1084
this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
1084 points (89.8% liked)
Microblog Memes
6036 readers
2159 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Its part of the brainwashing to preserve the illusion that they live in a real Democracy even though there has been a duopoly on Power for way over a century and that they are Free even though only a small number of them is born in wealthy enough families that they can actually do what they want, whilst everybody else has to do what they have to merelly to survive and are even constrained in that (for example, if they invade long unused land, to build their home and do subsistence farming there - i.e. try to have freedom via self-sufficiency - they will be kicked when the owner calls the "authorities").
Also treating the Constitution as almost sacred means that people can't challenge or even just criticize the very mathematical rigging that makes Power in their country be controlled by a duopoly (and hence not a Democracy) because it was set down on said Constitution so doing so would be challenging/criticising said "holy" Constitution.
Thinking people should always ponder on the answer for the good old Cui bono? ("Who gains from it?") question (so old it comes in Latin) whenever something or somebody is relentlessly portrayed as beyond questioning.
What the hell does that even mean? If the constitution allows amendments and changes, the inherently means it's built with acknowledged fallibility. The fact that is baked into it means that people can challenge and criticize it. What strawman are you trying to point to?
People can challenge it, but that's incredibly hard. In this comment political landscape, do you really imagine that the Constitution would be changed at all, let alone in any meaningful way? You're right, the framework is there, but without significant upheaval, would it be changed?
It is incredibly hard. But if you take it textually and literally, it's in there. I would actually argue that it is part of the "holy" ness is believing it will happen, despite all odds. Maybe it is more like waiting for the second coming of the Christ given the current political climate. But I think that if you treat the constitution as sacred, you are acknowledging change and historical development. The real question is probably around interpretation. Do you believe it should be interpreted explicitly and only within the historical context of the time, or is it something that needs to be reinterpreted and changing as the times change. Maybe there's a similarity there to religious fundamentalists and and how different churches and denominations all interpret the same book. All that said, treating the constitution as something sacred and foundational doesn't mean we are living in the past and afraid to change.
People could vote that duopoly out at any time, if they wanted to. And they would do that via democracy.
Also, over the history of the US there's been different parties/powerbases that have come and gone (remember the Whigs party?) and some parties that have shifted from one mindset to another.
So I don't think it's fair to state overall that there's just a static duopoly that is in power and nothing can change that.
You get the government you vote for.
You clearly never lived in a country with Proportional vote if you think people in any country, including the US, would just keep on voting for the same two parties if the voting system one was one that reflected the votes of all parties, big and small, equally in, for example, Congress.
No, people can't in practice "vote that duopoly out at any time" because that would require at least 100 million Americans to, somehow, all agree on the same election to vote for the same, entirelly new party, a party which would not have had any meaningful political representation or press coverage until then because even if they had managed 30 million votes the previous election (itself a near impossible feat) they would still not have elected a single representative - in other words, it requires a coordinated political shift with no help from mass media of about 1/3 of the population, something only possible with, quite literally, magic or some kind of Sci-Fi mind control technology.
In the real world, that's a much "possible" in that system as it's possible that a butterfly will cross a piece of paper via quantum tunelling: it's theoretically possible but requires a combination of events of such incredibly low probability that nobody has ever seen it or will ever see it actually happen.
Nah, the only political changes that have happenned in the US for over a century have been of the kind were one of the two power duopoly parties is subverted from the inside, not through the supposedly democratic vote.
I live in the United States of America.
I never said that voters would just vote for the same two parties no matter what ad infinitum.
Each individual can vote for a third party, or a fourth party, or they can all vote for one person in one party. It's not like everyone checks with everyone else and coordinates before they go into the voting booth to vote, they do their voting individually.
They do have the power to make that vote, they don't need to coordinate to be successful, each person on their own can contribute to the success of a change.
It is extremelly hard (basically impossible) for people to "maintain hope" during that initial period of several election cycles as a party grows from nothing to "big enough to win some power" if during all those years their vote makes no difference whatsoever.
