the American people voted for all this, including the harmful alliance with Russia. It isn’t just Trump.
The Americans who were allowed to vote and chose to participated in a system that has resulted in Republican presidents twice in the last two decades who lost the popular vote but won the electoral college vote. Republicans have been suppressing the votes and Trump was even bragging about how easy Elon could hack voting machines.
I both think the election was rigged and want to make it clear that decades of voter suppression by Republicans is why the elections are even close and the fact that they complained about ‘stolen’ elections is consistent with all of the other things they accuse Dems of doing that Republicans are doing.
Yes, the broken US system resulted in him being in office. No, the whole public is not to blame. Not even half the population deserves the blame for it.
I won’t lie, the fact that Americans got a taste of this and then voted to go back for another bite of the apple (not to mention the global rightward shift that’s been happening along with it) has soured me a bit on representative democracy. Democratic modes of government seem to be fundamentally incapable of defending themselves against demagoguery, and too large a percentage of the population prefer to be told what to do and who to hate rather than put in the work of engaging seriously with the civic duties required to make a democracy work. I’m at a loss as to what a viable alternative might look like – various forms of autocracy are what we’re trying to avoid, and I’ve never seen any anarchist ideas that seem like they could work at scale, but clearly democracy falls apart when too many of the people participating in it refuse to participate in good faith.
asfg
The Americans who were allowed to vote and chose to participated in a system that has resulted in Republican presidents twice in the last two decades who lost the popular vote but won the electoral college vote. Republicans have been suppressing the votes and Trump was even bragging about how easy Elon could hack voting machines.
I both think the election was rigged and want to make it clear that decades of voter suppression by Republicans is why the elections are even close and the fact that they complained about ‘stolen’ elections is consistent with all of the other things they accuse Dems of doing that Republicans are doing.
Yes, the broken US system resulted in him being in office. No, the whole public is not to blame. Not even half the population deserves the blame for it.
As an American… I don’t know.
I think we’re well and truly fucked.
I won’t lie, the fact that Americans got a taste of this and then voted to go back for another bite of the apple (not to mention the global rightward shift that’s been happening along with it) has soured me a bit on representative democracy. Democratic modes of government seem to be fundamentally incapable of defending themselves against demagoguery, and too large a percentage of the population prefer to be told what to do and who to hate rather than put in the work of engaging seriously with the civic duties required to make a democracy work. I’m at a loss as to what a viable alternative might look like – various forms of autocracy are what we’re trying to avoid, and I’ve never seen any anarchist ideas that seem like they could work at scale, but clearly democracy falls apart when too many of the people participating in it refuse to participate in good faith.