Well you see the government has tanks…
Okay off topic but what the hell is beehaw? I went to the website and my eyes glazed over after the first 13 paragraphs.
One thing I haven’t seen in this thread yet: we’re more or less trained that the only politics that really matter are federal politics. Most people can name the president (used it as part of a fast field cognitive test as a paramedic), but most folks can’t name their congressperson or senators, let alone their state legislators, mayor, or city/county council representative. The more local you get, the less awareness there typically is, which is the opposite of what it should be. In the US, at least, local politicians have a pretty shocking amount of power while also being infinitely more accessible. If you live in a city, you can go to a city council meeting and yell at them about anything you want for 3-5 minutes or what have you, completely for free, and the cops can’t stop you.
The cool thing is that you’ll meet other people there who also want to affect change, and you can start to network and organize. I’ve done it, I’m doing it, I highly recommend it.
I never thought about that. Thank you.
It sucks. We have been so thoroughly atomized through propaganda, trauma and attack that we have no real class consciousness. There is basically no organized left wing political movement, though there seems to be a (re)growing seed. Left leadership has traditionally be persecuted, assassinated or coopted. Unions have suffered all three and are now a shell of what they were once. Our political ‘opposition’ is liberals who fundamentally misdiagnose the problems and are scared of real (leftist) solutions.
There are tons of reasons because Americans have been groomed this way on purpose, but here’s one I haven’t seen brought up here yet.
“Doing something about it” has consequences. In no order, and wildly varying in severity:
- You may be imprisoned (whether or not you are charged). The jails and prisons are very bad & this can lead to enslavement.
- Convictions strip you of civil rights.
- You may be entrapped or assassinated.
- Public activism and willingness to volunteer is frequently redirected by capitalists to spoil outcomes or just waste activist energy.
- Professional skilled volunteering (lawyers, librarians, medics) does not count as employment in your field for most purposes and this will inhibit your career. It can also get you blacklisted.
- Capitalists intentionally endanger and expose activists during pandemic events.
- Street violence from police, security, hate groups.
- You may be doxxed.
- Propaganda aimed at normies may turn friends and family and community against you.
All of the above are things that happened to me or activists I know / worked with in the Central & Eastern Rustbelt region of the stolen lands.
(i’m an aussie so i have no place to actually comment on lived experience in the US)
… but i will add, because this is similar in most places i think:
- Public activism and willingness to volunteer is frequently redirected by capitalists to spoil outcomes or just waste activist energy.
on the rare occasion that activism is getting somewhere, they’re very good at giving just enough to make just enough people stop participating that it falls apart, and the “just enough” that they give are short-term concessions that they claw back in other ways (or sometimes not even in other ways: just straight up revert)
Thank you for this. Was it worth it?
Hard to say, friend. My life is worse for the work I did and “America” is Nazifying rapidly. Fled John Fetterman’s region with my family and just trying to get my life back together now, figure out what is next.
I’m sorry that you have to go through this. But what you’ve done was worth it and I appreciate it.
America isn’t enthusiastically going for the racist guy. Right now no one is happy and the people will continue to vote out the incumbent. Any incumbent would have lost this election.
Both parties are Nazifying rapidly. I’m not in the business of arguing over which had further distance to shift, as both have directly impacted my life with their fascism. I fled Fetterman’s district. My choices on the ballot were Oz or Fetterman, and they are both Nazis now. I don’t know who you are or how you think you align, but at present I feel surrounded.
Depends on the part of the US.
It’s a country the size of the EU, so like, think about the political difference between Hungry and Sweden.
Like, the US system is a bit more centralized in many respects, but a lot of stuff is still very dependent on state and local politics. So just because some people say something crazy at the national level doesn’t mean that actually gets effectively implemented everywhere. A lot of the more outrageous stuff is also done at the state or local level.
Some states certainly are that bad but most aren’t, most are just… blegh. Many people with the means and bandwidth to get together and do something about the worst stuff end up moving, which sucks for those without the capability to do so.
It’s not necessarily that the U.S. is bad, or is choosing the worst option.
There are undoubtedly a lot of very intelligent and deep analysis on the topic, but here’s a pretty simplified explanation that I’m going to try to rush through because I should be doing something other than commenting a whole novel.
