this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2025
940 points (99.4% liked)
Today I Learned (TIL)
7637 readers
1360 users here now
You learn something new every day; what did you learn today?
/c/til is a community for any true knowledge that you would like to share, regardless of topic or of source.
Share your knowledge and experience!
Rules
- Information must be true
- Follow site rules
- No, you don't have to have literally learned the fact today
- Posts must be about something you learned
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Then why is the government so completely dominated by the right if most politically active people are on what Americans call the left?
The electorial college and gerrymandering
Money, Propaganda, Tribalism, an undemocratic voting system...
Further, the uneveness of Power is gigantic: billionaires have way much power than common people, who are only powerful if together in large numbers and that's incredibly hard to make happen in a structured way with everybody aligned in the same way compared with what a single billionaire can do if they feel like spending $100 million, and the entire system is set up against people organising in such a way - notice how the biggest demonstration ever in the US, the George Floyd protests, achieved pretty much nothing at all, and the police in the US is still a force of Injustice rather than Justice.
The vast majority of people are either played like fiddles or made to feel impotent and hence just turn of from politics and just live day to day.
The US is not a Democracy.
Gerrymandering and other structural means of disproportionate representation in federal government are big parts of it
In one word: money.
Two words, voter disenfranchisement
They remove the right to vote from our poor, our people of color, our citizens who have made mistakes but paid their debts to society, they remove polling places, making people wait hours and hours standing in lines to vote, giving them water is illegal, they purge voter roles right before elections…. And so so many more things. So many Americans don’t vote because they can’t because our right wing government has put so many roadblocks in the way.
Because while a lot of Americans support a lot of left wing positions, there are no major left wing parties, and a very small number of politicians who run for national or statewide office who actually take action to further left wing policies. There's Bernie Sanders, who isn't a member of a large party. AOC, and a few others qualify, but being a small proportion of those running, they're a small proportion of those elected, and have relatively little actual influence.
Ideas neither major party supports are basically impossible to see happen.
As others pointed out, there's major structural issues. There's also issues with apathy and people buying into the anti-electoralism/accelerationism con with religious ferver.
It's not hard to be anti-electoral when elections don't seem to ever fucking work
because Dems allowed gerrymandering to go without protest
Because most Americans have knee-jerk reactions to labels as opposed to policies. Like how everyone supports all the protections Obamacare provides, but how they all want to get rid of Obamacare.
also voter suppression gerrymanderinng élite control of the media etc
Others have commented valid points but I also wanted to bring up propaganda;
A lot of people are unwilling or even unable (i.e. there is only one tv in the house and you don’t get to control the remote most of the time) to get their news from sources that aren’t constantly telling them that Democrats are out to get them and 2SLGBTQIA+ are the enemy and that if they just vote for (wealthy conservative) then all their problems will be solved overnight. Couple that with an education system that has failed to give people the critical thinking skills to ask what trans folk have to do with the economy and you get the 2024 election.
The fact that there are so many valid reasons makes me extremely unhopeful.
To make you more hopeful, they have to constantly fight to keep these systems of oppression in place. We win if/when this stops. All we have to do is keep fighting them. Make them work to oppress us, and it'll crumble.
So the electoral college and the apportionment act will go away, too?
And Americans won’t be a bunch of fucking idiots with the attention span of a goldfish?
And we’ll get proportional representation when they crumble?
Because most of the issues pointed out are structural and have nothing to do with Trump
Well, either they will be fixed or the state collapses eventually. If they keep this up people lose faith in the government.
Too late.
My take is that there are a lot of Left people who won't vote for anyone except a candidate they support 100%. Hilary Clinton should have destroyed Trump. Those people ignore the simple truth that any time any GOP gets elected the whole country moves to the right.
There are two sides. The Right and everyone else. The Right wins because they stay on topic and vote. Until the rest of us fall in line like they do, they'll keep on winning. Show me where I'm wrong.
There is an evil witch that lives underground in the Moon and who is mind-controlling non-Rightwing votes in the US so that they don't vote. Show me were I'm wrong.
The easiest thing in the World is to come up with a wild-ass theory without backing it with any evidence and then demanding others disprove it - I do believe that's even a 4chan special.
Donald Trump won the election in 2016 over Hilary Clinton. How much more evidence do you need that people should have done more to defeat Donald and the GOP?
That's as much "evidence" for your original "two sides" theory as it is for my "witch in the Moon" theory.
Also you've moved the goalposts to a self-fullfilling and generic to the point of uselessness statement "people should have done more to defeat Donald and the GOP".
That's like saying that "all drivers in car crashes should have done more not to crash their cars".
