The insane part here is the red party having ANY loyalty, support, or chance of winning. That is the psycho dystopian impossible part, and the rest is damage control choosing among lesser evils.
Discworld even mocks this. The recurring patriarch of Ankh Morpork is Havelock Vetinari. He’s kind of evil. But he’s nowhere NEAR as evil as some people who’d like to take his place, and actually wants some stability for the city. So he stays.
There resides roughly 20-30% of any population that are complete lunatics and/or miserable assholes. It’s the additional support above that and the enormous number of apathetic people that are scary.
There are conspiracies about the deep state and everyone on lemmy says the donor class is what decides politics, but what I’ve personally seen is just massive amounts of money dumped into propaganda and mass media stories about how dems want everything bad and how everything Republicans do is good and common sense, and it works unbelievably well.
The insane part here is the red party having ANY loyalty, support, or chance of winning. That is the psycho dystopian impossible part, and the rest is damage control choosing among lesser evils.
Discworld even mocks this. The recurring patriarch of Ankh Morpork is Havelock Vetinari. He’s kind of evil. But he’s nowhere NEAR as evil as some people who’d like to take his place, and actually wants some stability for the city. So he stays.
There resides roughly 20-30% of any population that are complete lunatics and/or miserable assholes. It’s the additional support above that and the enormous number of apathetic people that are scary.
There are conspiracies about the deep state and everyone on lemmy says the donor class is what decides politics, but what I’ve personally seen is just massive amounts of money dumped into propaganda and mass media stories about how dems want everything bad and how everything Republicans do is good and common sense, and it works unbelievably well.
It’s not people just saying this by the way. There is empirical evidence the donor class decides politics.
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policycast/oligarchy-open-what-happens-now-us-forced-confront-its-plutocracy
Their inference from the data is correct but misleading, since for 90% of the issues the average citizen and the “donor class” were aligned, and when they were not, the citizen’s decisions were chosen about 40% of the time. That’s definitely a hard lean towards the rich, though their claim is that the average citizen has near-zero impact which is a big overstatement.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283035709_Testing_Inferences_about_American_Politics_A_Review_of_the_Oligarchy_Result
On the federal level near zero is accurate. Trying to downplay this is rather silly.