/r/50501 Mirror

Unpopular opinion: The problem is the people, roughly 30%-40% of them but continuing to grow, and their inability to cope with modern propaganda herding techniques through big data, social networks, and now AI.

What we have today are governments, whether they be two party or more, being divided into the ideological parties, those willing to operate within the framing and intent of their constitutions, to those willing to game it. Those willing to game it and those attracted to oligarchs and easy lobby wealth only seem to have an ideological factor to them because they adopt the political ideologies of least resistance - which they will gladly go back on, and have done so as their attempts to game the system have led them to the sort of voter menagerie they have now.

People blaming the "democratic party", in this context the US democratic party, are ignorant enough to not realize that a "party" in the US is just a donor list to finance candidate race's for congress and that it is very easy for a corrupt candidate to run for the "party" in states where it is beneficial for them to do so - as long as they can cajole that list of donors long enough. This isn't like some other countries where being part of a party actually means something. In the US, both parties have a significant degree of corruption, and it was already arguably an oligarchy.

But within the democratic party, due to the aforementioned biases, it has less members willing to outright game the government and more of those operating from an ideological basis. An ideological basis is basically the only thing a government can be built around, once parties start getting in that don't operate from an ideological bases, you are just voting on who scams you. Yet nowadays the portion of those action from an ideological position within the US government is no longer the majority. There was even a rift in the Republican party a few years ago, and because it is inherently the party dominated by those most willing to game to government instead of serve it, it was MAGA that won out.

More to the point, an ideological basis limits what candidates do to working within the constitution and actual good faith.

So people blaming the democrats are people who have a deluded world view, blaming a governing minority party who by their very nature will operate in a handicapped ideological fashion versus a dominant authoritarian insurgency willing to do anything to game the system and make it that much more subservient. They are the sort of people who think they will still get fair elections for the midterms and subsequent elections, and they don't realize their democracy is now over and that what they will need is either secession into a new governing entity (not going to happen any time soon, because today's Americans can't comprehend things like the UK being able to leave the EU and the EU and UK continuing to exist and having that be the normal way federal and state interactions could occur, never mind the shadow of debt being a chain to the central government) or a Civil War (and while Americans will virtue signal all the way to kingdom come, it is in their ignorance, those countries that were democracies but are today authoritarian states, that shows most of society will be quite willing to bend the knee - if US society were for some reason different than the rest Trump wouldn't have gotten so far).

At a personal level, what people can do and will do is resistance, and be honest, let me ask you, supposing 1/3 of the US was doing the same effort, the same investment at resisting that you, personally are doing right now, given that 1/3 are inert "undecideds" more likely to get caught and the other 1/3 is MAGA, and keeping in mind that the authoritarian government is operating outside of society and is choosing to game it, what change would you really affect? How about we make it an even easier question? What if the authoritarian was a foreign monarch in Europe with an ocean of distance between them and you, if the most advanced form of travel was by ship and there was no AI, no big data, no social network herding, no instant communication, if your actions right now were representative of what the rest of society was doing, how much of a change would they be likely to make?