I wouldn't border on belaboring the subject if I didn't believe the words necessary to discuss it, mimic the words of Dave Baerwald's songs.

From Andrew sullivan:

" Market capitalism and revolutionary technology in the past couple of decades have transformed our economic and cultural reality, most intensely for those without college degrees. The dignity that many working-class men retained by providing for their families through physical labor has been greatly reduced by automation. Stable family life has collapsed, and the number of children without two parents in the home has risen among the white working and middle classes. The internet has ravaged local retail stores, flattening the uniqueness of many communities. Smartphones have eviscerated those moments of oxytocin-friendly actual human interaction. Meaning — once effortlessly provided by a more unified and often religious culture shared, at least nominally, by others — is harder to find, and the proportion of Americans who identify as “nones,” with no religious affiliation, has risen to record levels. Even as we near peak employment and record-high median household income, a sense of permanent economic insecurity and spiritual emptiness has become widespread. Some of that emptiness was once assuaged by a constantly rising standard of living, generation to generation. But that has now evaporated for most Americans.

New Hampshire, Ohio, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania have overtaken the big cities in heroin use and abuse, and rural addiction has spread swiftly to the suburbs. Now, in the latest twist, opioids have reemerged in that other, more familiar place without hope: the black inner city, where overdose deaths among African-Americans, mostly from fentanyl, are suddenly soaring. To make matters worse, political and cultural tribalism has deeply weakened the glue of a unifying patriotism to give a broader meaning to people’s lives — large numbers of whites and blacks both feel like strangers in their own land. Mass immigration has, for many whites, intensified the sense of cultural abandonment. Somewhere increasingly feels like nowhere."

The above describes what is undergirding what I call the trickle- down-- greed era

It's tenacity, thus its propagation, is exacerbated, by Fareed Zakaria's observation that our diversity is no longer defined by immigration, but rather by resident location based on income level. In short, the rich are living with the rich, so on down to, the poor are living with the poor.

That places the poor outside the usual purview of attention. Greed, trickled down becomes survival. The pain of endless disappointment, the failure to realize any form, hence, any sense of community results, finally, in a reach for sedation, swallowing the sun.

Capitalism run amuck may have in store for democracy the same result as Communism run amuck: Tyranny.

Surround a leader, who see himself as a strongman, with military advisors: Who knows?