In reality, the system is entirely unresponsive to public will. The reason people voted for Trump in the Republican primary was they hated everything the GOP had become over the last decades. This lesson was entirely ignored by the party. The reason Trump won the general is the people were revolted by Hilary Clinton. Both parties not only ignored these messages, they mocked them.
The last two presidential elections have been the result of a process that started after the Cold War. The two parties have divided up the electorate into fiefdoms. This allows them to share power, with one party having limited control over one branch for a while, then turning power over to the other party. The House, for example, will no doubt flip to the Republicans in the 2022 midterm elections.
When you look at what will really happen in the midterm election, you see why it is best described as a ceremonial change in control. According to the Cook Political Report, “just 16 of 435 districts crossed over to vote for presidential and House candidates of opposite parties, down from 35 in 2016 and 108 in 1996.” There are maybe 25 House seats that could plausibly change hands in 2022.
If you dig into the partisan divide of House districts, what you will find is that very few seats will ever change parties, which is why incumbents win over 90% of their races. Of the 435 seats in the House, the two parties control close to 400 of them. Even accounting for changes in demographics and public sentiment, there are a maximum of maybe 85 seats that require party attention.
What this means is that the seats controlled by the parties will never have someone in them that is not fully vetted by the party. They get the seat because they will do as the party demands and in exchange have a seat for life. When Nancy Pelosi finally keels over, her replacement will be selected by the party for that seat. The freaks who line up to run will be dispatched so that the path is clear for the party candidate.
Counterintuitively, the seats that are listed as competitive will turn out to be the least competitive from an ideological and partisan perspective. A district that is 50–50 will select a winner that is not offensive to the other side. Both parties know they need someone who has some appeal to the other side, so they seek out those who are good at playing both sides of the partisan divide.
Even if the people are so enraged at the establishment, they find a Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders in all of these competitive races, the result will be a minority caucus within the majority party of the House. If 85 Trump clones win in 2022, they will be a marginalized and ignored minority in the Republican Party. This has been the reality for genuinely conservative members of the GOP since 1994.
This is what the Squad is experiencing in the Democratic Party. They can make noise and get on TV, but they have no power in their own party. The best they get is to be a cat’s paw the leadership uses to harass the other party. Like the elections, this is mostly ceremonial, just a part of the theater of democracy. In the end, the leadership of the parties settles on a bipartisan deal that pleases their donors.
When people say the system is rigged, they usually mean that the parties rig the election results to get their guys in office. That certainly happens, but the real shenanigans are further upstream at the party headquarters. They work in tandem to maintain the two-party system, preventing a legitimate challenger, and they work together to maintain a consensus in Washington. That is where the game is rigged.
Even more devious, the frustration that arises from the unresponsiveness of the system makes the voting public more partisan. This is why the number of competitive seats has steadily dwindled over the last few decades. The unhappier people get, the more willing they are to accept the partisan narrative. Blaming the other side is easy and it seems to explain why the will of the people is always thwarted.
This makes people less open to appeals from alternatives and much more willing to vote for one side, as that gives them a chance to spite their enemies. The result is two camps locked in a fruitless struggle. Instead of the House being the most dynamic branch of government, it is now the least dynamic branch. We live in a tyranny of the minority exercised through the manufactured majority of party politics.
This immunity to the public will is why voting has had no impact on policy. In 2014, researchers looked at 1,800 policy issues over a twenty-year period. They examined the results of those policy disputes and compared them to public attitudes. What they found was that there was no connection between election results, public opinion, and the final policy outcome. Voting has no impact on public policy. It is purely ceremonial.
People vote because they think it is the right thing to do, so they stick with it even when they have concluded that the parties are corrupt. In 2022 disgruntled Republicans will turn out to vote against the party of Biden. That will make them feel good as they stand in line for expensive food or fill their tank with five-dollar gasoline. The Dionysian theater of democracy will allow them to vent their rage safely and impotently.
Meanwhile, the people in charge will continue doing what they want, safe in the knowledge that they are immune from the public will. John Adams said, “There never was a democracy yet, that did not commit suicide.” What he could not know is that democracy is tricked into killing itself by a clever minority that skillfully turns their virtues into vices to the benefit of the minority.
And some more commentary from another post of his on the same topic.
Donald Trump finally got the attention of Republican leaders the other day when he said that unless they addressed the 2020 election shenanigans, his supporters will not bother to vote in upcoming elections. This got the usual suspects out to denounce him as a Hitler plotting to do Hitler things. Regime media was flooded with boilerplate articles about how there was no evidence to support his claims. Some Republicans were sent out to denounce him for his dangerous rhetoric.
This little bit of drama is interesting in that it suggests that some portion of the electorate is making the next logical step. If you cannot get what you want at the ballot box, either because the vote is rigged or the choices are false, then why vote? If those conditions are true, then voting becomes self-sabotage. When you vote, you are endorsing the process and its results. Voting in a rigged election is, in effect, validating the rigged process and the people rigging it.
The fact that it has taken close to a year for anyone to reach this next logical step in evaluating the last election shows the power of conditioning. Everyone has been conditioned since childhood to believe that voting is a requirement of citizenship and not voting is therefore an abdication of duty. You cannot complain about the system if you do not participate in the system is the logic of democracy. The only acceptable participation is voting for one of the two parties.