Well, true, but also about as worthless as "insights" go as "the sky is blue".
Also by blaming people you're implying that "the system works and is fair" hence the fault is entirelly of people who have full agency and control. I'm afraid that things like the partisan support in the US for Genocide or the extreme level of police violence show that "people" don't really have full agency or even much control - in fact I could spend the whole day listing how most people don't really have much in the way of control of how the US is managed, though granted those wo do have most of the control are people (unless one subscribes to the theory that the ultra-rich are lizard-men).
Let's turn it around.
What's your plan? How do you propose to get Trump out? Be very specific.
Trump is a symptom, not the disease.
By worring so much about the puppet instead of the puppet masters, you're playing into the hands of the handful of people who control the politics of the US and hence the US.
Go after the real power of the land: the ultra-wealthy.
A General Strike would be a good start.
lol! You demand specifics and plans, and then throw out two words. "General strike."
Details, please. Who is the leader? What is the date? What are your demands? How are you going to handle invalids and homebound folks who need food and meds delivered? Schools open or close?
By exactly using the MAGA the technique of, after ranting about blaming everybody else but yourself about all maner of problems, "asking" for others to provide solutions only to criticize them when given them, you've just proved what I suspected, so thanks for that.
Whatever is the way to solve the US problems, it's the very opposite of that "criticized everything and everybody" shit that you, EXACTLY LIKE THE FAR-RIGHT POPULISTS are doing - that shit is literaly "how to divide people and make them believe there is no option other than compliance" out of the Authoritarian Playbook
Being a fucking rock, literally, does more towards solving the situation in the US than what you are doing.
Whether because you're a sock-puppet or because you're the ultimate useful idiot, you are part of the problem, not of the solution.
And you're doing... what, exactly?
I'm still trying to get a response to my original point that
does not logically follow from
and hence the latter does not prove the former.
The whole ploy of the other post in, when I pointed that out, demanding that I do the impossible and provide a "specific" and "detailed" plan to "get Trump out" (as if I'm some kind of omniscient divinity that can produce a specific and detailed plan for something as complex as that out of the top of my mind), followed by using my inability to do the impossible as evidence that I must be wrong about my earlier point, is just a common argumentation ploy to distract away from the point I made rather than address it, and specifically a ploy that the MAGAs constantly use.
Of course I don't have a "specific" and "detailed" plan to "get Trump out", and neither has the poster who demanded that I provided one in the full expectation that I couldn't - if it was that easy that even an internet rando could come up with a "specific and detailed plan" for it, it would've already happened.
If you read the thread back you will notice that I made a good faith attempt at providing at least some ideas, whilst the other poster has not put forward a single positive solutions oriented idea, only criticism, starting by criticizing everybody and later moving to criticizing my inability to do the impossible.
"Always criticism never solutions" is exactly the political strategy of populists. People who want to try and solve things, even if they think it's going to be hard as shit, don't spend their time in "criticize everybody" mode.
You realize you're literally describing exactly what you did. You demanded details then couldn't come up with anything but a pipe dream.
And if I'm doing what MAGA did, what is the problem? Patton was the general the Germans feared the most, because he fought exactly the way they did.
And I love the last line. If I am the problem, what is the solution? Again, give me a lot of details.
Things like who is going to organize this general strike?
You're lying about what I wrote
Quote the exact words were I "blamed everybody" or even "asked for a solution".
Once again you're using a ploy straight out of the Fascist Manual of Argumentation: "When accused of something, accuse the other person of the same, lying if need be."
From the Fascist Manual of Argumentation you so far have:
If you were arguing in good faith you would've either walked back on that theory, refined it some more, or tried to actually show there was a logical link between "Donald Trump winning the election in 2016 over Hilary Clinton" and "There are two sides. The Right and everyone else. The Right wins because they stay on topic and vote.".
You did not. Instead you went for the "Demand the impossible and when the impossible is not delivered claim that it proves the other person is not wrong" ploy, same as the MAGAs do.
tl, dr
You're wrong by blaming the fictional non voting left for all your woes. Don't be stupid.
It's very simple. 36% of people didn't vote on average. What percent of those people are leftists? If you don't have that information, then you're making shit up and demanding other people prove it for you.
There's your tankie behavior.
You're saying I'm wrong, and not providing anything like actual information. Why don't you give me some facts and figures to explain it?
So, instead of actually doing research to prove me wrong, you went through all my threads and found something you can take out of context?
That makes you even funnier!
Because the left keeps falling in with the ineffectual center-right, leading to widespread voter disillusionment.
Mainly because your average person is apathetic to their own governenance