The American electoral system is completely fucked.
It was not designed for or implemented with the concept of political parties, and some of its fundamental assumptions are predicated on political parties not existing in order to function as a working democracy. However after the first election, political parties formed, and began working on codifying and entrenching their power. It’s like game theory run amok. The win condition is first past the pole, so there’s only one winner, and by default, if there’s more than 2 contenders, then the vote is split inefficiently, so naturally there can only be two major parties at a time. And the two parties must exist such a way that they do not dilute or share their power, so they do not modify the system to allow for the inclusion of other parties, or allow for the vote to be split. It’s unlikely the parties would pass laws that they know would dilute their own power, even if it also diluted the power of their opposition.
As a result, voters in the U.S. must either: Vote for the party that most closely aligns with their interests, vote against the party that aligns against their interests, or abstain from voting.
With only two options, it’s sometimes challenging to find a party or candidates that represent your interests. Many people in the U.S. feel that no party represents them, or that their vote simply does not matter. In 2024, a little more than 2/3 of eligible voters did not vote.The process of financing and prosecuting elections in the U.S. is completely fucked.
Well before the 2011 Citizens United ruling, the U.S. had a lot of issues with voter suppression and voter turnout: Election Day is not a national holiday in the U.S. and many employers will simply tell their employees to figure out a time to vote that isn’t during work hours. Every state, and sometimes individual cities can execute elections differently, with different laws, however, so the experience is not consistent. Some places make voting more approachable, and some make it more difficult, but the federal government has limited authority over states when it comes to the election, so decisions about voting hours, whether to allow mail in voting, and the reasons for which mail in voting is allowable, are left up to various municipalities, creating a confusing patchwork that is a challenge to navigate by citizens. This lowers turnout to those who have the time and ability to navigate it all. Since 2011, unlimited corporate bribery has become the norm, and politicians are now nakedly bought and owned by corporate interests. Studies show that regardless of party or political belief, that most politicians align with donors way more than than the ‘rank and file’ voters, so the average person does not have the ability to impact the outcome of the laws that are passed.The third leg of this, which I’m unfortunately out of time to really discuss, is the media, and the internet. But the U.S. isn’t shutting down TikTok over user data. It’s shutting it down because it could not influence the algorithm to viewpoints that were favorable to the political goals of the U.S. and its corporate sponsors. All the major platforms in the U.S. are somehow beholden to the U.S. government, save for, well, Lemmy.
And beyond that, you have corporate control of the media, and corporations that own vast swaths of the information that comes into the U.S.’s TV’s, newspapers, and inboxes. It’s impossible to get viewpoints that are not influenced or controlled by (again) the U.S. government or its corporate sponsors.So if the public perception is controlled, the ability to vote is hampered, and the political parties have a noose braided out of dollars around their neck, then what does the average person do?
Go shoot a healthcare executive and watch major news networks freak the fuck out trying to villainize you while the government throws every possible law at you? Try to start your own political party and be drowned by the conspiracy of the two in power? Citizen-led voter initiatives, that are routinely challenged by monied interests and even the government themselves, when the citizenry don’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars in lawyer fees to fight frivolous lawsuits? Try to start an armed insurrection against the U.S.? Psh.
The citizenry of the U.S. are hostages, whether they believe it or not.
The American electoral system is completely fucked. It was not designed for or implemented with the concept of political parties, and some of its fundamental assumptions are predicated on political parties not existing in order to function as a working democracy. However after the first election, political parties formed, and began working on codifying and entrenching their power. It’s like game theory run amok. The win condition is first past the pole, so there’s only one winner, and by default, if there’s more than 2 contenders, then the vote is split inefficiently, so naturally there can only be two major parties at a time. And the two parties must exist such a way that they do not dilute or share their power, so they do not modify the system to allow for the inclusion of other parties, or allow for the vote to be split. It’s unlikely the parties would pass laws that they know would dilute their own power, even if it also diluted the power of their opposition. As a result, voters in the U.S. must either: Vote for the party that most closely aligns with their interests, vote against the party that aligns against their interests, or abstain from voting.
Care to comment on Alaska and it’s Ranked-Choice Voting system?
Care to comment on Alaska and it’s Ranked-Choice Voting system?
