This is not election denialism. This is almost just a fact except they also subjectively declare that we have a faux democracy (which also seems accurate to me).
No.
This reflects the common understanding of the term:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_denial_movement_in_th...
> The election denial movement in the United States is a widespread false belief that elections in the United States are rigged and stolen through election fraud by the opposing political party. Adherents of the movement are referred to as election deniers.
It requires that people still believe they're being given legitimate choices. My comments above do not.
If you actually don’t believe capital plays an outsized role in elections and government then take a gander at the Wikipedia page called Campaign finance in the United States. There is a chart called Percent of races won by top spending candidate… and lots of other information. Also looking into the role of lobbying in American politics.
It is not less dangerous because you include Marxist delusions like "capital" in your description, as if "capital" is an autonomous entity with a will and interests of its own. In fact, it takes money to run a campaign, and that money comes from a large variety of interests and sources, all of which are competing and not by any means unitary, anf among which include very not "capital"-like things such as workers unions, individual donations, groups set up by citizens, etc.
You don't get a pass because you think your election denialism sounds sophisticated and progressive by inserting Marxist terms into the picture.
- Michael Bloomberg - Hillary Clinton (both in the 2008 primary and 2016 general) - Alex Vindman ...
a simple Google search reveals that while there is some threshold amount of dosh necessary to get noticed, _more money != more votes_. To believe otherwise is is willful ignorance. Sometimes your favorite candidate loses because the median actual voter (you know, the guy who actual fills out the form) prefers the status quo for their own reasons and not because they're brainwashed or whatever it is that "capital interests" do to them.
Conspiracy theories are just as batshit whether they're socialist or fascist. The only difference between yours and the nazi type is that the nazis added the adjective "jewish" to their description of "capital"... but I guess these days the left is doing that too!
Go listen to Ian Shapiro’s Yale lectures called Power and Politics in Today’s World. It’s an amazing lecture series and you’ll learn a lot.
Though I’m surprised you think it’s surprising left leaning people would criticize the role of capital in politics, since that’s kind of the whole thing with true leftists.
The will of the people is the result of the corporate interests that control the democratic system.
Manufacturing Consent is an excellent read - and don’t stop at Chomsky, read Bernays, who pretty much codified the system as it runs today. Propaganda is a good place to start.
Convincing argument you have there, but the choices we're provided between shit sandwich A and shit sandwich B are the problem, not which one wins.
Large parties represent large coalitions, so there are more compromises and things happen slower, but they still happen. Not always for the better, as we're seeing when populists are elected.
Ever-growing wealth disparities, eroded rights, mass enshitification in a race to the bottom, and widespread hatred of ones neighbor over fake outrage culture war propaganda disseminated from corporate media are not a trends of improvement. They are trends of decline, unless you're of the class who has their doomsday bunker on standby.
Higher concentration of wealth is not new, it's happened many times and dissipated many times. Real-wages are still growing, which is what we care about qua improvements in our well being (and what attracts immigrants). The key risk though is regulatory capture from consolidation of tech companies (much of this "wealth" in question is stock valuation, which tends to get reinvested in companies), but anti-trust is still a thing, and has been wielded relatively recently.
> enshitification
This is about consumer products, not government policy. Buy an alternative, you have those choices.
> widespread hatred of ones neighbor over fake outrage culture war propaganda disseminated from corporate media
Based on polling, the most salient issues seem to reflect economic anxieties. Even stances on immigration are really about that.
When the established parties and institutions fail, people lash out and elect populists. The populist fervor will wane once housing affordability is appropriately tackled for instance.
> not a trends of improvement
Yeah, not everything improved in the short-run, that isn't remarkable. Many things did. Look at real-wages, look at the extreme poverty rate globally as defined by the UN. I could go on.
That's a very clinical way to put it. Usually when its "dissipated", its through war or economic depression or both, and a great many people who never had any wealth suffer needlessly, while the wealthy rarely do.
It would be nice if we could like, _not_ do that, and try something different for once, instead of throwing up our hands and saying "well that's just how its always been!"
Also, dynastic wealth itself doesn't sustain itself well, and dwindles in a generation. See: the aforementioned Rockefeller, whose grandchildren are nowhere near as rich. Notwithstanding that many of the wealthy (in particular, Bill Gates) are donating the majority of their wealth when they die.
You speak as if these things are unrelated.
> Buy an alternative, you have those choices.
Increasingly, we don't:
"Modern Capitalism Is Weirder Than You Think: It also no longer works as advertised"
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/03/how-asset-managers-h... (https://archive.is/wSmtd)
State the connection, because it seems like your next argument is going to be "the government didn't stop them", as though that's their job.
> Increasingly, we don't:
Think of a single enshittified product that matters to you for which there is no alternative but to use it.
This also all pales in contrast to the conveniences and improvements afforded over time. You can now access and stream basically any music you want for free, for example. Television sets are now commodities, which tend to be cheaper adjusted for inflation. Etc etc. So the rhetoric about enshittification doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
It's not their job to break up monopolies and ever-shifting financial abstractions a few steps ahead of the law that enable monopolistic behavior?