Alternatives to the parties in government don't just appear fully fledged and big enough to take power, they grow over the years and they start getting votes because people have some hope they will make a difference and keep on getting more and more votes as people hear and see the representatives of those parties as they participate in lawmaking and are shown by the Press because of it.
Whilst in countries with PV systems it's absolutelly natural for parties to organically grow and shrink in response to how they increasingly match or mismatch the desires of the population, hence naturaly over time power rotates (for example in The Netherlands governments with 3 parties in cohalition are absolutelly normal, and its normal to one or more of those parties to end up replaced oreven a totally different cohalition to replace them all), in countries with electoral circles, especially large circles with single representatives like in the US, you need a huge fraction of votes to all switch at the same time, all to that same new party, and all in the same electoral circle, merelly to change a single representative (itself a far from having any real power versus the 2 behemoth power duopoly partis), so people seldom vote for any alternative party because it's almost always a wasted vote in such system since each individual voter has no guarantee that a sufficient number of other people will at the same time change their vote to that same party so that their representative is the one elected. Even when it does happen, it's an extremelly local phenomenon in a single electoral circle, and such movements that elect local stars in alternative political parties have so far never managed to progress into national movements so they never amount to a real change of power and most commonly are just "bought out" by one of the 2 power duopoly parties.
(The ideas of "usefull vote" and "voting against a candidate" do not exists in a PV system because people believe their vote, no mater who for, count, so they vote positivelly - for their preferred candidate - rather than negativelly - to block a certain candidate. It's quite a different mindset.)
So your casually thrown sentence of "people can just elect a different party" in practice requires that a huge fraction of the electorate at the same time starts supporting the very same obscure party (which they wouldn't have heard of much before because even if that party got a couple million votes before, they would have had no congress members hence no real press coverage). What you said just translates in expecting a hundred million people to somehow make their minds all in the same electoral cycle to vote for a party they've barelly hear of, each believing their vote will not be wasted because they somehow and against a lifetime of experience of it never javing happenned before believe that many tens of millions of other people people will also vote in that same obscure party, hence their vote will not just be wasted in unelectable candidates.
Feel free to suggest mechanisms for those 2 somehows that would work in the real world and don't involve magic.
(Anyway, my reference to PV systems is because I've seen there how new parties grow to the point of taking over power, and that's oragnically and over time, and relies on people believing that if they vote for something new their vote still counts and doesn't just get thrown out by the system. As each vote does count, other see the results and if they agree they too will next time vote the same eventually to the point were that party grows big enough to benpart of a governing cohalition. This is not at all possible in the US system were there is no such possibility of incremental change: any change throught the vote has to be immediatlly massive, involving many millions of people coordinating in a HUGE country, all without any help of the Press to spread the message, a huge barrier to entry - in business language - which is de facto impossible to overcome. In practice what you see is that any such changes only happen via internal subversion of one of the parties of the power duopoly, as Trump did).
-verbose ChstGPT response crits for 20,000!-
This is all under the idea that every vote is counted 100% equally in every stance. The idea ignores how presidential primaries start on the east side of the country and the western side has the choices limited by the eastern. It ignores the electoral college, gerrymandering, voter disenfranchisment, voter suppression, misinformation, manipulation by other countries, and probably a bunch more I think can't of right now. One of the most reductive ideas I've ever heard is "you get what you vote for". If that were actually true, everything I listed above wouldn't exist.
Reagan was from California.
On an individual State-by-State level, I've never seen the population vote one way and the Electoral College delegates choose different.
I would have no problem with the Electoral College going away, but for the most part how people vote are reflected correctly through the Electoral College.
But all of that will exist no matter what, you're never going to get a perfect purified form of democracy, human beings are too messy for that.
Honestly you bringing those up is something of a strawman for what I was trying to discuss.
You do get what you vote for, that statement is not reductive it's just simplifying all the various complex points for the sake of conversation.
That phrase means more than the actually just marking your choice on a ballot, it means getting off your ass and going to vote in the first place, know who your senators and congressperson is, etc.
No your whole perspective is something of a strawman. You bringing up all the faults and you're saying the totality of those faults 100% prevents democracy from happening, which is just a strawman and not true.