more wealth than the entire middle class. I love Capitalism too, but it's looking like it's cracking more and more as time goes on and can't just be ignored. Something (I don't know what) has to be done. Somewhere along the way the ratio of money going to executive vs laborer has gotten way too skewed.
The reason this country survived the Revolution and, later, the Civil War, was the idea of checks and balances. Over time, there have always been fallbacks to keep one faction or another from dominating power or discourse. It's never been a perfect system, but it's worked well enough that the nation in general has been able to buy in and keep the experiment going.
What's happening is that now everyone feels like it's time to wipe those checks and balances out because of fear. The first domino to fall happened after 9/11 because people panicked - for the first time, Americans felt threatened enough to willingly abdicate their freedoms in the name of chasing safety and security. That was the opening of Pandora's Box. From that point on, it became an ever-increasing pell-mell rush to try and secure one set of freedoms by curtailing other people's. And into that vacuum of confidence rushed a group of grifters and ne'er-do-wells who saw a profit motive in keeping outrage inflamed and influencing people to move farther out to the fringes of extremism.
What that's done is set Americans at each others' throats, and each side's fringe elements are howling for the nuclear option in every possible situation. The grifters love it because they can easily monetize it, and they further know that they can shield themselves from accountability by using delaying tactics or hiding behind a political shield. With every check and balance that gets eliminated in the name of patriotism/nationalism and pseudo-religious political crusading, we lose more and more of our social safety net that is supposed to protect
all Americans from falling into the same pits of violence, toxicity, and hopelessness that have crippled so many other nations in the world. It lets the rapacious and greedy flourish at the expense of everyone else, leading to a rise of a plutocratic faction that keeps sucking up more and more wealth and then using it to gain more and more influence to protect it, like a sick perpetual motion machine.
Unless we can figure out a way to make
all Americans accountable and responsible, regardless of race, creed, gender, or other demographics... unless we can restore the checks and balances to keep the fringe elements in check and look again toward a greater, common good... then this nation is in deep trouble from which it will take generations to recover, if it ever does at all.
