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Sadly, similar stuff does happen even when you have more parties.
In my opinion, what’s happening here is that the policies of the parties do not align with the opinions of the public. If you care about not doing a genocide, there wasn’t a candidate to vote for last cycle. If you care about universal health care, there wasn’t a candidate to vote for. And so on.
And you can measure this. Research has been carried out into the congruence between policy and public opinion in the US. For example, in the paper Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens, it was found that the impact the average American (as a group) has on policy is miniscule compared to the influence of economic elites. You and I don’t benefit from invading Iran, but the owning class sure does, so that’s what we do. All this is independent of who’s in charge.
And so now you might rightly theorize that since there are only two parties, the democrats can fully cater to billionaires, as long as they’re less bad than the republicans. And as time goes on they move further and further right, since they really don’t have to care about voters, because the only other party consists of actual demons, and people will vote for them anyway.
However, you see this effect (the wealthy having a disproportionate amount of influence on policy) in pluralistic systems as well. Norway has about 9 major political parties, yet the study Affluence and Influence in a Social Democracy finds that here too, the rich have an outsized influence. Similar studies exist for other western European countries, most of which (if not all) have more than two major parties.
So I don’t think the root of the problem is the two party system (although I’m sure it doesn’t help).
No you don’t understand, we have to do the same thing we’ve done for decades, and this time, instead of things getting worse, things will get better. Please be practical.
So Biden sends 20B in aid to help pissrael commit genocide, and you feel like the blame is on people voting for republicans months after that happened? That’s odd.
One of the big problems with lesser evil voting is that a lot of people forget they still voted for evil.
Hannah Arendt wrote it better but I can’t be bothered to look up and copy the full quote.
Removed by mod
Little known fact about Kamala Harris: she was actually part of the administration that sent close to 20 billion dollars in aid to help Israel commit the genocide. Pretty high up on the totem pole too.
I don’t have a specific Harris quote, but her running mate Walz said “The expansion of Israel… is an absolute fundamental necessity for the US”.
Maybe this makes you go “AHA! Gotcha, no quote!” But if, during the holocaust, I saw someone shipping heaps of zyklon B to Germany, have a running mate that said “well actually, it seems pretty great that Germany invaded Poland”, and who refuses to use the word genocide to describe the holocaust that they helped commit, that would be enough for me to conclude they’re a nazi. You’d have to be pretty fucking stupid not to. Or just not care, in which case, fuck you.
Look, each time, in the past, arguments like this existed, and each time we sent arms, the region ended up in a fucked state. But let’s not learn from history.
Yeah sure whatever, let’s pretend your question wasn’t rhetorical. What you’re doing here is called weaponised standpoint epistemology. Starting from a very valid base, namely “some aspects of things you can’t know without having experienced them” you extend to “you can’t know anything unless you were there”, which is not valid. You don’t want to talk about how Americans are flushing their democracy down the toilet and doing nothing to prevent it? Fine. But I’m not going to pretend that this is anything other than you putting your head in the sand.
Given the track record of the impact this has had on the locals whenever the US has done this, however justified the dissidents’ cause, I completely agree with you. It has brought us such beauties as Suharto, Pinochet, and the silent holocaust. Glad we could find some common ground here.
Are you familiar with the term “thought terminating cliché”?
More to the point, politics in America is, perhaps more than some other nations, suffused into daily life in almost every public interaction in some way, shape, or form. And presuming to have an understanding of that while never participating in that public life - and furthermore judging such aspects based on one’s non-involvement with the assuredness of a wise veteran participant - is bullshit.
I don’t accept this epistemology at all. The idea that the only way to meaningfully know about a thing is to live the thing itself is complete nonsense. “Oh you think light behaves simultaneously as a wave and as a particle? Well have you ever been a particle?” Such a joke
You’re projecting a little bit. Just because you’re not educated on the politics of nations outside your own, doesn’t mean folks from other nations aren’t educated about yours. And I’m not trying to be an asshole here and call you stupid, because you’re not! It doesn’t make sense for you to learn about Belgian politics because in the end, nothing they can do will ever really affect you.
The converse is not true. American politics affects the rest of the world a great deal, and so we’re almost forced to learn about it. You’d be surprised how many Italians have an opinion about the electoral college, or gerrymandering.
You may not know about protests in Spain, but we sure as shit see yours. And we see you getting shot in the streets. And yes, you look like fucking clowns letting what semblance of a democracy you had slip from your fingers.
No, not great. Destabilizing a region is not good for the folks who live there.
Not to get too “um actually” on this but Sputnik 1 predates Explorer 1
That last part was interesting to me. Every president since Eisenhower, every single one, no exceptions (none), was a war criminal. Has any administration ever prosecuted a previous one for war crimes?