And please try to do it with the less bias possible, left and right wing are meaningless terms for me, I only believe in 🐔 wings.
To give a simple and unbiased answer to your question: Any natural-born US-citizen who has lived in the US for at least 14 years and is at least 35 years old is allowed to run for president of the United States.
Allowed to run, yes. But to be able to win requires a lot more, mainly money, and the ability to raise money. They raise money by making promises to wealthy corporations…
As the most powerful nation, literally nobody can stop us from being this stupid.
But in the event of a fascist takeover, please do try.
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Older generations have entrenched themselves in institutional power, they cling to it to their very last breath. Whether it’s democratic power, corporate power, media etc.
Having two old fucks like Trump and Biden slap-fighting for the throne is the ultimate manifestation of that effort.
There’s also an incredibly powerful cloak of bystander effect happening in America.
There are literally hundreds of thousands if not tens of millions of people better fundamentally equipped to be the president of the United States than either Biden or Trump or any of the people working inside of the DNC or RNC.
But, thanks to the bystander effect, which is where people will stand idly by and watch another person being murdered in broad daylight and not do anything to help them, all of America is standing in public watching our future being murdered in broad daylight and nobody is doing anything about it because we keep thinking someone else will do something.
Add another layer to that, I don’t know what any one person could do to change this current path that we are on. If I could figure it out I would do it myself.
Yup. And a career in politics sucks way more than most people realize. It’s almost all fund raising all the time. On the phone begging for money. And when you’re not doing that, you’re dealing with belligerent morons like MTG.
“To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.”#ImWithBender #KillAllHumans
They are allowed to run, because there’s no law stopping them.
As for why they have a chance at winning, I don’t think I can answer that without significant bias.
Well for one, there are no laws to prevent them from running. But as for why it’s them, as opposed to other candidates, the parties have elections (called primaries) to decide which candidate they will put forward in the general election. These two candidates got more votes in the primaries than any of their opponents. In the case of Biden, he was an incumbent, and no one generally runs against the incumbent of their own party, so he wasn’t really competing with anyone.
You’re glossing over how some of the more progressive dem voters were purged from the Democratic party voter rolls ahead of the primary 4 years ago, thus preventing Bernie’s fans from voting for him as the nominee.
Because people who do not have the approval of party power brokers and wealthy donors are effectively locked out, leaving only people of which the power brokers and donors approve.
The primary requirements of the power brokers and donors are that the would-be candidate has no principles that might interfere with them getting whatever it is that they want but have enough skill and/or charisma to project the illusion of principles to the voters. They want someone they can count on to exclusively serve their interests while maintaining enough of an appearance that they serve the interests of the people to win an election, then maintain at least enough support to function in office.
And since they control, as the case might be, the nomination process and the funding of campaigns, they get what they want.
We need a cabal to kill these super-rich.
Under a good electoral system a party that fails to choose good candidates would lose votes to other parties competing for those same voters. The system in America largely prevents this from occuring because both parties have large bases of voters who would effectively never consider voting for the other side.
The framers of the Constitution tried to make the limitations on who could run be as minimal as possible since they didn’t want any institutional bad actors messing with the process. This includes being a felon of a state as it was thought a state could convict a candidate without due process for political reasons. If there was something to disqualify a candidate from office, it should be handled through the political process.
Also, it was never really intended for Presidents to be elected. Only two states put the election for President on the ballot initially and South Carolina only let people vote for President after the Civil War.
From that, even when Presidents were directly elected, they were initially nominated by their parties through a closed process. As this was found to be deeply undemocratic, states changed their laws to regulate how candidates were nominated, creating the primary process. Since this was done at the state level, every state did it differently.
So why Trump and Biden? Trump is extremely popular within the Republican Party; he won the majority of primaries and no other Republican candidate could compete with Trump’s popularity. Biden is the sitting President. Traditionally, sitting Presidents only get challenged when they are seen as weak politically. Until the first debate, Biden was seen as strong enough politically that no one wanted to challenge him.
Essentially , the DNC and RNC have at this point successfully executed regulatory capture of the US political system. That is, it’s incredibly difficult to run for anything and win at a state level or higher unless you’re affiliated with one of those two, and the parties are able to exert a substantial degree of control over any and all candidates affiliated with them simply by giving or not giving them financial and political support. And the FEC has rules that effectively entrench both parties - the barrier to entry for 3rd parties is obnoxiously high, and the vagaries of our FPTP system (and for president, the electoral college too) mean that we’re effectively forced to vote tactically if we want our vote to mean anything in general elections.