It is a bizarre logic when you consider it. Popular entertainment is full of plots where the star is faced with two bad choices and refuses to accept them. Instead, he creates a third choice to save the day. Every business school trains students on how to think beyond the choices on offer. “Thinking outside the box” is considered to be the hallmark of the modern entrepreneur. People like Elon Musk are celebrated because they allegedly refuse to accept the conventional answer.
Only in politics is it that no one is ever allowed to question the options put forward by the two political parties each election. This exception to the rule of thinking outside the box is necessary because the system requires it. For example, if “none of the above” was an option in most elections, that would often be the winner. This is why it is never an option on the ballot. Otherwise, even the dullest Republican voter would begin to think that maybe he should have another option.
Of course, one of the weapons that the system has always used to prevent people from thinking outside the box regarding politics is hyper-partisanship. “If you don’t vote for more of the same, the other side will win.” This was the standard line from people like Jonah Goldberg in the Bush years. Staying home was a vote for the other side, so you had to hold your nose and vote for the Republicans. It was effective until 2006 when the odor was so bad that no amount of nose holding was possible.
The neocons conveniently forgot about that in 2016, but they went to great effort to avoid saying they would boycott the election. Even they saw the danger of unleashing that option on the system. Conservative Inc. was mortally wounded when they could not explain how their boycott of Trump was not an endorsement of Clinton. They were either voting for what they said was evil or they were boycotting the election, something they said was morally unacceptable.
That last bit has always been a lie. Boycotting elections has been a part of democratic systems since forever. During the Cold War, the United States government would encourage boycotts in places being subverted by communists. Alternatively, the protest vote has always been a part of the American system. Organizing people to throw their vote away on a ridiculous option is just another form of boycott. You are forcing onto the ballot the words “none of the above”.
Getting back to Trump and his boycott claim, he was never more than a wrecker, which is what the times require. He will never organize a boycott or even completely endorse such a campaign. He will talk about it. For good or ill, if he talks about something it becomes news. Just mentioning the idea of boycotting the midterm is more than enough to normalize the idea for unhappy voters. Sitting out, perhaps loudly sitting out the election, becomes the best way to participate.
If you look at the upcoming midterm, there are maybe 25 seats that are genuinely up for grabs with another 25 that might tip that way. The Democrats currently hold 220 seats and the Republicans 212 seats. The seats that will decide the House will be won with just over 50% of the vote in those districts. In other words, even a poorly organized boycott could prevent the Republicans from getting the House. It is a low cost, high reward strategy to send a message.
Now, even a highly organized national boycott of the midterms, where Democrat voters join in will change little in terms of policy. The people who control the two parties will remain in control. What changes is public perception of politics. This system requires the broad public to think voting matters. If they come to see that voting is just ceremonial, a play put on to keep them pacified, then the system cracks. At the minimum, it brings the system to crisis.
There are no easy answers to generational problems, but normalizing the idea of a boycott helps create a morality outside the prevailing orthodoxy. If 20% of people think that boycotting the system is the moral choice, they are in effect rejecting the morality of the established order. It is a peaceful revolt. Once people get used to revolting in their minds, they can revolt against the system. Normalizing the revolt of the mind is a prerequisite for any challenge to the prevailing order.
I often feel like I'm on the bleeding edge of political and social philosophy. I'm saying stuff before its time. It's obvious to me, but it's not part of the zeitgeist until several years after I've said it. This is an uncomfortable place to be, because I find that I'm marginalized among people I know as some kind of radical... merely for saying something that they themselves will acknowledge as obvious a few years after I say it. For one small example, the Church didn't part ways with the Boy Scouts of America organization until Jan 1 2020, officially. I saw the inevitable writing on the wall in 2013, and had been more and more frustrated with the Church's affiliation with the group throughout the 2010s. (And this while I had a string of callings within the Young Men's organization of my ward and stake, as well as three sons who became Eagle Scouts through church-sponsored troops during this exact same era.) And after I had seen the writing on the wall in 2013, quite frankly, it became easier to see lots more cracks in the BSA's organization than I had previously perceived and realized that the rot in the organization was much deeper and more pervasive—and had been around much longer—than I would have believed before I opened my mind to the possibility. Whereas, meanwhile, I think most members in the Church didn't see it until the Church officially announced its separation, and some people refuse to see it even now.
I'm confident that the Z-man's position—and mine; I'd independently concluded the same thing after the blatant election stealing in 2020 that there was no way to make any protest against the increasingly hostile and unresponsive system anymore through the ballot box—that refusing to grant the system legitimacy by participating in elections, is in fact the moral position to take. The relationship of the American people to its government has become like that of a battered wife to her abuser. It's time to acknowledge that the moral choice is to walk away for good. The government doesn't hit us because it loves us. It hits us because it hates us.
And it hates us because our people have stood for freedom since the days of the Norman invasion of the land of the Anglo-Saxons, and have only led the world by example in the centuries since, up to and including the American Revolution. And because our people are Christian, and the gospel was restored to a scion of our people who was a literal descendent of Ephraim and from him and the rest of our people who joined the Kingdom of God on Earth, it started spreading to the whole world. Is it any wonder that those in the thrall of Satan hate us so much, want to see our legacy and even our very existence erased and replaced with more compliant slaves? That is the animus that is driving the increasingly erratic and blatant hatred against white people, especially Americans that is the defining feature of our age.
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