Thanks for your comment ..a wonderful synopsis of where we are today. Where to from here.

it’s all about protecting privilege and increasing it, because some people can just never have enough

That’s a textbook misunderstanding. The key concept here is “ideology”, meaning in its simplest form saying one thing and standing for another. The ideology of liberalism is individual freedom. What it actually does in terms of practical politics, especially in its extreme form commonly called “neoliberalism”, is subjugation of individual freedom under the freedom of the market. But it doesn’t even stop there, because these free markets imposed by deregularization, free trade agreements etc. are actually not characterized by individual free entrepreneurs, but by multinational corporations. “Neoliberalism” is freedom not of individuals, but of corporations to exploit and destroy without liability. Totalitarianism doesn’t need to be organized through the state, it can just as well be organized through private enterprises, where the state plays the “minimal” role of arbiter of corporate interests (what Marx called ideeller Gesamtkapitalist) . That is the situation we find ourselves in today. And cronyism is not an imperfection of that system but a core feature, because the whole point of the global free market is appropriation of riches by a small “elite” at the expense of the vast majority of people.