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this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2024
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We're not there yet, calm yourself. Your rhetoric doesn't help.
Having said that, wake the fuck up people, participate.
Go check out states like Ohio and Wisconsin, where 40% of the voting base selects a supermajority of the legislature.
My own Texas Senate has been similarly packed and stacked. And that's before you get into the openly adversarial practices of state voting offices.
We are not a democracy in any real sense. We are, at best, a Republic of regional demagogues and despots.
Lining up for another game of 3-card-monte because this time I can beat the dealer.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court threw out the gerrymandered election maps. This happened only after an election shifted the balance of the court. That election had record breaking turnout, because the people were engaged and ready to fight for their rights.
Democracy isn't dead, but it is in danger. Giving up isn't going to make things better.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/02/13/wisconsin-gop-undoes-legislative-gerrymander-after-court-pressure-00141325
One red wave, one red governor, and the state goes right back to where it started.
The situation is untenable when one party works exhaustively to cheat on the first day in office and the other has to spend the next ten years cleaning up the mess.
As of March, we're seeing generic Republicans with a coin flip chance of winning statewide with a map that marginally favors their party.
You don't think if people stop just standing by the sidelines watching, but instead participate, specifically pushing back on their Representatives and their Senators, asking for change, that things wouldn't change? At all?
Congress does what it does because we all sit on our asses and do nothing about it, except maybe go vote every once in awhile.
They have no respect for us, because they don't see us as participating in the system, only companies that give them money are seen in their eyes to be participating.
"Democracy already failed." is total bullshit, plain and simple, and it's rhetoric that doesn't help solve any problems.
Participate.
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/07/11/texas-voter-arrested-parole/
https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/ag-paxton-san-antonio-election-fraudster-arrested-widespread-vote-harvesting-and-fraud
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/27/pamela-moses-voting-rights-mistake-jail
The deck is stacked and the game is rigged.
First link is about someone on parole voting, when they can't.
Second link is about someone who got caught when trying to do fraudulent voting activities.
The third link is a person with a prior felony conviction (that she pleaded guilty to), that is ineligible to seek office, trying to seek office/vote.
Those are three one-offs, in the margins. None of those prevent the system from working overall.
You're grasping at straws.
Participate.
I question whether you've ever actually participated in an election before.
Actually, I've voted in every election I was asked to.
Extreme Weasel Word Phrasing
How so?
One of the ways democracy falls is if we prematurely declare it fallen. Abortion referendums in deep red states have passed. Democrats have won in Alabama suburbs. Republicans could at best tie Democrats in economic conditions that heavily favored them.
Democracy is succeeding. What we're seeing is that it takes time to change things, because there is entrenched power. That's slowly eroding away though, because they have gone too far against the people.
We are in a position to completely eliminate entrenched Republican power over the next decade or so if we remain persistent, all through democracy. It will be slow, but it will work.
You've got it backwards. Democracies fall because people assert the institutional rot can't happen to their sacred soil and refuse to acknowledge their own internal failures.
When barely half the eligible voting population bothers to participate? When seats are so heavily gerrymandered that 40% of the voting public can command a super majority in the legislature? When every election is (fairly or not) considered rigged or stolen going back to the Kennedy Administration?
We are not. Nobody on the Dem side of the ballot wants this. Party leadership wants a strong opposition. They even state as much publicly.