Honestly, I was going to be a little snarky and say “No.” all petulant-like and leave my response as just the quote of your question and my dumb response but I did a quick skim of the headlines about it because I, well, forgot they passed ranked choice. I know, at a time of upheaval, pandemic, and highly mediocre personal depression, I should have been thinking of Jewel’s home state.
But it’s kind of interesting, right? A citizen-led ballot initiative passed in the 2020 “blue wave”, and using ranked choice in 2022, Alaskans elected their first Democrat state senator in over 50 years. And Republican aligned groups are now repeatedly bringing petitions forth to to to get it overturned - which have so far continued to fail.
That’s a solid counter to my “Americans are hostages” line of thought. Unfortunately, Alaska represents less than 2% of elected officials, and about 0.25% of the U.S. population.
But those ballot initiatives won’t stop. Talking points from the strategists trying to undermine ranked choice will be played, parroted, and drilled into people’s heads. Until enough folks rethink their decision to vote for ranked choice on one of the upcoming votes to repeal it. And then what happens. Is there a political party that will fund ballot initiatives until it gets passed again?
Nah. Just two parties, pretending to oppose each other while pocketing a paycheck. It’s pro wrestling. Scripted fights. Misdirection. Anything to turn a profit and keep the show going.
Fitting that Trump sits at the top.This comment fucks
It’s not as bad as you probably think, and more people are “doing something about it” than you probably think.
But quiet progress doesn’t make the news, neither does people following common sense, neither does the everyday prevention of tragedy. It’s the loud backsliders, the senseless actions, and the unprevented tragedies that make news, so that’s what you see, even though the former is overwhelmingly more prevalent.
Thank you for your optimism, I sincerely appreciate it, but that progress doesn’t seem like enough to change the way things have been going.
One thing to keep in mind — the US is huge, both geographically and culturally. Flying from Los Angeles to Boston is further than London to Baghdad.
And likewise, the cultural “distance” between, say, New England or the Pacific Northwest and the deep south is extreme.
Of course there are things that affect (nearly) all Americans, but some context is important.
Generally it’s mostly a rural urban divide with some exceptions for places like Vermont.
We’re indoctrinated since grade-school. Pledge of allegiance is absolutely insane to put on children. And it doesn’t stop from there. Remember learning how great our country is in history and other classes? It’s terrible.
Yes, it’s real bad.
Our government exists to further enrich the wealthy - at absolutely any cost to people if Rs are in charge, or at almost any cost if it’s the Ds turn.
50+ years of the ruling class completely ignoring the most basic pleas for a sane country has completely destroyed the expectation that the government exists to serve their population’s interests.
Because that would be inconvenient.
American culture is everything available at all times everywhere, and if it isn’t it is a tragedy.
American propaganda playing on wide screen TVs 24/7, social media fills in the gaps.
It really is easy to see but hard to pinpoint on a personal level unless you are affected by whatever is currently happening that is the disaster/crime/injustice.
Long answer short: enough of the people are comfy in their worlds to give 2 shits.
I am an American native, EU resident visiting family for the first time in 6 years and…it’s overwhelming to me.
Would you elaborate more about what you believe is ‘bad’?
First a convicted felon as President, the way lgbtq people are treated, the rich controlling the media, constant warfare “for the good”, and also taking advantage of third-world counties, ie nestle
Edit
It really does seem like it’s turning into fascism
a convicted felon as President
I don’t believe that we’ll ever know precisely why and how this happened. However, my best guess is that the general public is uneducated and brainwashed by the media.
the way lgbtq people are treated
This one depends on which state you live in.
the rich controlling the media
This one has been going on for a long time. My best guess is that the rich and powerful want to become more rich and powerful.
constant warfare “for the good”
The billionaire oligarchs that are profiting from this have to paint it as such to get all the young people to participate.
taking advantage of third-world counties
The oligarchs are diseased dragons lying atop mountains of gold (see J.R. Tolkien). They don’t care about the earth or any life on it. The bottom line for them is power/money.
So, why aren’t more citizens trying to change this?
This is quite a complex issue, with multiple layers that compound on eachother.
