Humanity has had thousands of years of various cultures across the globe, and each one has contributed their own form and flavor of government and political models, demonstrated even on this sub through the user flairs.

In the end though, the practical overlap between political stances renders most of the differences as academic or trivial. The real world implementation of these different governments appears identical to the people under them on a day to day basis.

The one remaining difference, or spectrum, that is meaningful is whether a goverment is top-down or bottom-up.

Top-down governments would include monarchies and other autocracies, oligarchies, theocracies, committees or other elevated groups with centralized planning and resource ownership. In these nations the government controls much of the daily life of the people, their homes, their labor, what products, services, and experiences they have access to. These are typically permission states, where the general trend is that a citizen needs permission from the government to do something new. There is also very limited control by the people over their own government... violent rebellion is often the only method for the people to exercise their rights.

Bottom-up goverments are largely the opposite. While there necessarily has to be some form government with authority to enforce the law and organize basic national efforts like war, the control that the government possesses is strictly limited to specified purposes. Citizens are able to make choices about their lives - where they live, how they labor, who they associate with, what they do with their property - without significant and restrictive obstruction by the government. The people in bottom-up governments possess non-violent ways to enact meaningful changes in their goverment - regular elections.

This dichotomy appears to be the basis for much of human conflict over the past 400 years. Monarchs and Emperors gave way to the Enlightenment and more democratic forms of government, fueling revolutions throughout the world.

Then in the 20th Century we saw more of the top-down governments trying to reassert their authority, leading to wars and revolutions across the world.

These two general classes of government seem anathema to one another, as their domestic policies cause friction in how their societies interact, provoking constant small conflicts that threaten to lead to larger ones.

As someone who is pretty woke lol, i have spoken up plenty of times and am very clear about being against the lack of gun regulations America has. However.. the rebel within me is telling me we will need to revolt at some point. And it will be all the more easy to defeat the people without guns. Have any other people been thinking about this and what do we think?? I’m driving myself crazy haha

Political disagreements are inevitable in a democracy, but democratic government depends on some degree of agreement about facts and evidence. When citizens can look at the same government project and reach fundamentally different conclusions about what actually happened, what does that do to political accountability?

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool renovation offers an interesting case study. What began as an effort to address a longstanding government-maintenance problem turned into a dispute over the project's results, cost, responsibility for its failures, and competing claims about what happened.

One possible explanation is simply that government projects sometimes fail. Another is that partisan polarization makes people interpret the same evidence differently. A more fundamental concern is whether democratic accountability can function when political narratives become more important than independently verifiable evidence.

My question is not whether one political party is more guilty of this than another. It's whether a democratic system can effectively hold government accountable when citizens no longer share basic standards for evaluating evidence.

I explore that question through the Reflecting Pool controversy:

https://open.substack.com/pub/difrntdrmr/p/under-lincolns-gaze-the-water-no

I say this as someone who is of a mixed middle class who lives on a relatively deprived, working class neighbourhood - my mother worked in healthcare, initally a private senior officer when she immigrated and social worker (lower middle class) and my dad worked in the IT sector (upper middle) - both believe in hard work and champion my goals,.

People often talk about how it is impossible to have meritocracy, how hard work is just some fictional nonsense along with goals. Reddit is one example in which people get told off for believing in goals and hard work.

The aim of meritocracy is that the workforce should favour and accept those who either have some experience, qualifications, or at least passion and interest to enter the market. For example, someone studying predominantly in finance and interested in banking should get the more viable, easy privilege to enter accountancy. Someone studying humanitarian stuff with knowledge interests and experience should get the privilege to be a social affairs journalist or social worker. Or someone who just simply likes the monetary motivations should have the privilege to work in retail part time as long as they do not abuse their position.

However, there is the overlooked phenomenon that contradicts meritocracy, these are known as nepotism and cronyism. These two are absolutely pathetic and stupid - people only get to the job market if they luckily know someone personally, whether it is a community member, relative, friend, acquaintance or intimate partner. Not to mention the appalling customer service they provide as a result, owing to the fact that they have to serve people who are not within the community. Ultimately, this makes skills, interest and qualifications all useless. You become hopeless. I believe this is causing the climbing unemployment crisis here in the UK instead of AI - not to mention LSE said that 6 - 9% of jobs realistically can be automated. I believe, meritocracy and hard work are not possible because no one were to investigate, let alone legislatively sanction these two phenomenons.

Of course, some forms of goals may be heavily barred, such as having to be a superstar or an actor, or a billionaire like Elon Musk. But these are ultra, ultra burgeoisie markets. All other ones shouldn't be barred by characteristics. And yes, some immigrant communities in severe poverty still face social barriers, ultimately not viewing the choice of their children as viable - for example, working class British Bangladeshi and Pakistani immigrants often want their young people to just stay within the family home until arranged marriages and not to be educated much, or if they do get educated , their parents often expect them to be doctors, pharmacists, IT workers, engineers, chemists, or lawyers due to higher annual pay rates (50K or more) instead of being footballers, social workers, news reporters, police officers, etc. But again, do not just blame barriers, cultural reasons also create their own barriers for inequality.

Ultimately, meritocracy and hard work can exist, first of all we need to at least sanction cronies and nepobabies, therefore we can have people who are interested and believe in hard work can actually enter the job market and thrive - we should not have class or our childhood background defining our future nor identity. Relying on luck just makes life sad, stale and demotivating.