Friday, October 11, 2019

How wealth and cronyism transformed American democracy

Reality TV star Trump leveraged social media and anti-establishment politics into a takeover of the Republican Party.

In his television show Servant of the People, comedian and filmmaker Zelensky portrayed a high school teacher whose rant against the political class goes viral and becomes the basis for a successful presidential campaign.

In a double case of life imitating art, both Trump and Zelensky wound up portraying versions of Zelensky's character Vasyl Petrovych Holoborodko in real life.

Unexpectedly, Trump's relation to Ukraine threatens the viability of the movements it helped create.

Just as Trump needn't have broken any laws for the Democrats to impeach him, Hunter Biden needn't have violated any statute to symbolize the cronyism of America's political class.

For decades, the economies that emerged from the wreckage of the Soviet Empire have been playgrounds for American political professionals to deploy their tricks of the trade, their skills at campaign management and public relations, in lucrative arrangements.

From Varsity Blues to Jeffrey Epstein, from China and the NBA to Ukraine and Hunter Biden, Americans are taking a crash course on the ways in which powerful people manipulate the system for personal advantage and globalization merges political cultures as well as economies.

https://freebeacon.com/columns/we-are-all-ukrainians/

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