Trump being elected again arguably is a sign the system is working, that people when unhappy with the status quo were able to change their government to someone they feel will represent their interests more. Now, I have no love to lose for Trump, I think he's a asshole, braggart and charlatan - but his election is a sign we can enact change - I dont think Trump will bring much real change, but its a sign the system works.
The only reason that this doesn't happen more often is the electorate is mostly disengaged from the races that do matter, and tied down by partisanship.
It seems you contradict yourself. Yes change is Trump's platform. But you agree he won't change anything. So the system has the illusion of change, but no proof it can actually facilitate it.
No, not at all - it means that the power of the people to vote their choice is alive and well - that doesn't mean we're putting good candidates up, or that people underestimate the difficulty of wholesale systemic change - it just means we can vote for who we choose.
So I'm arguing for democracy. I'm a fan of it and you see a lot of prominent people even within the US (Theil, the GOP, Curtis Yarvin, as well as burned out doomers) arguing and working against it so that is not just pointless posturing.
Democracy generally works well, and America becoming a poster child for "Why Democracy is bad" is a development that could lead to real horrors, at home and across the globe.
You don't have to condone political violence to support more democracy to avoid it. Even in nations, like the US, where political violence is celebrated every single day.
And yet the US were created by bloody revolution, preserved by bloody civil war, and made prosperous by countless bloody coups, wars, etc.
Perhaps the problem is that democracy isn't really any different than any other form of country-level government. Perhaps we lost for ever when our ancestors started founding cities a few thousand years ago.
This is not really the point of the article. It also points out that the man has not been convicted yet. In a rule of law society, people are innocent until proven guilty, but it seems irrelevant because his unrelated contributions are preemptively stripped from him and people are being arbitrarily punished for asking about it.
> Perhaps rightly - We have rule of law, if a person is doing something unethical, change the law - if your electeds wont change the law, vote them out and pick people who will.
I don't mean this sensationally, but I do have to say it: you're promoting violence by saying this. Maybe indirectly, but it still leads to violence.
Money, in the US, is speech. That means that the richest people in the country have the most speech. They are heard the most by politicians because they put those politicians into power through their speech. This is done through mass communication in the media among other things. But it also happens through campaign donations, PACs, and whatever other interest groups.
When a group of people tries to "vote them out and pick people who will", inevitably a person with more speech than them uses it to override the will of that group. There is a massive asymmetry of power, one that is near impossible to overcome:
As people continue to see their material conditions decline despite voting, they begin to see violence as the only solution. So when you say "just vote away the problem", you are promoting violence, because voting continues to prove ineffective.
Oh, and just to pre-empt derailing: I vote. In every primary. In every election. Local, state, and national. In every run-off election.
Maybe in your bubble it's stable. Outside of that, it's not. There's tipping points. Just like the Americans tipping over to vote Trump. In the future, more points will be tipped when the asymmetrica effects of economic boom and bust cycles finally trip something.
Eh, check out what happened in Romania recently: we had presidential elections and an independent candidate won (by quite a big margin). The second place was also not expected. They then cancelled the elections and we're doing them again in May.