> Think of a single enshittified product that matters to you for which there is no alternative but to use it.
* Mobile devices and their respective walled gardens if you expect to do something as simple as access your own bank account or reliably receive text messages
* Social media which only really works when lots of people are on any given platform
* Food that is safe, nutritious, and sustainable
> Television sets are now commodities, which tend to be cheaper adjusted for inflation.
Oh neat, they didn't enshitify the legacy propaganda client devices yet. How nice of them, and quite the measure of progress.
It's not their job to prevent companies from selling products that are a bit shittier in some fashion. Buy from a competitor.
I know you must not be confusing enshittification and monopoly, so why the attempted switch? At any rate, we're not dealing with monopolies, but competition can be reinforced through policy and anti-trust is still being wielded, more recently against Google.
> Mobile devices and their respective walled gardens if you expect to do something as simple as access your own bank account or reliably receive text messages
This is a EU phenomenon, and it's a product of EU-wide payment-security regulation, in particular PSD2's Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) rules. Banks found apps cheaper than SMS and card readers, and registered phones offer a layer of fraud protection. There are other incentives.
You're lumping this as "enshittified" but given what this does, average people would not agree. People who dislike this move are more privacy obsessed, or techies who dislike the app ecosystem. Ultimately if consumers en-masse cared enough about this to push a grassroots effort through, it would change, but they do not.
> Social media which only really works when lots of people are on any given platform
vbulletin forums and online communities have been around long before the popular iterants today. HN itself is an online community. It can work whether there are more or fewer.
People tend to tolerate more for high-traffic sites, but not infinitely so. Digg died many years ago, and now reddit's numbers are plummeting. FB's traffic is just old people.
> Food that is safe, nutritious, and sustainable
Lmao we've never had it better for food, in terms of choice and access. Pesticides are also safer than ever.
Notwithstanding staples and cheap healthy foods like legumes, there are novel products on the shelves all the time, including "sustainable" offerings. For instance consumers have enthusiastically adopted "milk alternatives" despite not reporting themselves to be vegetarian.
If you can't see how these are related, then we're done here.
You did not. But you have lots of boot to clean out of your mouth, so I won't bother you any longer.
Meh, the economic anxiety voters are systematically voting for economically worst performing parties. They may say "it is economy" in polls, but it is hardly believable.
The difference between men and women in voting patterns is not about economy.
Incidentally, among the most effective remedies for what ails us now, like zoning reform, would be derided as "neoliberal" by progressives, though the evidence speaks for itself, and YIMBYs are making in-roads.
That doesn't mean that state capacity doesn't have it's place. We historically would spend more on innovation, on NASA, DARPA and the like, and that matters a great deal. But it doesn't preclude removing red tape that hinders govt and private sector efforts.
> a great deal of issues
Ok, name some. Realistically, there aren't many.
Yet, the Trump administration continues to support the repression of workers unions, environmental deregulation, foreign and domestic imperialism, state-sponsored terrorism, corporatocracy, mass incarceration, and other common tools of the neoliberal State.
Yes, his economic policies are populist and nationalist, his immigration policies and other things, but his administration and the likes of Stephen Miller simply do not perceive these other issues as relevant to the new era they are ushering in.
> Ok, name some. Realistically, there aren't many.
Both previous presidential candidates were bought and paid for by the establishment. Both were prepared to serve the needs of the wealthy class and pander to the middle class. Everything else follows from there.
You're still confused about what neoliberalism is. It really is just "vibes" to progressives apparently.
But keep trying to wave the away the obvious. You only look more ridiculous the harder you try.
No, the non-con man option was an unpopular candidate who was installed after skipping a primary process. A primary process that was shown to be a complete joke during the previous cycle.
> When people type what you type it seems obvious you are attempting to avoid responsibility for choosing the con man.
I never chose the con man. Nor did I choose the party who manufactured consent for him with their pied piper "strategy" that was exposed only by wikileaks. Did the party reflect on this? No. They got mad at the person who leaked it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Raffensperger_ph...
But anyway, on the subject of the usefulness of your vote, Trump was elected on an America first platform, touting ending foreign wars and avoiding new ones.
If you elected him and his party based on that I think you're going to be pretty disappointed with the effectiveness of your vote in its ability to bring about actual outcomes that you want.
That would be the implication of such statements as "our democracy has been subverted by the big corporate conspiracy".
Or restrictions on mail-in voting?
Repubs are only putting on a show of getting nervous about certain voters voting to excite their base.
But as far as the Uniparty is concerned, they'd be much more nervous if overall voter turnout plummeted by choice, because then it becomes immediately obvious to everybody that increasing amounts of people no longer believe in the illusory democracy. It's a similiar threat to the bad optics of when a "joke" party gets a sizeable amount of votes (see: Count Binface as recently discussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49301260)
The Uniparty wants high-ish turnout (2/3 is good) because then we can all other-ify the 1/3 with the narrative that they were "too lazy" and thus to blame, while the 1/3 + 1/3 who did vote hopefully make for a close election, propping up the democratic illusion of choice and popularity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: sorry to pile on, but please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49468011 also.