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Charles Koch Won; We the People Lost

‘Government is the problem’ ideology has permeated America, and most have no idea how to affect change

Mitchell Peterson
12 min readAug 12, 2022
Photo by Harold Mendoza on Unsplash

There is a litany of reasons there’s been a slow degradation of life for ordinary people in the US. The emphasis on the Wild West individualism and competition, the nature of corporations and capitalism to grow and eat everything in their path — even the foundation they’re sitting on, the flippant disregard European colonizers had and still have for other cultures, pure always classic corruption, the effectiveness of the American media apparatus, that same media and politicians wielding never healed race relations, the myth of the American dream, and ahistorical anti-communist rhetoric, as well as the cycles of economies and empire, could all be said to have played a role — and a million other things.

America is a corporate-welfare hellscape of egregious inequality masquerading as a meritocratic ‘free market’ utopia. The government is bought and purchased. Corporate America is hollowing out the country from the inside.

The citizens are afterthoughts and a Princeton study showed public opinion has almost zero effect on policy, which means the nation is very much not a democracy.

So, unfortunately, the ‘government is the problem’ rhetoric isn’t entirely wrong. Right-wingers simply have it upside down and backward; the corruption and corporate control of government is the problem.

If there was even a shred of democracy and the state houses and Congress represented constituents, not business, the country would be in a different place. We’d see the will of the people met on a variety of pressing issues, not continue to see them ignored as life for average citizens gets worse and worse and worse.

Just coming back from rural America, I was struck by how many berate the government from what they perceive as a right-wing free-market libertarian perspective. Yet few have words for the corporate control of our institutions and domination of our society.

They seem to think that eliminating the government will somehow solve all problems, but in the next breath, they will unironically bemoan the poor quality of the public schools.

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Mitchell Peterson
Mitchell Peterson

Written by Mitchell Peterson

Freelance writer in his tenth year outside the US. Currently in rural Spain writing the Substack bestseller and soon-to-be book, 18 Uncles.

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