I mean yeah, obviously. Anyone over the age of 22 should have been able to tell you that the only two candidates with a chance of winning in '24 were the Republican or the Democrat.

How is that “chance” determined?

We (my peers) must vote for them because we (the rest of the country) are voting for them.

Everyone is making this decision. Not just your peers. You cannot simply brush aside the fact that the entire population, for each individual in it, is making a voting decision based on some mental process they have.

It seems like you don’t understand the simple fact that most americans genuinely like the Democrat or the Republican. They don’t get elected because everyone has deluded themselves into thinking everyone else is going to vote for them, they get elected because the average person sees Trump or Biden and says “I like that guy.”

There’s certainly a large element of that. I would argue because, as Noam Chomsky said, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.” They only view their candidate in the context of “the other” candidate, with a tightly controlled narrative around them. For the huge contingent of the population trapped in this bubble of idiocy, the topic, and the comparisons to non-genocidal politicians, must be forced. You cannot allow yourself to be kettled by this trick that they play, and forced into a decision where the parameters are manufactured for you. There is no escape from that.

Does their predisposition to falling for cult of personality, “politicians shaking hands and kissing babies despite the fact that they’re mass murderers” tactics, somehow release them of their civic responsibility? No. They have the same responsibility as all of us in a democracy. They have completely failed. So what is the path to fix this? Rehabilitate your thinking. Rehabilitate their thinking. Get us back to the level where people understand what it means to participate in a democracy and taking responsibility for what they have to do, instead of being cowed into choosing between preselected candidates complicit in genocide.