So you're telling me that, not only are federal elections decided by states rather than votes, but each individual state has their own set of laws to prevent you from appearing in the ballot? And it's somehow still fine because "you can just do a write-in vote"?
My favourite one is the Texan one, where you need to have gotten boatload of votes in order to appear on the ballot.
For a registered political party in a statewide election to gain ballot access, they must either: obtain 5% of the vote in any statewide election; or collect petition signatures equal to 1% of the total votes cast in the preceding election for governor, and must do so by January 2 of the year in which such statewide election is held. An independent candidate for any statewide office must collect petition signatures equal to 1% of the total votes cast for governor, and must do so beginning the day after primary elections are held and complete collection within 60 days thereafter (if runoff elections are held, the window is shortened to beginning the day after runoff elections are held and completed within 30 days thereafter). The petition signature cannot be from anyone who voted in either primary (including runoff), and voters cannot sign multiple petitions (they must sign a petition for one party or candidate only).
In Democratic America, you can only win elections if you've already won the elections.
I think media and basic history education focuses expressly on Nazi Germany as an example of fascism rather than Italy at the same period, because they have essentially the same symbols (in terms of the US stealing the Roman's aesthetic and national myth) and methods for controlling the ballot.
For sure. And like from my memory of history class, since we had to be taught that we were the good guys, we were taught that both Germany and the USSR were equally bad. This is a comparison that gets brought up literally all the time and I know we've all seen in all over social media. But regarding what made Germany fascist, it just always felt very glossed over. I didn't even consider this until I started getting push back from people when I even mentioned that Trump was at least a little bit fashy(plot twist, he's a lot a bit fashy). So like, can't even tell these people that our system is also fascist. Republicans will flatout refuse and Dems for sure won't buy it lol.