this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2026
269 points (96.2% liked)
Technology
82414 readers
3675 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Government of the people, for the people, and by the people. Not now.
Unfortunately, the people voted for this.
I sure as fuck didn't...
Yes, well, you are not "the people", you are "a person".
Kinda? Most Americans are extremely low-information on politics, and never proactively educated as to how to find that information or sometimes even why it matters. We are the most propagandized population on Earth, our country has little to no standards for factual information on the news and several of our major outlets are just pure corporate spin, while all of our major newspapers are owned by oligarchs. Demographic fact is gerrymandered out of our districts, our default voting method creates perverse incentives to elect popularity over platform and locks third parties out of viability. Individual jurisdictions decide how voting is accomplished and more often than not use this power to make it difficult to do so instead of easier. There is almost no enforcement of laws requiring leave from work to vote. There is next to no oversight of our physical voting machines and little trust in tabulation, while parties can and often do purge voter roles between elections without informing those who they nullified. Ultimately most people didn't vote for this because quite frankly most people don't or can't vote for one of the reasons above, something that I missed, or a tragic apathy created by said trainwreck of conditions.
Saying "The people voted for this" sounds logical but the reality on the ground makes the statement wholly disingenuous. At the very least it's not a statement that can be built off of for a more productive outcome, in fact it functions as a thought-terminating cliche and provides cover for a powerful class people who continuously work to keep this set of circumstances in place.
While the US has always had oligarchic tendencies, from my experience living there for several years, the current wholistic debasement of governance and liberal democratic values is mostly self-inflicted by the population. It's a choice.
A significant portion of the population are supportive of crime and corruption, another group simply don't care and another group might understand that things are not going well, but they are too well off (on a relative global basis) to risk rocking the boat until it's too late.
It's not like the US is suffering from immense poverty with +50% of the country being illiterate (e.g. South Sudan) or has to deal with centuries of constant imperial attacks by a much larger neighbour or a multitude of truly challenging factors with respect to implementing good governance.
You mention the notion of productive outcomes. One can argue that by wholly ignoring the role of the public in the US becoming a full on chauvinistic oligarchy, one is moving away from productive outcomes. If an issue is related to the behaviour of the public, you won't solve it by pretending the public had no role to play.
Happy to elaborate if you are interested. I know my reply was very high-level.
I've lived here my whole 40 years and can verify that while a significant chunk of our voting class (Because it very much is a class thing) are sheltered enough from consequence that they are either still satisfied with status quo or their disaffection leads them only to encourage debasement. But the class living a tenuous and effectively disenfranchised existence is much larger. Did you know that despite our last presidential election having the largest turnout in US history, less than half of citizens and barely more than half of eligible voted participated? Whether disenfranchisement or apathy, neither of those reasons generate from nothing.
But my point above was not that it's incorrect to point the blame squarely at US voted for their government's decline (Even though I would probably argue, in a separate debate, that it is), my point is that it's entirely the wrong tree to be barking up when trying to figure out how to put America back on "The right track". Thinking that we can just yell at Americans until they vote progressive is to deeply misunderstand the nature of power. Asking why Americans are so disaffected, apathetic, or disenfranchised that they don't participate in politics is perhaps a good first question, instead.
It's not. There's no other way to have a govt "for the people" than to hold an election.
That may be but it doesn't make it untrue.
I don't think you're addressing what I wrote. I'm not saying it's untrue. I'm saying it's a disingenuous point. A misleading framing. An uncritical, not entirely applicable, and wholly unhelpful approach to the issue.
By some of the people, for a few of the people, and subsidized by the rest of the people.
Fsvo people.