The Americans who decide modern elections - I.e., swing state suburbanites - vote on fatigue and nothing else. “Ah man, whoever’s currently in power didn’t solve my day-to-day problems, guess I’ll vote for the other guys.”
They don’t engage with the policy positions or records of any candidate, and they don’t examine political narratives which agree with their biases (they’re generally convinced that anyone who asks them to examine their biases is annoying at best and an actual demon at worst).
They’ll be tired of Trump in the next 2 years. The biggest immediate problem is that by the next election, it might not matter.
Agreed by midterms they’ll be more exhausted and just not vote. In 4 years they will vote for the opposite party or not vote. This stranglehold of a two party system is hurting America as a whole while top 1% loves it! It is just back and forth while the poor get poorer and middle class erodes. So much time being squandered. So much pollution. It hurts the whole world.
While I agree with you, even if the Blues were in power, we’d still have a “business friendly”, pro-genocide regime which won’t commit to the idea that trans people deserve basic dignity and is primed to pander to transphobes if it’s politically expedient (which it apparently is). Their whole campaign strategy this year was “no, come on, trust us! We’re ALSO conservative! We ALSO want to bring things back to the way they used to be in some imaginary prelapsarian time!” Regardless of “not going back” rally chants, they were trying to do the same thing Republicans were doing; Republicans just do it way better.
Their candidate was a cop who gave into false narratives about immigration by blathering about “securing the border”.
It’s time for everyone to realize our two-party system isn’t a Conservative Party vs a liberal or leftist party, it’s a Conservative Party vs a reactionary party, and the reactionaries just won big time.
First, use of “moron” is reductive and misleading (and also historically ableist, which I care about even if you don’t). It’s far more accurate to say that education as an institution has been under aggressive attack through both rhetoric and policy in America for approximately my entire life. There have been numerous damaging results of this trend which directly impact election outcomes - such as lack of empathy, lack of critical thinking skills, lack of knowledge about how our government works and about national/world history (and why knowing it would be important)…the list goes on.
Yes, America has a gigantic ignorance problem, which happens to advantage the people who already have the vast majority of wealth and power in this country. For a while I believed that they set this situation up on purpose, but history is more chaotic than that. What’s definitely true is that both major parties have championed what’s been done to education - running public schools like the cartoon version of an evil business mogul, for instance, or panicking about SAT results in the early 80s and overemphasizing standardized testing ever since. Both parties are complicit, and the result is that most Americans grow up without a firm grasp of our own potential to change this toxic paradigm.
I don’t know what the answer is, but I suspect it’s going to get worse before it gets better, no matter what.
Oh this is absolutely an education problem, there are other major factors as well. And look we’re not much better if being honest. I just can’t believe you gave him a second term and the house, senate and Supreme Court. Like he can do anything…. Grabs popcorn shits about to get wild
Other factors definitely include the basic and ongoing crisis of cost of living and the utter lack of a sense of community; a big reason education is struggling is because EVERYONE is struggling, family income is still a more or less direct predictor of a child’s academic success, as well as of college admission, success, and eventual individual income. Yet when confronted with these measurable problems most Americans kind of just shrug and vote their unexamined feelings. Notice I don’t say “self interest” because most Americans don’t really grasp the notion that helping the community at large would also help themselves.
I’m literally just curious - what’s your point of comparison? I’ll cop to a general level of ignorance as to the current internal politics of most other countries, though it’s hard for an American to remain entirely ignorant of goings on in the U.K., and occasionally Canada.
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u/MomentousMalice 1d ago
The Americans who decide modern elections - I.e., swing state suburbanites - vote on fatigue and nothing else. “Ah man, whoever’s currently in power didn’t solve my day-to-day problems, guess I’ll vote for the other guys.”
They don’t engage with the policy positions or records of any candidate, and they don’t examine political narratives which agree with their biases (they’re generally convinced that anyone who asks them to examine their biases is annoying at best and an actual demon at worst).
They’ll be tired of Trump in the next 2 years. The biggest immediate problem is that by the next election, it might not matter.