they don’t clip the top, and they don’t protect informational borders, so they have plutocrats relentlessly financing division among people with objectively common interests. 1/

you can have plutocrats and hierarchy enforced and sustained by social division, or democratic governance by something like a broad consensus. but the two regimes are oil and water. 2/

(it’s often a bad idea to reason from international experience as though nations are independent experiments.) /fin