Miguel Afonso Caetano<p>"So on the one hand, this is all pretty dismal. It also makes the trend towards electing anti-democratic politicians who want to abolish elections a lot easier to understand: if you (correctly) believe you live in a world where politicians don't care about you, then why not vote for a strongman who'll punish your enemies and maybe leave you with a few more crumbs?</p><p>But on the other hand, this is very exciting, because it shows us what a truly democratic world would look like (and just how different that world would be from the billionaire astroturf-dominated social media world)! If the popular will can achieve primacy, we would live in a veritable paradise!</p><p>It also explains how candidates like Zohran Mamdani were able to clobber the political establishment simply by a) telling people that he would do popular things; and b) convincing them that he meant it.</p><p>Suppressing popular preferences in (nominal) democracies isn't easy. It requires absolute unity of the ruling classes. Whenever the faintest crack appears in capital's unity, good policies gush out of it. That's what's happened with antitrust this decade, where the divisions between billionaire rentiers like Apple/Google and the millionaire capitalists who want to escape their 30% app tax has allowed a rush of effective antitrust enforcement to sweep the world, to the detriment of both:"</p><p><a href="https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/07/the-people-no-2/#water-flowing-uphill" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">pluralistic.net/2025/08/07/the</span><span class="invisible">-people-no-2/#water-flowing-uphill</span></a></p><p><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Politics" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Politics</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/USA" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>USA</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Kleptocracy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Kleptocracy</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Capitalism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Capitalism</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Democracy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Democracy</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Antitrust" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Antitrust</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Billionaires" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Billionaires</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Inequality" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Inequality</span></a></p>