> though the forever pursuit of more material wealth is exactly what brought the USA to this point
I disagree. Itβs the corruption of democratic politics with money. And rage-based content providers (on cable TV and social media) who take any consumer/worker surplus and ram it into invented culture wars.
I don't think we are disagreeing, expanding my point: the forever pursuit of more material wealth narrowed whatever was the USA's vision as a nation.
More material wealth showed other good indicators for society being correlated to it, culminating in the misguided ideology with Reagan that only caring about advancing material wealth is enough to advance society.
Since then the whole point of the USA is to further material wealth, and the belief that societal benefits will inevitably trickle down from this advancement. My firm belief after 40-50 years of empirical data about this experiment is that it was completely misguided and missed the forest for the trees.
Within this ideology all the issues you brought up branched from: corporations and moneyed interests got even more power; to keep power those moneyed interests need to corrupt democratic processes.
Rage-based content providers is just another facet of power maintenance mechanisms, if you have capital and want to push your agenda you need the media for it, and since your main purpose is to have an audience to push this agenda you will, inevitably, rely on content that is easy to churn out while keeping this audience, hence the rage-based content landscape that is very prevalent in the USA.
I think people have different connotations for the word wealth. For some that means people being able to afford housing, Healthcare, or taking a day off to spend with their children.
I think it is simply wrong on the facts that the national government has been primarily focused on raising national GDP and material well-being, or that it has done a good job.
The topic of growth is almost absent from campaign messaging, and investment in infrastructure for the future is a minuscule part of budgets.
If economic growth was the priority, we would see streamlined code and legislation throughout the country and focus on improving them. Politicians would be spending their time trying to figure out how to lower the costs of High-Speed Rail or Bridges or houses.
