to be honest if I was the representative of moldova WHICH I’M NOT and it was the 32nd consecutive year in a row that the same shit had happened and nothing had changed then I might also take a day off

I would like to point out that this is just what robin hood is

I am familiar, in part, that’s what I was kinda thinking of when I wrote that. I probably should’ve brought it up explicitly, though, you’re correct. I have seen/heard that recent numbers have been up for membership but I haven’t heard enough beyond that to know whether or not the organization itself is actually performing well or is doing anything for members, so I guess I didn’t feel comfortable explicitly talking about it.

Seems like the short version of my Intro to American Politics class at Uni.

What’s insane is that’s something you have to go to university to be taught. In this society, where it is purported that democracy is part of the fundamental fabric, most people understand absolutely nothing. If they even get taught about relatively basic things like what I’ve described, which is to say nothing of the legalese-reading abilities you might need to verify that, say, a ballot measure is what it says it is, they apparently don’t end up remembering any of it. So instead we get doomed to listen to the same conversations, over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, every election cycle. They’re like cicadas, waking up every couple years, chirping, and then immediately going back to sleep as soon as it’s over.

I dunno. I find legitimate political debates to be interesting, informative, at least sometimes when I can tolerate the cringe levels at work there. I’ve been unfortunately forced to take a crash course, kick start education on every political conflict that’s been started as a result of israel, which also includes like, political context surrounding every country they fuck with, and every country that supports those countries that israel fucks with. I find that, if heartbreaking, to be a good opportunity for me to learn, because at least I get somewhere with that. But I dunno, I feel like the tendency of the average commenter is just to scroll past, or read whatever the top line I’ve posted is and then try to get me to spoonfeed them on that basis, which is obviously never going to work because they can just spin the conversation whatever direction they want, where they’ll probably end up learning less than nothing, they’ll probably just use me as another vector to reinforce their own beliefs.

So, I dunno. It all seems totally hopeless to me. I remembered forums being a much more useful vector for talking to people, but more and more often it seems like it’s less worthwhile, and I just end up retreating to my own bubble, using whatever outlet I find to post like I’m posting to a personal blog that I know nobody is going to read. It’s worthless. If I were to optimize this paragraph I’ve written, with citations, much clearer language, and make it more succinct, and then post that under all these types of posts, or, propagate that as copypasta, then despite it being more well thought out and ultimately much less spammy than the idiotic bad faith trolling that most people tend to engage in, it would probably, maybe rightly, get banned on the basis of being spam. More and more, this place, every place online, reveals itself to just be another horrible vector for the propaganda of whatever interested parties decide to manipulate the levers and pulleys controlling the tubes.

Now I classify myself as an anarchist. Not sure what went wrong.

And, see, I never even got that far. I’m still just some guy that want everyone to have healthcare and good public infrastructure, and wants wars and genocides to not be happening constantly. I don’t even know what political system is supposed to make that work, and I don’t really give a fuck which one it takes, I just want that to be the case.

Yeah, pretty much, that’s pretty much all I’ve said, yeah

Unfortunately, after a year of witnessing their entire ethnicity being written off as an acceptable casualty in the name of international diplomacy and foreign lobbying, they’ve become numb and just stopped caring.

The craziest part of this to me is that this isn’t the first time this has happened since it’s started like… since the country has been founded. So the fact they’re really still willing to engage politically at all is a pretty good testament to their character, I would say.

Everyone else is basically going to give you dogshit answers, here, and I’m not gonna read through the thread to confirm that because I’ve been in enough of these threads on lemmy to know that it’s going to be the most oversimplified and horrible hand-wavy explanations you could’ve hoped for. I think maybe the collective effort people put into their posts on the internet is dwindling as a result of mass adoption and various social media incentive structures, to the point where even platforms like lemmy are gonna get filled with horrible dogshit and just the worst oldest facebook memes of all time. Don’t listen to all those fucking morons, listen to me, I’m the only one effortposting in this removed, because I have psychosis and like to write these out as a way to take notes and review my talking points.

SO, at the lowest level, you have gerrymandering. This applies to things like city council seats within cities, it applies to what gets defined as “inside” and “outside” the city and the county, it applies to districts that elect representatives at the state level, and it even, to a certain degree, applies to the states themselves. Basically, every time the electorate gets subdivided, something you would otherwise think is a good thing, as it lets people be governed more with concerns local to that subdivision, instead, those lines get drawn up most often to favor the party that is currently sitting in that seat. Being that this is instituted at pretty much every level of governance, and that people don’t tend to change addresses super often, especially homeowners, this contributes to why most states are not swing states, and why most votes are very predictably “wasted”, or, are used by the parties to cancel out other very predictable votes, or are used to further secure and entrench power with more overwhelming margins.

