US has been in the closet fascist for a long time.
If you're a wage earner, a minority, a woman, or just simply don't fit conventional American culture, it's openly fascist to you. Hell, Idaho got away with criminalizing abortion, which means 2/3 of the states will follow.
There aren't any concentration camps that we know of, at least not yet, but I am sure that will change when Trump is reelected in November and every fascist thing he's done is vindicated.
I think for these types of posts you have to be clear what type of dissent won't be tolerated. The loony QOP people like to pretend that they suffer under an authoritarian state. But they don't challenge capitalism or colonialism so they don't really suffer oppression. Not like Gaza protesters or people who try to exit capitalism.
You are allowed to dissent...but only in quiet, peaceful, and easily ignored, ways.
American is only truly happy when political parties join together to club a poorer nation to death, and Americans get to feel like badasses about it
No place is free by that standard. The people sets the policy and when you transgress the people will push back via their representatives in the government. The government that they chose.
The problem isn’t the system, the problem is that most people don’t agree with you. Start changing people’s mind and quit looking for shortcuts.
The problem isn’t the system, the problem is that most people don’t agree with you
I think this is objectively untrue, as evidenced by the rampant "lesser of two evils" analogies that fly every single election season. Hell, Joe Biden won the election and he was the fifth least popular candidate in the Democrats' own primary, ahead of "Mike" Bloomberg. (The party bribed everyone else but Sanders to drop out.)
The problem is that, absent a homegrown terrorist event or a presidential assassination (neither of which I condone, mind you) the people are effectively powerless in the face of the stranglehold the oligarchy has on our government.
But, the people have gone all Blair Mountain before. It could happen again I suppose.
If you only show up on presidential Election Day. And, if you only really think that the president role is important. Well, then what you say is true. It’s just the lesser of 2 evils.
BUT.
There are 537 elected officials in the federal government. Thousands of elected representatives in state and local governments. Those people combine to make a force of authority that is WAY more important than the president. Joe Biden didn’t send the NYPD to bust up a protest at Columbia, the NYC authorities did that. Why did NY choose leaders like that?
We don’t have a king that leads us. We have a head of state that pretty much just points themself in the direction WE were already heading. If you want to change that direction, it’s a long project. The most important election this year is your congressional and local primary. That’s where you get to decide what’s going to happen in 5yrs. The potus election is just a silly game where we have to keep the ball away from an idiot madman so that the rest of us can run a country.
About 10 years ago, several Ivy League schools declared that the US could not be considered a democracy (and hadnt been for about 50 years) and should be considered closer to an oligarchy after doing studies on public opinion vs policies enacted by the government since they started keeping track of that (since the 1950s I believe?). The US has always been more of a mix between a republic and a representative democracy anyways, but that's getting off topic. They compared public opinion of bills compared to the opinion of the wealthy and found that the majority of the time, the wealthy got what they wanted. If I remember correctly, the results were that if a bill was supported by both the wealthy and the general public, it passed about 90% of the time. If a bill was supported by the wealthy and opposed by the general populace, it passed something like 60-70% of the time, and in the opposite situation, the bill would only pass about 30-40% of the time.
The system is broken at a base level, between gerrymandering, Bush Jr. letting money sway policy even more blatantly than it already had, lifelong appointments (even for a number of unelected positions), and a myriad of other issues. 60% of Americans are considered to be more liberal than the government.
But, you're right that complaining once every 4 years isn't going to fix it. One of the reasons that Republicans have such a stranglehold over the government is that they have a base of supporters who will go out and vote for every single little thing, every time. And many of them can afford to because they're retirees or wealthy enough to be able to take time off to vote whenever. As my grandfather used to say, "Im a Republican, I vote for the nominee." What we need is to create support networks to help get people to the polls so we can vote in local officials who will help to get the bigger stuff rolling. Voting in the lesser of two evils every 4 years is only a stopgap measure.
The problem is the system. For example, Clinton won the popular vote, she got millions more votes than Trump, yet because the system is fucked, Trump still "won". Then there's the fact that the system is designed to only allow for a lesser of two evils choice, so no one really gets to choose what they'd really want to choose.
The point is that when you try to start changing people's minds, say through peaceful protests, you get beaten and arrested.
The electoral college is stupid, and if there was any reasonable way to be rid of it we would be better off. The presidency is a national position and should be elected by a national vote.
But…
Clinton fucked up. Her campaign knew the rules of the game and they fucked up. She failed to campaign in states she NEEDED TO WIN and spent time and money in places where she hoped to run up the numbers.
It’s like being angry that refs at your hockey game don’t give you points when you hit a home run. Got to play the game you want to win.
