A new poll suggests that at least 46 percent of Americans would support Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson running for president, while 63 percent believe that Hollywood stars could "make good politicians."
Its a difference between popular policy and popular personality, this is literally voting on who is your favourite wrestler and not voting on what that wrestler might do that you would like.
America and most of the west as a whole has beaten the people into accepting that they have no influence on popular policy because damn near every countrys political system is set up as two general sides each playing harm reduction politics to the other, which means you have two choices, either vote for the same side you always do and accept whatever they give you or individually lose confidence and stop voting. You cant even organize a collective non-voting movement cause guess what, harm reduction means you now want the nazis to win.
Its a difference between popular policy and popular personality
In politics, they routinely go hand-in-hand. Trump wasn't popular because he was Billionaire Famous Guy. He was popular because he was Billionaire Famous Guy Trade Protectionist and Xenophobe. Even then, there were layers to it. The bar in 2016 was far lower than in, say, 2000 or 2008, simply because the GOP had rarified itself to Own The Libs that much longer.
America and most of the west as a whole has beaten the people into accepting that they have no influence on popular policy
I don't know. I think that, in 2020 at least, it certainly felt that way simply because Trump ran totally uncontested and Biden just kinda drifted to victory on political inertia. But we're a nation that considers :vote: an ingrained instinct. Mass media constantly uses the idea of an election as a means of juicing enthusiasm. Political activism seems to constantly revolve around galvenizing people into electoralism, regardless of what they're actually saying they want to accomplish. Disenfranchisement and gerrymandering are considered BFDs, precisely because of the implicit value in :vote:.
If anything, Americans have an outsized expectation of their impact on national affairs. They throw hissy-fits when they don't get their way. They constantly surrender up their own money, labor, and political agency with the expectation that they can just "buy" their political outcomes - and we see this happen at every political level, often with comic results from people who should ostensibly know better (re: Jeb Bush and Michael Bloomberg).
This political narcassism often leads to powerful singular individuals and large groups of people into wasting time and energy on pointless vanity projects or obvious grifts. But this suggests all the participants think they do have agency. They simply deny the existence of the political inertia that inevitably shuts any kind of reform (or revolution) down.
You cant even organize a collective non-voting movement cause guess what, harm reduction means you now want the nazis to win.
You absolutely can and people routinely do. But we're often blind to it by omission or blinded by the national spectacle such that we forget these mutual aid organizations exist.
Democracy is always a popularity contest.
The better questions to ask are "What's popular?" and "Why?
Its a difference between popular policy and popular personality, this is literally voting on who is your favourite wrestler and not voting on what that wrestler might do that you would like.
America and most of the west as a whole has beaten the people into accepting that they have no influence on popular policy because damn near every countrys political system is set up as two general sides each playing harm reduction politics to the other, which means you have two choices, either vote for the same side you always do and accept whatever they give you or individually lose confidence and stop voting. You cant even organize a collective non-voting movement cause guess what, harm reduction means you now want the nazis to win.
In politics, they routinely go hand-in-hand. Trump wasn't popular because he was Billionaire Famous Guy. He was popular because he was Billionaire Famous Guy Trade Protectionist and Xenophobe. Even then, there were layers to it. The bar in 2016 was far lower than in, say, 2000 or 2008, simply because the GOP had rarified itself to Own The Libs that much longer.
I don't know. I think that, in 2020 at least, it certainly felt that way simply because Trump ran totally uncontested and Biden just kinda drifted to victory on political inertia. But we're a nation that considers :vote: an ingrained instinct. Mass media constantly uses the idea of an election as a means of juicing enthusiasm. Political activism seems to constantly revolve around galvenizing people into electoralism, regardless of what they're actually saying they want to accomplish. Disenfranchisement and gerrymandering are considered BFDs, precisely because of the implicit value in :vote:.
If anything, Americans have an outsized expectation of their impact on national affairs. They throw hissy-fits when they don't get their way. They constantly surrender up their own money, labor, and political agency with the expectation that they can just "buy" their political outcomes - and we see this happen at every political level, often with comic results from people who should ostensibly know better (re: Jeb Bush and Michael Bloomberg).
This political narcassism often leads to powerful singular individuals and large groups of people into wasting time and energy on pointless vanity projects or obvious grifts. But this suggests all the participants think they do have agency. They simply deny the existence of the political inertia that inevitably shuts any kind of reform (or revolution) down.
You absolutely can and people routinely do. But we're often blind to it by omission or blinded by the national spectacle such that we forget these mutual aid organizations exist.