- Most people are just managing to stave off homelessness, living hand to mouth. They live to work, and have very little energy or time to concern themselves about trying to change fundamental issues, if they are even educated on those issues, which leads into…
- The US education system is failing quite badly. People are not taught well how to critically think, and almost never cover fundamental societal issues or how to organize to improve them. It’s a meat grinder that is designed to get you smart enough to be a good employee, and generally kills the flame of curiosity in most people. This is especially true in republican states, where they are actively gutting the public education system in favor of private schools that will teach Christianity, and that slavery wasn’t all bad (literally, in Florida they want to teach that slavery gave slaves on-the-job experience)
- The red scare of the 50’s and 60’s is still effecting older generations, and they view any sort of collectivism as Stalinist communism. This is reinforced by Fox news, which is genuinely fascist propaganda, and is wildly popular amongst the elderly and rural populations.
Saying all that, there are people trying to make things better actively, and we’re starting to see an awaking of the working class as unions are making a comeback, and more people are beginning to realize that the system itself cannot pull itself out of this capitalistic nosedive, and that grassroots mutual aid and prefiguration is a more promising way.
For a non-violent option: Go to a rally or protest or something, yell for actual change. Talk your voice hoarse about injustice.
In the good ending, you sat there for a week, maybe were given weak platitudes from your target, and dispersed, went back to work, and were forgotten.
In the bad ending, you were called a disrupter, a terrorist, forced under militarized police order to disperse or have your life fucked up. Maybe you break under the pressure, maybe the situation devolves into a riot. You’ll never be taken seriously again.
For a violent option, look at the recent CEO thing. But even then, look at how disproportionately “justice” is dispensed. Because the victim was one of the elite, the case is being handled very differently than if a lowly serf killed another. An example must be made, of course.
Could be several reasons. Most people aren’t aware. Some people don’t care. There are probably more reasons.
To add one, have fun going to that rally when you are living paycheck to paycheck, working long hours with much exhaustion.
And if you did eke out the time to go do something, and get detained and prevented from coming back to work in time, you’ve lost your job. And your meager healthcare. Soon your home if you can’t bounce into another job.
That kind of living keeps people afraid of peeking outside the box.
Thank you for this. Would this be the case if more of the workers joined together or would they just fire them all? That’s not sarcastic, I’m curious.
Firstly, such unity would be hard to organize. Work culture down on the lower rungs where there would be people wanting change, are drowned in a conflict culture. Don’t talk about your wages. Unions are evils. You are Replaceable. The threat of termination is welded like a cudgel. One of my previous jobs had a point system. If you were late, point. Called out without enough sick hours and a doctor’s note? Point. Missed a shift for any reason and didn’t call in? 4 points. 4 points was terminated.
Would they actually follow through with it? A previous manager I’ve had absolutely would. Snow? Late? Should have shoveled your way over sooner. He changed someone’s schedule and they didn’t notice, failed to appear. Arguments were made, there was an appeal system after all to make it fair, right? They compromised on keeping the guy at 3 points. He spent the next while looking for a new job because he knew he was one mistake away from unemployed.
Would they fire the whole team for organizing? I think so. I think they’d quickly offer to re-hire their favorites while they picked up new blood but they’d do it. Everyone would be back on probation and back in line.
Another company taking over the country no longer has a fresh meat butcher department because they wanted to unionize years ago. Company made an example of them nationwide and now just does factory meat.
The last thing I want is for future generations to fix our mess from complacency which seems to be the trend.
It’s a matter of perspective.
From your, and many rational being’s perspective, there being a felon for president is a bad thing. You trust the judicial system, you think they found and convicted rightly, so now we have a bad man in charge.
From the other perspective, the majority voting perspective, the judicial system has been usurped and politically weaponized, the trial was a sham and the conviction false. He’s not a felon, just an unjustly labeled political martyr. Or maybe even a felon is better than a woman, or, gasp, a colored woman! The racism and misogyny never died, just sat in the back until it was allowed to speak again.
Why do they think this? Well, why do you think opposite? Different upbringing, education, social media exposure, less lead in you/your parents?
Clinton’s impeachment didn’t get the votes to go through and I still think that is wrong.
I don’t care who it is, but the President should be the best of the best of the country.
I agree, the president should be the best we can get, but infortunately we don’t elect people to be good at the job. The nature of elections selects the person who is best at elections at that moment. Sometimes that person happens to be really competent but that seems to be the exception and not the rule.
