I hate how the US manages to combine the worst parts of capitalism with creeping authoritarianism, and then has the nerve to tell us it's the price of freedom. There's no excuse for how hard basic survival has become here, especially when we're constantly told we live in the richest, greatest country on earth. On that, I fully agree.
But I brought up the "gilded cage" framing because you and
@Tommy Knocks comment's leaned on a kind of instrumentalist logic -- the idea that people might accept repression if it delivers material comfort. You might not be endorsing censorship, but that line of reasoning still risks softening how we talk about authoritarianism. It shifts the conversation from whether repression is wrong to how much it can be tolerated in exchange for stability, and that's a slope a lot of people slide down without realizing it.
We should absolutely demand the kind of competent, humane governance that gave us Medicare, strong public services, and fair, livable wages. But we should also reject the idea that political repression is somehow tolerable when paired with lower rent, better trains or mega-cities. People deserve both freedom and dignity, not one as compensation for the loss of the other.
