> Slightly tangentially to your comment, I believe that people tend to vote based on the fact they believe they either are, or will soon be, part of the one percent.
As quoted in A Short History of Progress (2004) by Ronald Wright:
> John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. This helps explain why American culture is so hostile to the idea of limits, why voters during the last energy shortage rejected the sweater-wearing Jimmy Carter and elected Ronald Reagan who told them it was still “morning in America.” Nowhere does the myth of progress have more fervent believers.
Socialism/Anarchism has serious roots in the United States. See the history of the underground railroad, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and actual gun battles against the militias of the bosses (Pinkermen), workers opposition to the first world war and their jailing for anti-war propaganda (anti-war doesn't mean anti-revolution, on the contrary), etc..
At some point of course a lot of people are gonna think a 0.001% to become a millionnaire and 99.99% chance to stay a wage slave all your life is better than great chances to be detained, mutilated or assassinated by the police or a militia.
The irony of how little May 1st means in the US today, is that May 1st as the international day of labor demonstrations stems in part from the AFL announcing to the First International that they planned to pick up demonstrations for the 8 hour day again, in part in commemoration of the Haymarket Massacre.
So in large parts of the world organised labour annually takes part in demonstrations as a direct result of the commitment of US unions.
Indeed, I think HN has a bug[1] where posts about labor rights are implicitly downranked. This can happen even when the topic is technologically interesting (such as here) and the workers in question are tech workers. I hope we’ll fix this bug soon, because HN is really the perfect place to voice concerns about labor right issues related to tech workers.
That said there were some pretty goods discussions following the walkout at Blizzard/Activation where this implicit downranking didn’t happen. I want to see more of that.