I’d like to think this is a problem with American voting specifically, or maybe first past the post election systems, but I worry that this is the trend of democracy as a whole. It seems like all democracy is sliding that direction, and I can’t think of many safeguards in place to resist it.
I sat with it for a moment, and I think parliamentary systems do seem more resilient since they require experts to be appointed or hired to do the real work, while the elected officials are steering the general direction. That falls apart of course when the appointed experts are selected for reasons that have nothing to do with expertise.
I don’t know what a solution to this is, and I think that is by design too, though it may just be the way the human brain works, I don’t know. It’s very hard to imagine new ways of doing things that are very different, and it’s even harder to see a clear path to that different future. I’m hopeful because good people are working on it, but I’m worried because the problems are so titanic.
Trouble is, would you consider someone best if they have imperialist values? Socialist ones? Would they require a Ph.D? And no matter what you answer, someone will believe the opposite. Who gets to pick the best of the best? In the current system, supposedly the common people do.
And they picked Felump.
Sure, stats say he wasn’t actually super popular, but the voters that could have gone another way made their vote too by leaving the box empty and giving him no opposition. To paraphrase Rush, “if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice”. So whether by checking the box or not, the people spoke, and here we are.
This just means we need a better educational system to help them understand what they’re watching and listening to on the media.
I agree.
But it’s a government system like any other, so like any other piece of it, the people in power ultimately decide what the people below get to have.
Public schools are being defunded and villainized by the powers that want them devalued and replaced with a different systems, where the rich can keep cash flowing through private schools the public gets their knowledge from what is approved by religion, with a preference on teaching the things that will improve dependence on and obedience to power.
The people in power are banning books, slashing budgets, using the already malleable to convince voters that teachers are the ones brainwashing their kids, that (public) education doesn’t work, so they can have another generation of under-educated malleable serfs.
Hopefully other countries can watch the US decay and learn from it, and keep systems like affordable and common healthcare and education available, so that at least some portion of humanity aren’t this gullible. The news is telling me about the attempts for this same crap to rise on other countries and I can only hope they hold strong.
But shouldn’t those that do know share the knowledge. This isn’t a lost cause. We’re in the middle of it and need to do something about it
60% of the country has no savings
I thought it was higher (80%)?
Probably talking about the social media/traditional media posts & programs.
If that’s the case, then my general answer would be that the US is not as bad as social media and other media conglomerates make things out to be. One reason being is the media figured out a while back that tactics such as fear-mongering gained more people’s attention. Therefore people were more likely to read their newspapers and see their advertisements, etc. (i.e. clickbait)
Now that I have been, mostly, limiting my self to the Associated Press and National Public Radio I don’t feel things such as impending doom.
I made a similar move a few years ago - none of the for-profit newspapers, and like you said, a stronger preference for national broadcasters who don’t have to worry about revenue directly from the populace (even if they are funded by public taxes), and a lesser dependence on advertising. I’m not even from the US and signed up for the NPR newsletters because they were so good and interesting!
I can’t help but feel you’re correct that clickbait is leading to a decline in the quality of things-that-I-read. In my opinion, it’s the manifestation of capitalism in communication and socialization and feels like such a terrible problem. Money may make the world go round – but it is clear that it doesn’t always do it in a sustainable way. I do what I can (with contributions to the DeArrow extension for YouTube for example) to stay focused on mitigating it, but I feel like I’ll have to do more in the future.
Statistics do say that it is safer now than ever before, but viscerally it doesn’t feel that way, which is by it so… unpleasant.
the average American IQ is less than 100
But this applies to the UK, Ireland, France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and…well…much of the world, if these data are to be trusted.
And it is this way for a variety of reasons, be that lead in the gas and paint, or underfunded basic educational institutions, or overly profit-focused higher education.
Or political persons recognizing a dumb populace is easier to manipulate and make the road to power smoother.
The next phase is bringing back zealous doctrine. Time to replace the under-funded public schools with religious institutions, so that you are trained to follow faith blindly. Whatever “God(TM, a whoever corporation)” says will be the way forward. Of course, if you can pay the private school, you can be one of the wolves instead of the sheep.
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