It’s all a moot point when you consider the anti-democratic functions of our EC and winner-take-all district system.
Yelling at the One Trump Voter or the One Jill Stein Voter or the One Hilary Clinton/Joe Biden/Bernie Sanders Primary Voter or what-the-fuck-ever is meaningless in the context of machine politics that ultimately decide who runs for office and who wins. The tiny cartel of partisan State Secretaries purging millions of voter registrations with a bias towards demographic groups that favor opposition parties will have a far more significant impact than your single ballot choice. The billions spent on advertising and marketing to shape public perception and limit the scope of national discourse, the tens of billions spent to orchestrate national media and pander to certain elite, overly represented economic interests, and the decades of Cold War propaganda we’ve been drenched in since Paul Weyrich, Pat Buchanan, and James Dobson gaslite generations of evangelical voters into believing defunding Medicaid would save unborn children, are far more responsible for the current state of electoral politics than your 11th hour hot take on who should be President.
Americans want desperately to believe that their liberal democracy isn’t like the kletocracies and kakocracies of the Big Bad Foreign Countries. But this exceptionalist (deeply white nationalist) mindset is just one more layer of bullshit we’ve all been forced to swallow.
The people who voted for Trump have been hoodwinked into voting against their best interests thanks to an entire consent manufacturing industry. And the people who voted for Biden/Harris, thinking they could win over these scammed voters by softly pandering to the same set of reactionary, xenophobic campaign pledges and bullshit paranoid theories and get-rich-quick scams are also getting hoodwinked.
You’re trapped in a systematic failure of electoral populism. “Don’t blame me, I voted for the other guy!” isn’t a way out. Its just a dogmatic belief that the Other Corporate Candidate was the panacea to the deep corruption that ails us.
Our electoral system has been having a scaling issue since the 1800s when we started adding a bunch of states. We patched over it with things like the Missouri Compromise and broadcast media, but now that we’ve closed the Gutenberg parenthesis we’re too balkanized as a society for the elections to work.
It’s all a moot point when you consider the anti-democratic functions of our EC and winner-take-all district system.
Yelling at the One Trump Voter or the One Jill Stein Voter or the One Hilary Clinton/Joe Biden/Bernie Sanders Primary Voter or what-the-fuck-ever is meaningless in the context of machine politics that ultimately decide who runs for office and who wins. The tiny cartel of partisan State Secretaries purging millions of voter registrations with a bias towards demographic groups that favor opposition parties will have a far more significant impact than your single ballot choice. The billions spent on advertising and marketing to shape public perception and limit the scope of national discourse, the tens of billions spent to orchestrate national media and pander to certain elite, overly represented economic interests, and the decades of Cold War propaganda we’ve been drenched in since Paul Weyrich, Pat Buchanan, and James Dobson gaslite generations of evangelical voters into believing defunding Medicaid would save unborn children, are far more responsible for the current state of electoral politics than your 11th hour hot take on who should be President.
Americans want desperately to believe that their liberal democracy isn’t like the kletocracies and kakocracies of the Big Bad Foreign Countries. But this exceptionalist (deeply white nationalist) mindset is just one more layer of bullshit we’ve all been forced to swallow.
The people who voted for Trump have been hoodwinked into voting against their best interests thanks to an entire consent manufacturing industry. And the people who voted for Biden/Harris, thinking they could win over these scammed voters by softly pandering to the same set of reactionary, xenophobic campaign pledges and bullshit paranoid theories and get-rich-quick scams are also getting hoodwinked.
You’re trapped in a systematic failure of electoral populism. “Don’t blame me, I voted for the other guy!” isn’t a way out. Its just a dogmatic belief that the Other Corporate Candidate was the panacea to the deep corruption that ails us.
Our electoral system has been having a scaling issue since the 1800s when we started adding a bunch of states. We patched over it with things like the Missouri Compromise and broadcast media, but now that we’ve closed the Gutenberg parenthesis we’re too balkanized as a society for the elections to work.