Ill freely admit I straight up didn't see your second half of the comment, to the point where I thought you edited it until I saw that wasn't the case. My bad, does no one any good to argue against a strawman.

In any case, our unions aren't near as good or as effective as the unions in Europe, and the difficulty they have in trying to get companies to listen to them is indicative of the problems we have. Our democracy is subverted by the cold truth that companies buy out our politicians, which means that unions are disempowered by both federal and state lawmakers.

Our government works to ensure that the work place can only function as a dictatorship, and they push the narrative that unions are weak and ineffectual and just take your money through dues. The government made things this way.

I mean for Christ's sake, Biden busted the most important strike in this country in probably the last three decades, and we're already seeing the horrific consequences.

This country is democratic, more so than a lot of places, but it is wildly less democratic in our day to day lives than a lot of our allies in Europe. It's not hard to see why they think we live in an authoritarian hellhole, because by comparison to what they've got, we freaking do.