/lit/ - Literature

>>19250319
I read recently that one of the top donors for a border wall project in Texas is Timothy Mellon, who is the ultra-rich grandson of Andrew Mellon, the Gilded Age industrialist and treasury secretary under Coolidge and Hoover (also a supporter of Mussolini). Tim Mellon was also a big Trump donor. And I can't even find a picture of this guy. So "politics" as such in the U.S. feels like a dispute between these people, and for everyone else, what distinguishes them is how they're mobilized to vote every four years -- which is why American election season feels like the Gangs of New York when Bill the Butcher kicks in the saloon door to round people up to Pokemon go to the polls:

https://youtu.be/dg8E6AEeVtI

The parties are not even real political parties as I think Europeans would understand them. Like, I'd read about somebody getting "expelled" by a political party in Europe. Like, what? Well, they have "members" of these parties, while being a "member" of the Democratic or Republican parties is just voting for them. Or party conventions in Europe will actually involve defining the party's agenda -- maybe it's more limited than I think. But the party conventions in the U.S. are pre-arranged, scripted shows. They don't even bother to uphold the party platform. Or maybe the parties here would be like "fronts" in other countries of different parties, business groups, unions, religious associations, ethnic groups, etc. etc. etc. Or maybe they're like corporations, with the Republicans having more of an MLM-type structure and Trump was successful because he merged his brand with it and took it over so he became the top of the pyramid, and conservative "activists" try to rise up or suck from the upward flow of money by recruiting other people into the scheme -- so it has a bubble and burst pattern.

They even hire failed actors to be talking heads like Candace Owens. Apparently her and some other minor MAGA celebs were poached from some hire-an-actor website. It's Hollywood politics. Obama, Trump... they're celebs, actors.

China has a Leninist structure. So the party is like a shadow organization that parallels via party cells every other institution in society depending on its size. They'll be embedded in the school system, the government (of course), the military (commissars / political officers), and even private businesses, and you have to be a party member -- vetted by the 12380 (the CPC Organization Department) -- to have a significant career (professor, director of a state-owned factory, etc.). This summer was interesting because it's the party anniversary so they went all out with the propaganda and expressing this thing as a very real and very powerful organization:

https://youtu.be/RBrW8eQIqSI