There’s a whole class of “consultants” who work in Washington who are some of the most deluded, corrupt, and dishonest people you could ever want to meet. It is almost impossible to succeed in politics without making a Faustian bargain with them, even if you started out good (which, mostly, you didn’t), and once you do, forever will they control your destiny. They will decide that particular people are allowed to run. They will swing massive amounts of money and (more crucially) media attention in favor of the corporate candidates and away from the popular candidates.
They are some of the most dislikable people you can imagine. They’re all fake, like a Ken doll or a church mom, and they don’t care if you know it. And their priorities are wildly out of step with anything that will produce progress for America. They run the RNC and the DNC, and by the time decisions make it down to the level of the American people getting to pick one of the options, it’s mostly a disheartening array of bullshit that no one really has any stomach for selecting any one of, which is only further depressive of any interest by any large segment of the population in making any of that better.
Sometimes fuckups happen. Bernie was almost a massive fuckup, but they were able to kneecap him in time. Biden was actually pretty good for the working class, within the parameters of what they find to be acceptable, but I think he is 100% unable to, for example, take meaningful action against Israel, or they would throttle him in the night (figuratively speaking), and he would never recover, and Trump would win.
None of this is to say that voting doesn’t matter. Voting for Biden in this particular election will be necessary if you don’t want the world to end, chiefly because of how horrifyingly worse than even the uninspiring norm Trump is. (Trump was a fuckup, too, by the way; they didn’t want him but they were faced with a fairly authentic popular movement that just hates all politicians with a fiery passion and wants to throw them all in the river and was able to identify that he wasn’t one, and that was enough.)
But the overall system is so inbred and corrupt that people with genuinely new ideas are commonly ejected from the system, as a matter of course, before they can gain traction that might threaten anybody’s paycheck. And so, you get two old, old men who both have significant drawbacks (though not of the same kind or degree), competing to see which one can run the most powerful country in the world. It’s like if 1960s NASA had all the same engineering, all the same genius and money and manpower, except, the president’s idiot nephew was in charge of picking astronauts, and there were only like 10 random people in the world that were willing to play baseball with him that he liked, so they had to just go with a couple guys out of that lot that were acceptable to that guy for some fuckin reason and hope it went okay.
Ask me if I am bitter about it
Because there’s nothing that says they can’t. The highest position in the land also has one of the lowest requirements to run for, which is being a citizen and being over a minimum age.
Natural born citizen, and you have to have been a us resident for 14 years
Well, the 14th Amendment says insurrectionists can’t run but we arguably have the worst Supreme Court since before the Civil War. And conservatives have always hated the 14th Amendment since all the other clauses stop them from being local fascist dictators.
The short version is that the Constitution says the President is the one who gets the most votes. The Electoral college says there are only 548 votes, and they are mostly all awarded by each of the states to one victor (first-past-the-post).
The practical result is that if a person-or-party can only win 36% of the vote in a state, they get 0 electoral votes. Because of *that*, a two-party system has more or less been the norm.
On what basis do you believe they should not be allowed to run? It’s a democracy, outside of a small handful of qualifiers, anybody can run.
If your actual question is “why have the major parties chosen these two individuals?” then that’s much more complicated.
Nobody can speak for their intentions except them, but the subtext is highly suggestive of the idea the founding fathers set up the nation to be rigged from the start.
Consider the following.
Suppose you wanted answers on why each election only highlights two possible answers. The founding fathers wrote they thought the masses were stupid (not even sure if that’s their exact wording, it even may have been) and that the process had to be dumbed down.
Suppose you wanted answers on why voting power is distributed between county lines. One can cite none other than Alexander Hamilton who said he thought “people would be overriding each others’ interests otherwise”.
But… then suppose you wanted answers on why people way past their prime can ascend to the presidency. The founding fathers, surprise, really did think about this, long and hard, since Rome had the same question lingering, but then said “meh it’s not going to be that big of an issue” (despite the fact something like the elections being dumbed down seemed big enough to manifest how it was manifested).
It definitely seemed like they were sewing the seeds of tyranny.
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