One of the most elaborate and impressive feats of modern political stagecraft. In the span of around 50 to 60 years, America’s political system has become diluted, dried out and ringed into a simple “Red/Blue” dichotomy artificially enforced by media of every variety and a legion of yes-men who place enough token measures to make people ignore their true motivations and objectives. Pass gay marriage while jacking up drone strikes, start “building a wall” while sliding police forces MRAP’s, finally shove stimmy checks out the door while ALSO selling police forces MRAP’s even after spending the better part of the year wearing #BLM, pass an AWB to make people ignore getting a blowjob from your secretary and letting Somalia die, the list can go on for actual decades. And you might wonder how, how can the bastion of democracy become some mediocre oligarchy?
Simple.
1: Force your citizens to have “opinions” on every single matter and topic, most of which they know nothing about nor care for.
2: Do this for so long that you make people burned out on political matters and have them side with or adopt the ideals of a group who they don’t care for. Or they end up feeling like they “have” to choose a side.
Do this and spread it across all 50 states like peanut butter and you get the US. Realistically, most people either don’t care about a lot of political matters or they do it not for a sense of intrinsic virtue in that matter but because of how it “looks”. The optics of being a conservative or a liberal outweigh any real interest in the politics, and this allows for American politicians to take advantage of the shadow they have and become corrupt. Whether it’s career Republicans and Democrats spending actual decades on the Senate floor and doing nothing but vote against the people, or it’s the rise of scalper politicians like Sanders, Crenshaw and AOC who “promote” themselves as different from the rank-and-file of their respective parties but then vote alongside the tides when push comes to shove. And that’s not even covering the obvious of lobbyists.
I know this take of “both sides bad >:L” will get me a lot of labels as a “centrist” and I get that. But that’s the nature of being a person. You can’t live in an extreme, they’re untenable. Evolution may state that only the strong survive, but it never specifies what type of strong. Brute force doesn’t work, and emotional and mental strength play as much of a part as anything else. Willingness to discuss terms, rationalize points of view and understand where everyone lies. There’s far more shared between an intercity rich kid and a podunk farmer, but it comes with peeling back decades of passively reinforced systems that are made to keep people divided and fighting each other. If the politicians in the Capitol can do that to deprive you of rights and take millions in corporate money, you can do it to deprive them of the chance to continue this facade of democracy and reject this yoke of artificial division.
Not a bad take. I doubt I could have been as kind.
Until We The People take our individual responsibility for the governance of our society, the divisiveness perpetuated by the elite will keep us subjugated to unchecked abuse.
We have raised generations of government dependence. Until this cycle is broken, only the actors will change. The play still ends the same.
