For one, the United States lacks a good press corps of independent journalists with broad reach.
Everything is either politicized or commercialized. Shock value sells. Balanced rational discourse does not. Polarization makes too much money for too many people.
On top of that, a systematic destruction of education and a stranglehold of religion practically makes ignorance inevitable.
Maybe we could repair it, but it would take Republicans being blocked from making any decisions for several decades at this point.
It’s a catch-22. We can’t fix it, until we fix it.
No no…we had it fixed for centuries, until it was intentionally dismantled over the past 50-70 years (depending on where you wish to place the official start date.) For me, I place it during the 1964 presidential campaign, as that’s the markings of the first ever attack ad.
If you want the public to care about your politics, then politics needs to be about the policies of those politics. Reflection from within. Rather than “but what about the other guy? He’s bad.”
If candidate number one tells you “I will raise taxes, and use the money to pay for schools and roads”. And a second candidate says “I will lower taxes by dismantling social security”. You as a voter then have a choice to make. Pay slightly more in taxes, with better roads, and a better future for the next generation. OR pay less taxes, and probably have your retirement vanish.
Instead, that same scenario today would be “The other guy wants to take your retirement! He’s bad!” and the second candidate says “The other guy is raising taxes. He’s bad!”
So now the general public thinks both candidates are bad, and nobody looks into what the outcome of their other choices have historically been. This then leads them to vote based on sound bytes, rather than historical accuracies.
The end result is nobody cares about politics, because it’s all bullshit anyways.
Corrupt plutocracy of a government removed the law that prevented mass ownership of news and media outlets. It consolidated everything into just a handful of media outlets that talk to the nation.
That, along with complete over saturation. A person trying to sort through a huge country comprised of their city government, plus their county, plus state, plus national level politics across a nation that’s 8,000,000 square kilometers (not including Alaska and Hawaii) is just too much for most people to decipher and sort through.
It’s even harder to mass protest here. It’s not like everyone can drive inside of less than two hours away and show up in London or something. Getting to our capital to protest could be quite literally a 40 hour drive away.
That last part is particularly noteworthy. If I’m in the UK, I can make it to London in 8 hours pretty much regardless of where I am. That’s less than a full work day of driving. Many Americans have done that to visit family.
If I’m in France, I’m never more than 9 hours away from Paris. Again, many Americans have done a drive like that just to go on holiday.
If I’m in Newport Oregon, it’ll take 43 hours of driving (and crossing two full mountain ranges) to reach Washington DC. That’s a full work week of driving, just to reach the capitol.
So most Americans protest locally if they’re able. But that’s far less effective, because it splits the protests apart and makes them easier to ignore or break. Americans can’t go full “light Paris on fire for a full month because the retirement age is getting raised” because there aren’t enough protestors near the capitol to do that. The small protests that do start almost unanimously get broken up by cops as quickly as they started.
Any excuse huh? You have roughly the equivalent of the entire population of France living within a four hour drive of Washington DC, but
There aren’t enough protestors near the capitol to do that
There aren’t enough people who would actually stand up for themselves, and in particular , others, is what you actually mean
There aren’t enough people who would actually stand up for themselves, and in particular , others, is what you actually mean
So, protestors?
A mixture of poor education in some states combined with a steady, deliberate demoralizing of the voters by the political class.
Cos that’s the way the elite want it, an ignorant population it’s easier to manipulate.
"There’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education SUCKS, and it’s the same reason it will never, ever, EVER be fixed.
It’s never going to get any better, don’t look for it, be happy with what you’ve got.
Because the owners, the owners of this country don’t want that. I’m talking about the real owners now, the BIG owners! The Wealthy… the REAL owners! The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions.
Forget the politicians. They are irrelevant. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice! You have OWNERS! They OWN YOU. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls.
They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want:
They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. Thats against their interests.
Thats right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that!
You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shitty jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later cause they own this fucking place! It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it! You, and I, are not in the big club.
By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table has tilted folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care! Good honest hard-working people; white collar, blue collar it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard-working people continue, these are people of modest means, continue to elect these rich cock suckers who don’t give a fuck about you…. they don’t give a fuck about you… they don’t give a FUCK about you.
They don’t care about you at all… at all… AT ALL. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Thats what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that’s being jammed up their assholes everyday, because the owners of this country know the truth.
It’s called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it."
George Carlin?
