We (the US) had a very successful, carefully designed system that seems to have been an unstable configuration. It was neither hammer and sickle nor single megacorporation: it was balanced on a hill between both.
The combination of (1) checks and balances, (2) separation of money, religion, corporation, and government, and (3) regulation in moderation worked pretty well for around 200 years. Monopolies and labor abuses were mostly in check. Prosperity was widely shared. Churchill might have said it's "the worst possible system, except for all the others."
Around the mid 70s it started to go astray with the income gap and collection of obscene personal wealth and unchecked corporate powers. With the repeal of Citzens United, that was the end of it. We all know that playing defense against constant assault from an opponent with unlimited resources is a losing proposition.
If we do manage to oust the 1%, we could in theory reset to that decision point: with a few additional constitutional safeguards to keep money out of politics, strengthen ethics barriers for all three branches, etc, we might go another 200 years.
> We (the US) had a very successful, carefully designed system
The idea that it was "very successful" basically comes from ignoring things like the Civil War, and the idea that it was "carefully designed" comes from building a fiction around the output and ignoring the process that actually produced it (in no small part aided by people viewing the after-the-drafting sales campaign of the Federalist Papers as if it reflected a real coherent rationale that went into building the system rather than a marketing campaign developed for a particular audience for an existing product.)
the current us capitalist system is essentially a post-civil war system... considering the us started as a wartorn backwater in 1860 and wound up as the dominant nation in world by 1950 says something.
I don’t think the U.S. system was ever perfectly stable even in the "golden years". There were always contradictions—like slavery that showed the checks and balances weren’t flawless.
200 years? And went wrong in 1970? The USA absolutely wasn't a good system in 1770, and has sucked for a lot of people for large fraction of those years.
Civil War was about as far from "balanced" as you can get, and the problems weren't even on the axis of "hammer and sickle" vs "single megacorporation".
The New Deal was a radical change in the economic organisation of the USA, basically ended Laissez-faire. Before that point, there was enough social unrest that, for the people at the time, I think it wouldn't have seemed at all implausible the USA would have faced an actual communist revolution similar to the one in Russia, because of events such as e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
> it wouldn't have seemed at all implausible the USA would have faced an actual communist revolution
Read the first volume of Robert Caro's biography of LBJ, and you'll see that the militant farmers and tradespeople of Ohio were on the verge of declaring independent soviets when the New Deal began.
The fundamental contradiction between the working class and the owning class (over maximizing vs minimizing wages) continues to exist, which means that any system that tries to manage that contradiction can't be permanently stable. Social democracy is the best known and most successful strategy for managing class conflict, but in the US and UK it was only fairly stable while the USSR meaningfully threatened to overtake them economically, and collapsed completely when the USSR did. It has lasted longer in Europe, but has clearly also been in decline since the 90s, with various governments resorting to "austerity" or having it forced on them.
I still question your claims of cause and effect here. The US abandoned this well before the USSR had fallen, and the reason the rest of Europe followed suit was not the fall of the USSR, but merely because they were blindly following the US, which they saw as a leader in this matter.
But plenty of countries did not follow down that part. There's no reason to assume this can't be stable, but you do need to limit the influence of big money and neoliberalism on your society.
> Monopolies and labor abuses were mostly in check
Really? Transatlantic slavery by far the biggest labour abuse, then the company towns, then Standard Oil which was allowed to run amok for 30 years then broken up (which then consolidated into ExxonMobil and Chevron again). These are just off the top of my head.
The US from my point of view has been a puritanical, borderline genocidal, enslaving, cowardly and hypocritical, and yet nosy entity that discarded its inconvenient founding and history.
Its success I daresay has been entirely contingent on its remoteness from the rest of humanity (which fed into its exceptionalism narrative), and comparatively sparse population. By many measures the Roman and British empires were 'more successful'.
>By many measures the Roman and British empires were 'more successful'.
With the Roman Empire you are overlooking their slavery, genocide, etc, most of your critique applies. Britain at least outlawed slavery at home, but not in territories abroad, hence the slavery in the Americas and elsewhere
The combination of (1) checks and balances, (2) separation of money, religion, corporation, and government, and (3) regulation in moderation worked pretty well for around 200 years. Monopolies and labor abuses were mostly in check. Prosperity was widely shared. Churchill might have said it's "the worst possible system, except for all the others."
Around the mid 70s it started to go astray with the income gap and collection of obscene personal wealth and unchecked corporate powers. With the repeal of Citzens United, that was the end of it. We all know that playing defense against constant assault from an opponent with unlimited resources is a losing proposition.
If we do manage to oust the 1%, we could in theory reset to that decision point: with a few additional constitutional safeguards to keep money out of politics, strengthen ethics barriers for all three branches, etc, we might go another 200 years.