But the vile and evil government in place reflects the around 30% of the registered voters that turned up to vote for the orange menace…
That's kind of the point, though. When was the last time that Americans got the government the majority of us wanted?
The electoral system in the U.S. is intentionally configured to prevent a tyranny of the majority, but that winds up meaning that we have a tyranny of the minority instead.
That's a gross oversimplification, but the point is that we needn't take this personally. It's true, but it doesn't mean we are all bad people.
Question is, what do we do about it?
The 2 party system is broken. Few ultrarich can inject endless resources in supporting candidates. This should stop. The voting needs full voter representation instead of the silly ancient state representation. The ridiculous 2 party system is fully defective with the complete polarization as is ongoing.
Without full revision and realization that there is a big problem and collaboration is the only option, this will go nowhere but towards an uprising or tyranny.
Sure, it's great to fantasize about how things could be, but we have to be practical about how to get there from _here_ or it's just fanfic.
Then we simply wait until these fascists start prosecuting people opposing the regime they are building. It is happening now.
Next stop will be a choice between resistance and democratic opposition, hopefully stopping this madness at the midterms, or an authoritarian state with a mad king that wants to rule the world.
A full-blown civil war by those that won't take it anymore, in an option then, take your pick to what the future may hold.
Sorry, I must not have been clear. I agree that we need to change the electoral system. But we need to take practical steps to do that, not just talk about theories for how it could be better.
People in the U.S. are doing serious work on that. I don't think the situation is hopeless. But it's going to be a long trudge—the people now in power obvsly aren't going to do it.
If this all ends with neutralizing this madness by the midterms, not all will be lost. If the parties will be prepared to look beyond the train wreck that now is underway. Given the neoliberal capitalist system I wonder where this will go, I see no change coming in fact.. without very deep reform...
Can say that again indeed... and that goes for presidential candidates and members of the house and senate...
@xs4me2 @abhayakara @alanferrier
Root cause analysis: Rich people will always manipulate any disconnect in any government system. We need to fix the broken system. But we also need to be rid of rich people. It's probably too late to solve this crisis without guillotines. But we should take measures in the aftermath to prevent billionaires from existing again.
The reason they exist is the way our economic system is designed. For-profit corporations are wealth extraction machines. They are *designed* to harvest the exchange between workers and customers, collecting a non-government tax on every exchange and handing it off to the owner(s). They intrinsically concentrate wealth, to the detriment of the common people.
Cooperatives, by contrast, are democratically controlled and immediately make reparations to the community from which excess revenue was extracted, in the form of dividends back to the community. We need to make all companies cooperatives, by law, when we sort out the mess afterward.
@abhayakara @hosford42 @alanferrier
Robespierre tried that in the reign of terror, and was in the end the final victim.
The Soviets tried that in the October Revolution and many times after. The experiment failed.
The current problem is the end game of winner-takes-all neoliberal capitalism that rules the world. That model should change for a more social and democratic model where work and effort is rewarded, but also contributions to society are needed. Tax. There is no place for oligarchs.
I'm putting guillotines at the end, after all the other options. I just worry that the other options may fail us at this point because we let it slip so far before acting.
@xs4me2
I don't think what we got reflects the people that voted for him. A lot of people are getting strained by the system and this was the ticket promising changing the system.
To me it's clear that the option they selected is much worse than status quo, but this is what desperation drove them to.
Perhaps this mask-off state of the system is what we need to move towards actually fixing it.
Well in that case I hope there is a big case of the voter remorse… btw the same phenomenon is seen in Europe, the anger, the resentment focused by the far right. The pointing to “them”… it is what fascism is about. The same mechanisms used in the 1930s, it just needs a scapegoat, ironic for a country built on immigrants…
Mending? Germany learned a lot after the fact… but with AfD fascism is again raising its ugly head… resentment is the core.
Far too many people (particularly Democrats and progressives) insist on believing that it's all Trump. That as soon as he's gone, everything will go back to "normal". They don't understand that fascism IS the new normal, and it's only going to get worse.
Unless we stop it.
@alanferrier True but not, I think, in the way you meant.
Every country contains multitudes, and almost every person can be activated to be empathetic or fearful.
Fascism is very unpopular. It’s shockingly popular among a subset of elites and weirdos, but this has always been the case.
At the moment, the elite/weirdos have unusual structural power, and counterpower groups – the Democratic party, the institutions, the are all fragmented or asleep at the switch
Yes. Mr. Trump is just the tip of a submerged racist iceberg.
@alanferrier and america is the way it is because deep pocketed sociopaths and fools keep funding and promoting mediocre consultants, punditutes and others to do their bidding
AND certain segments of the population keep listening to -them-
instead of the lived experience of literally millions of people moving through life in non straight white christian male bodies.
Too many folks -still- don''t grasp the significance of this
We've been tell you what roads we've been on for decades.
Billionaires hired racists to bang bang bang on democracy, using whichever bias is most likely to cause anger and fear, and they own the press completely.
For example, to prepare for Trump's invasion of Canada, a US Republican bought 98% of Canada's news papers, big and small, and fired loads of reporters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmedia_Network
He owned just this 👇 paper before accepting his task of subverting Canada, buying all the papers.
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