• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    21
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    1 day ago

    This game gets played every election cycle. Popular legislation is proposed. Corporate media is inundated with “Actually this legislation is terrible and everyone who supports it is a Satanist”. Popular opinion turns on the idea. Candidates run on a platform of “You didn’t ask for this! It was an evil trick by the Far Left Antifa Terrorists!” Lather, rinse, repeat.

    At some point, popular opinion isn’t going to compete with a deluge of aggressive propaganda. Well-financed marketing teams can scream in your ear longer and louder than random conglomerates of local activists can fight back.

    Add in widespread, strategic voter disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, and roll purging. You end up with a state of 6.2M residents of which 4.6M are eligible voters. Of that 4.6M, only 3.7M are registered. And only 3.2M cast a ballot. This allowed a 1.7M voting majority to control the state’s elected offices. A meager 26% of the public has a super-majority of representation across the state.

    Liberal Democracy, folks!

    • hector@lemmy.today
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      3 hours ago

      Well do not stop there, you should explain why the other side doesn’t get more votes. Because the opposition party is worthless at best. Being better than the other guy has never been enough to comfortably win elections and we already knew that but that is the only thing we are offering. The way to get elected is not to be half as Republican as the republicans, it is to be Champion popular reform and loudly fight for it. To call out villains by name, to have a, to have a fucking spine.

      We are doomed with this same opposition party and Power and they are despite the last election. We should all agree that’s a failure. Nobody answers for that? We allowed the same power Brokers to do the next one?

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        3 hours ago

        Well do not stop there, you should explain why the other side doesn’t get more votes.

        Listen, we can’t upset the conservatives. If Republicans say they’re going to round up and deport all the migrants to a concentration camp in El Salvador, we need to say we’re going to only to it to half the migrants. If Trump wants to bomb China, we have to settle on bombing North Korea (again). If the Heritage Foundation has a plan to turn every public school into a Catholic Church, we need to sell people on turning them into Unitarian Churches.

        We are doomed

        Only because you didn’t vote harder! Nobody would be complaining right now if Kamala Harris had won. Everything would be happy and fine and good. But you people had to ruin her campaign by talking about medical debts and foreign wars. Damn you to hell! We could have had the a Neoliberal Utopia!