american politics tutorial
electoral process explained
the truism that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it has been hackneyed into what pretty much amounts to background noise.
and yet as we once more gird ourselves for the bi-annual determination of which toilet bowl to drink from colloquially known as “US election day” i would like to offer a bit of historical perspective as i feel it essential to the proper framing of the american democratic experience and its litany of locust-like predation upon we the people.
you can really sum up 95% of american politics in one cartoon:
put simply:
do the same thing
get the same result
act surprised
thank you for coming to my TED talk.
in all seriousness, give this some thought. when is the last time you were excited to vote, as a positive, for a candidate as opposed to choosing the one that seemed likely to be least odious?
can this seriously be conceived as a basis for the governance of a free people?
“voting your way to freedom” is always something of a myth and the tendency of political parties to sperate and segregate into what essentially amounts to dueling hostage situations is just the emergent dominant strategy and thus modal outcome of the game theory of elections in a captive population.
i have a number of thoughts on how this may be mitigated though both changes in electoral structure and constitutional organization many of which are simple, straightforward, and achievable without wild assumptions of implausible tenets.
they involve changes to primary structure, a return of the constitution to some of its original design, the removal of the safety and subsidy state from so many issues of personal agency, and a devolution of power to a far more federalist structure.
There is no longer any difference between the fourth estate and the deep state. There may have been a separation at one point long ago, but it's been long erased.
The backstabbing fifth column "journalists" will burn brightly in hell, right along side the viper accomplices in "government".
To the author's point: Facts don't matter, and 'true' and 'false' lose all importance and degrade into 'belief' - for most of humanity - the moment they are politicized, here's why: https://tritorch.com/folly
The bigger problem is that it's not even close to being about one person. The Federal Government is so huge and unwieldy, it hardly matters who the president is. Trump on steroids for 8 years would hardly be a speed bump on the road to the Orwellian totalitarianism we are headed for. That said, I'll take a speed bump over a doormat\enabler any day.