US election 2024 - democracy voting itself out

Assume for the sake of argument that Steve Bannon and his ilk didn't successfully steal the election as they were fairly openly planning to do, and there is no proof that they did, but also no one seems to be really looking into that. Right up until election day there were adamant claims the election would be stolen, and pretty much every thing Trump accuses his opponents of is projection, but let's put that to one side.

Also assume that the oligarchs backing Trump were at least somewhat counterbalanced by the oligarchs backing Harris. Musk et al did mean most of the big money was on Trump's side and blatantly buying the election, and while this was significantly worse than usual even for US politics it certainly wasn't new, and bipartisan, if not equally so.

That means that a majority of US citizens knowingly voted for not just a known truly heinous and corrupt individual but one openly expressing authoritarian intentions such as mass deportations, attacks on "the enemy within" and maintaining the purity of the "national blood", who thinks that the existential threat of climate change is a hoax. This seems like proof that representative democracy is doomed to fail, happily voting itself out of existence.

While Dutton isn't as bad as Trump, but that is a very high bar, he does seem to be doing his best to emulate him, and it is looking increasingly likely that we will get a local franchise of Trumpism next year. Our hollowed out democracies seem destined to fail, at best just continuing entirely as a facade.

At present it seems the only thing that will likely interrupt this decline back into feudalism and the rule of oligarchs is the actual end of civilisation due to actively accelerated climate change. So faith in democracy is pretty hard to sustain just now, perhaps only outdone by the effort to sustain any sense of hope in the future. I am grimly clinging to the distinction between representative democracy and actual democracy. The future however looks bleak.

How to break up a duopoly?

It is unclear how the policy to force Coles and Woolworths to divest would work in practice. At present they have economies of scale and an effective duopoly that is not just national but at the local level.

For instance if Coles was forced to divest some of its stores would the now separate stores introduce any actual local competition? Is it assumed that Coles would then open new stores in the same area to compete with their former stores? How many separate stores could most areas actually sustain?

The buildings aren't really the most important part of the business despite often limited suitable locations, but rather the access to the supply and logistical network, which is inherently centralised and where the economies of scale come in.

So are we not talking about divesting stores but some other aspects of the business that would somehow introduce competition, and if so what?

Perhaps if stores are divested from Coles or Woolworths in each local market to create a new public alternative or confederation of co-operatives, though it would still have to develop a new supply and logistical network to be able to effectively compete.

In terms of competition policy I have often wondered that if instead of trying to reinject competition back into markets if it wouldn't make more sense to acknowledge that a company or companies have effectively won the competition, that market is now mature, so game over you're nationalised.

If after that the so-called free market wants to claim that private enterprise is inherently more innovative (without any real evidence) then they would be welcome to try and compete with the supposedly inefficient public sector.