Imaginos1892 wrote:Don't forget the media, which reinforce that perception and pretend that no other choices exist.
That is quite literally true though.
The US runs exclusively on a direct representation system. No matter how many candidates are running in a given district, there will very likely be only two that will matter, those being the representatives of parties with money and a defined platform.
Sure, you might get the occasional district where a green or libertarian or pastafarian candidate might be viable, but for the most part, the very mechanics of the system you use to determine who gets to represent you in DC mean that only the two largest parties will ever be dominant.
To establish a viable third option, you need an absolutely massive level of popular support and a platform that is distinct enough from the existing ones to avoid being rolled into them. In an electoral system that allows for proportional representation, where parties are a feature of the system and not an unintended consequence, it is much easier to establish a new political movement and have it be taken seriously.
(But, of course, establishing such a system is basically impossible due to the US' absolutely bonkers adherence to a constitution written over 200 years ago)
If enough people would simply WAKE UP and take control of their own decisions, we could de-throne the lot of them. Unfortunately, most of them have been convinced that if they didn't vote for the winner, their votes were 'wasted', and that no one can possibly win except the Democrat or the Republican. Or, as I call them, the Republicrats. They all look like Yahoos to me.
Prove that this is actually possible. Do the math. How many people does your hypothetical new party need to run across the US to become a force to be reckoned with? How much funding? How much groundwork in terms of printing pamphlets, creating ads, and doing PR work do you need to do? Where will you procure funding?
None of this is impossible. It's completely doable. Unfortunately, the people who can make it work are either people you really do not want to be involved in this (i.e. the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezos of the world), or utterly invested in the way the system is now (the Koch Brothers, for instance).
Most people have been led to believe that the Republican and Democrat parties are part of the government. They are NOT! They are entirely private organizations that should have NO official standing, should be given NO preference over the Greens, Peace And Freedom, Libertarian, or any of the other political parties.
And this is why this sort of constitutional fundamentalism is bad. It's all fine and dandy for the founding fathers of the republic to denounce parties and factions and affiliations, but in the absence of a fundamental shift in human crowd dynamics, their formation is inevitable. It is thus better to design a system that incorporates them, rather than one that insists they do not exist.
I say if you vote for the person you want to represent your interests, it's never wasted. If only enough people believed that, change would be possible.
People do believe that though. It's just that, a lot of the time, there isn't a person they can vote for that represents their desires adequately, only people that sort of go in the same general direction they want to go in.
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Why do so many idiots believe that the way to solve our problems is to keep voting for the same shitheads that caused them in the first place?
Because that is what your system, intentionally or not, is designed to achieve.