You also have first-past-the-post voting in the vast majority of places, abbreviated as fptp voting, in which you have a single, non-transferable vote. Proponents of this system can basically only defend it on its braindead simplicity, because there’s not really any reality in which it accurately represents the interests of the voters. If you think of a voting system as being a way for voters to clearly communicate their preferences, and have those preferences followed, then fptp voting only provides one bit of information: “I want this guy”. It doesn’t rate candidates in relation to each other, it doesn’t tell anyone whether or not you would prefer one candidate over another. So, people get locked in to voting for one candidate which has proved to be consistently popular, and has a good chance of winning so they don’t “waste” their vote, which as previously described, is probably already wasted, and so we get locked into a two-party system pretty much everywhere.

Both these systems combine to severely limit the weight of anyone’s vote. It effectively means that, outside a couple gerrymandered suburbs, in particular swing states, which can be figured out well in advance of elections, the rest of the votes don’t matter. Most votes are just locked in a system where they are effectively being used by the sitting parties to cancel each other out.

Most local races are funded at the local level, meaning they tend to favor older, much more well-off candidates which don’t necessarily represent the majority of people’s interests. This outsized power can be increased with gerrymandering. Americans also tend to favor sitting candidates over new candidates, both because of FPTP, and also because culturally FPTP has become ingrained, meaning incumbent candidates tend to be able to sit around for as long as they want. Primaries are pretty much unilaterally controlled by the parties that run them, as we have seen in this election, and they are able to pretty effectively select who it is that they want to be elected through the funding and backing of the party, within their territories, which is something that’s happening at every level, and not just at the presidential level. So, economics and economic disparity has a great role to play in who is able to run for local positions, on top of obviously having a very clear role at higher levels. Less money can also have a very outsized impact in local, smaller elections, where candidates can court corporate interests and party interests and then bankroll their way into a position pretty much guaranteed. This is why you can pretty much dismiss anyone who’s going to suggest that you go and run for local office, as though that’s some gotcha. They wouldn’t know, because they probably also haven’t run for their local offices, but especially at the higher levels, those local offices tend to be controlled by elderly small business owners and a bunch of lawyers. Canvassing and commercials are pretty effective, especially when you can concentrate these on the gerrymandered fraction of the population with values already favorable to institutional powers, which is having an outsized impact.

So, given that your vote is pretty much guaranteed to not matter, is especially guaranteed to not matter at the federal level, and is very especially not going to matter if you live anywhere with any significant population density, lots of people take that as an opportunity to piss their vote away on jill stein or whatever other scammer that’s running. Of course, third parties would probably be more effective at the smaller local levels, building up larger and larger bases of support until they are more adequately able to challenge the major parties at the federal level, and even try for federal funding, but we’ve seen such a level of institutional capture at pretty much every level that it’s sort of a fucked game to begin with.

It’s so fucked up at every level that I’m not sure I would really fault the parties that are running with like, 2% of the votes, in polling, compared to the fucking massive country-wide institutions that are actually controlling elections and messaging. Those that can even get 2% of the votes are likely to get those votes because they’ve been donated to by one side, the other, or, much more commonly, both, on top of business interests and foreign powers, who all believe that adding in another spoiler candidate will help their candidate get elected.

To hopefully dissuade some idiotic criticisms before they happen:

Q: Well, then what am I to do!?! If I can’t vote on a candidate, and have my vote be effective for that candidate, then what have I done politically? What’s the alternative?

A: None of that really contradicts any of what I’m currently saying, it’s not a valid counterargument. I’ve told you the reality of the system, if you have a problem with how your current strategy is not effective in that reality, then take it up with reality, not me. I would probably say that organizations outside of the system, organizations owned by a majority of the people within them, organizations that can wield political power, those would probably be useful. Organizations that can punch above their weight class economically would be most useful. We’ve seen a recent, very minor rise in unionization and union activity, after decades of downturn as a result of government policies, which has been good, but I am concerned again about many of these unions, and especially the older ones, being subject to institutional capture at the highest levels as a result of ill-thought out internal structures and a desire to “keep out the raffle”, from elitism, classism, or racism. If I had thoughts of reformism, then I would aim there, and I would probably also aim to create a lot more interconnections between these smaller unions which are more individually vulnerable. One big union, would be a good idea suited to the moment, and I haven’t seen it taken up a lot.

And sure, go out and vote, right, but, don’t harbor any illusions about what you’re doing when you go out and vote. Focus more on your local candidates and your obscure, idiotic local laws and regulations which are probably going to be explained poorly in some half-baked blogpost or news article, if you’re even afforded that dignity rather than just having to read shit straight from the charters and laws themselves. Don’t just get invested every 4 years when you get threatened with a new form of fascism by corporate media. If you’re falling for that shit, then you’re probably running around like a chicken with their head cut off, doing worse than nothing. If you’re not willing to put in an hour or two of concentrated reading and research in the right places, then you would be better off, at that point, just ignoring all those anxieties, not voting, and eating jalapeno poppers at chili’s or whatever else.

Q: This shit is too long, I can’t read it all!

A: Tl;dr GOTO 10

basically, the US is a one party system, but it has two parties