"Bought out by corporate interests" is a completely accurate assessment of the American electoral system. It's honestly quite alienating reading all of these completely delusional comments. Your vote is at the very least supposed to be proportionally significant to the general population. We don't even have that. We are bombarded with corporate propaganda every fucking day. A senator from Wyoming has just as much of a vote as California. This notion that we live in a democracy or anything close to that is asinine. The system is not tethered to the will of the people in any sense of the word. It's an oligarchy.
> notion that we live in a democracy or anything close to that is asinine. The system is not tethered to the will of the people in any sense of the word. It's an oligarchy
Pure democracy doesn't work. (More accurately: election fetishisation doesn't work. It tears itself apart in manufactured partisanship.) We live in a republic. The Congress is democratically elected. The President is meant to embody the strengths of monarchy. The Supreme Court represents the oligarchy. This is civics 101, succinctly summarised in the Federalist Papers.
> senator from Wyoming has just as much of a vote as California
I vote in Wyoming. We're not the oligarchy. We're not even a swing state. You're complaining about, broadly, the Electoral College (and our system of apportionment). That's orthogonal to that of corporate interests. If anything, the fact that each of my resresentatives has fewer people they're accountable to makes them harder to buy off.
You sound like a religious fundamentalist. Civics 101 is blindly deferring to the architects of a system whereby only rich, white property owners could vote?
Look, however you rationalize it in your head, power is highly concentrated in the US. Unless you are a member of the ruling class, being in favor of this basically amounts to Stockholm Syndrome.
> Civics 101 is blindly deferring to the architects of a system whereby only rich, white property owners could vote
No, it's understanding the tradeoffs systems of governments make in erecting the systems that they do.
Have you read the Federalist Papers? If not, I suggest starting there. It's more interesting than railing against the woke mind virus or corporations.
> however you rationalize it in your head, power is highly concentrated in the US
It's not consistently concentrated. And even then, it's not that concentrated. I've managed, as a rando, to get language put into multiple state and twice federal bills because I was the only person in my district who called in on a low-priority process. Nihilism in American politics is often just cover for civic laziness.
It's a good thing I don't advocate for nihilism. You haven't asked what I advocate, which illustrates to me you're a dull, incurious person. And if you're seriously bringing up the "woke mind virus," I think that says all I need to know about you. I haven't even brought up matters of social justice. Many of the things I think are rather "unwoke" in many respects; however, if that's your paradigm, your brain is hopelessly broken. I don't particularly care that you have gotten "language" into legislation. Do you also have some patents in your name?
Because unchecked corporate interests / you don't vote for the President but for electors are hot takes?
(Also, "your vote is at the very least supposed to be proportionally significant to the general population" doesn't technically make sense. I think I know what you're getting at. But even ignoring the political structure and just focussing on voting, you're assuming by statement values for parameters which lie on a spectrum.)
