Is the answer to this question no?

Aye, comrade. It is the only way! *tankie salute*

Yet another one who doesn’t understand primaries or getting better candidates on the ballot of a major party. Not believing this one simple trick: confirmed.

Reality is not all rainbows & butterflies. Systems operate according to rules we don’t control no matter how much we stubbornly refuse to accept them until we work the system to change it. Denying the system exists doesn’t change it.

Fact: the US voting system (plurality voting) lacks the sincere favorite criterion^[1]. Fact: that means strategy exists to optimize outcomes, and not following it with protest(-non)-voting can functionally help elect the candidate you like least, directly backfire, and cause worse real-world outcomes for your own values. Fact: that means lesser-evil voting is necessary in close, high-stakes races to minimize losses.

Voting in a way that backfires has real-world consequences. Denying it is like denying the consequences of pulling the trigger when a loaded gun is aimed at your nuts. If you have to vote against getting your nuts blown off & don’t (in a cute little protest), then you’re still getting nuts blown off. Protest(-non)-voting to blast your nuts off every time doesn’t lead anywhere.

The only viable way to reform this system is to elect your candidates to other offices (local, congressional, etc) to build popular support, get your candidate to run as a major party in national partisan races, and vote lesser-evil in national partisan elections until your candidate is on the ballot as a major party. Then they can reform the system.

Anything else is blasting yourself in the nuts. Worse, it’s blasting off your neighbors’ nuts & ovaries, too. Your neighbors don’t want to vote lesser-evil either, but they’re not stupid enough to pretend that other moves won’t blast off their nuts.

How is denying the right of the people to reelect whoever they want to office more democratic than fulfilling their right? Claiming democracy restricting such liberty is somehow more democratic is impressive mental gymnastics. Even with modern democracy the guiding philosophy is to restrict government to promote & protect individual liberty, not undermine liberty of the people.

Cool vibes, lack of data, & copium.

Specifically billionaires/unchecked capitalists

The easy scapegoat oversimplifies the problem, which goes beyond & predates capitalism. Though exterminating all of humanity is one way to achieve sustainability, it doesn’t necessarily require it. So far, however, humanity has reached living standards beyond subsistence only by consuming resources at unsustainable levels faster than the planet can replenish, and that has been true regardless of economic system. Even when living at subsistence levels, humanity has likely caused mass extinction events.

From a comment to a similar post

People here tend to fixate on their pet theories that scapegoat capitalism for everything including that humanity’s drain on ecological resources exceeds Earth’s rate of regeneration without acknowledging that their alternatives don’t address the problem, either.

Although governments are far more able than individuals and firms acting singly to take action to protect the environment, they often fail to do so. The centrally planned economies of Eastern Europe, where governments controlled production, had a particularly poor record on pollution control. Per capita mortality from air pollution in Eastern Europe (outside the EU) and China remains high relative to the EU and North America.

In particular, the Soviet economy—with constitutional guarantees to continuously improve living standards & steadily grow productive forces—caused disproportionately worse ecological damage than the US’s. All economic systems have the same capacity to degrade the environment & deplete stocks of natural resources. Without adequate policies to protect the environment, improving & maintaining living standards with the continuous economic growth necessary to do that threatens the environment.

Moreover, human activity before capitalism has led to extinctions of megafauna, plants, & animals dependent on those plants. The quaternary megafauna extinction was likely driven by overhunting by humans. Those extinctions & increased fires coinciding with the arrival of humanity to Australia transformed the ecosystem from mixed rainforest to drier landscapes. Aboriginal landscape burning

may have caused the extinction of some fire-sensitive species of plants and animals dependent upon infrequently burnt habitats

More recently, they killed off the elephant bird likely due to major environmental alterations & overconsumption of their eggs.

Until humanity starts living sustainably, they are the problem.

From earlier comment on similar post

Moreover, human activity before capitalism has led to extinctions of megafauna, plants, & animals dependent on those plants. The quaternary megafauna extinction was likely driven by overhunting by humans. Those extinctions & increased fires coinciding with the arrival of humanity to Australia transformed the ecosystem from mixed rainforest to drier landscapes. Aboriginal landscape burning

may have caused the extinction of some fire-sensitive species of plants and animals dependent upon infrequently burnt habitats

More recently, [indigenous people] killed off the elephant bird likely due to major environmental alterations & overconsumption of their eggs.

and I see like before the same OP still won’t do the decency to support fellow humans by following web accessibility. That sums up our conviction of humanity.

yes

Here is an historic graphic of Social Mobility in the US.

Here is the Gini Coeficient that measures inequality (the higher the more unequal), which actually understates the reality because it’s not that great at reflecting internal inequality in the top quintile (i.e. things like how the top 1% are now way much richer than the top 10% than before).

A problem with these graphs & your inferences is it’s objectively unclear what to expect. What do they look like for other countries? What part of this is explained by other factors like unique historical advantages (eg, an industrial base untouched by war during the postwar boom) dissipating as other countries rebuild & catch up? Can we decouple these time-dependent factors to get an expected baseline performance apart from them?

With that social mobility graph, should we expect nearly all children to earn more than their parents every subsequent generation indefinitely? The remarkably similar graph provided by the source cited by yours shows birthyear of the child starting in 1940. Couldn’t their parents earning substantially less, perhaps by living through the Great Depression, and the postwar boom significantly explain the high proportion earning more than their parents? And as GDP per capita growth rate declines, wouldn’t we likewise expect a declining proportion of children to earn more than their parents? A base of reference would really help here.

As for the Gini coefficient, we see a 7% range from 35% to 42%. While this is an increase, it doesn’t seem staggering & needs evidence to distinctly support your conclusion.

Some problems you mentioned were always present or worse when that Gini coefficient was lower: gerrymandering, obstructions to vote (felon disenfranchisement, intimidation, poll taxes & tests), discriminatory incarceration, 2-party system due to plurality voting, etc. They’re not new developments systematically leading in the direction you claim.

It looks like you started with your conclusion & worked backwards to confirm it with evidence that is not as conclusive as you claim. An open-minded skeptic wouldn’t be convinced.