Post-Brown billionaires: The state of the city and nation

Unbridled oligarchy rears its ugly head. – Art: Kenya Ratcliff, AI by Bay View Editorial Board If you were paying any attention to demographic and economic forecasts in the 1990s, you would have noticed that by the 2020s the U.S. was projected to be majority non-white and the economy of China was projected to match or surpass that of the United States. You might have thought these forecasts presaged some significant shifts in domestic and international politics. Welcome to 2024, when the U.S. presidency is dominated by a demagogic billionaire replacement theorist promoting tariffs on Chinese goods. Make no mistake, fascism at the intersection of casino capitalism and white nationalism has arrived in the American republic, and it’s going to be a lot worse than many have dared to imagine. But we haven’t arrived here because most Americans are plutocracy craving nativists. While that is a very powerful element that now occupies the top of the political ladder, we arrived here because of the indifference of traditional elites in both major parties to the deeply festering socio-economic inequality that defines contemporary reality. As Giambattista Vico, an Italian philosopher of the Enlightenment period, observed, there comes a time in the life...