Democracy is Failing Us

and We’re Failing Democracy

Never has it been more apparent that democracy, in all its glory, is as inherently flawed as any other governmental system. While it’s not locked down at this point, it seems hard to imagine a scenario where Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump aren’t opposing one another for President. South Park nailed it many years ago, our options are literally a shit sandwich or a giant douche.

I very much enjoy Nate Silver’s www.fivethirtyeight.com — despite often finding myself disagreeing with the narratives surrounding their political modeling, i.e. that though patterns may exist demographics can’t be relied upon as a full on trustworthy source to predict outcomes of presidential races, I still love reading their work and know that they’re some of the best in the business at what they do.

Today they posted an article regarding the shit sandwich and giant douche that we will be forced to choose from (and not choosing is a choice too, seemingly the best) that helps call out what I’m saying is the failure of democracy and our failure within it. The article is here.

In gist, it simply states that both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are the most widely disliked candidates ever. It’s utterly insane when looking at the data, we’ve somehow gotten to a point where the two candidates (that we know of) will be two candidates that are extremely disliked. What the fuck?

I’m honestly not sure which is worse, however I know that I most certainly won’t vote Republican this year as I have in the past (for a variety reasons, a lot of it has to do with life changes over the last three years that have moved me much further left and because Donald Trump is a disgusting misogynist xenophobic moronic dickhead). And I can’t envision a scenario in which I’d legitimately go in and vote for Hillary either. Yet, I hate the idea of not voting.

But Donald Trump, an individual who courted democrats more so than republicans over the years, came into this race with absolutely nothing of substance and beat out the field. The Republican party’s best options were fucking Ted Cruz and John Kasich? That’s absolutely pathetic.

And on the other hand Hillary Clinton is damn near splitting the popular vote with an independent geriatric white man (running as a democrat) who came from literally having no support whatsoever to winning many states and some in upset fashion, despite the money, power, status, political backing, and media backing that Hillary had / has. It’s akin to an expansion team taking a perennial title contender to Game 7 of an NBA series — that’s the best I can think of — it has to be embarrassing for Clinton.

So we’re undoubtedly being failed by this system in place. We’ve become far too reliant on party systems, which are not inherent to democracies but rather we forced them into this model. The party systems are fucking shit. That’s putting it lightly. Hillary rails on Bernie for not raising more money for the party while republicans talk about rallying behind Trump (who they have tried to destroy this whole time and absolutely hate) just because he’s running as a republican. That’s the exact same reasoning as saying all men should stick together simply because their men, no exceptions. It’s utter nonsense. Yet, this is what we accept and even expect.

Yet, on the same hand, we’re to blame. Not the politicians and not the system itself, but the people within it. Voter turnout is absolutely laughable, and I don’t mean that relative to the past or to model driven expectations but to what one would expect when we’re electing the president of the so called greatest country ever.

I think this is probably the natural progression of “free” “first world” countries, the more power and wealth a country attains, the more “freedoms” people have, the more they stop paying attention to the real issues and the less visible regression becomes because we’re buried in our privilege. We’re so focused on the so called micro aggressions (i.e. this is an effect of privilege) that we just ignore the huge disasters coming right for us.

We stop voting, we stop even paying attention to what’s going on, we hear a limited amount of information and we get on facebook and bitch and moan just to feel connected to society but the reality is we don’t care as much as we say or we don’t know as much as we believe yet we just want to fucking bitch about something because that’s our right, or so we believe.

But the disasters are right in front of us — Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are more unlikable than anyone who has ever given it a go at the presidency. And I’d bet Ted Cruz is nearby (though he obviously dropped out, thank God). Wake the fuck up.

Write in someone else, vote for a 3rd party, or just don’t vote — but please for the love of God don’t blindly participate in the demise of democracy because that’s what everyone else is doing. Take a stand and do something uncommon for once in your life and tell both parties, both candidates, to fuck off and deliver better results or get the fuck out of the way.