Let’s kill democracy

Hi, most of you reading this know me personally, some stumbled here upon SEO fluke. My name is Nate Hall and I am a 24 year-old historian from Berkeley, California. To answer a few of your initial thoughts post-first sentence + title — yes I think democracy needs to die; no - I’m not the most qualified individual to discuss this topic, and no — I am not a communist.

If America was a ship, then we’ve hit rough waters and are hurdling dangerously towards the rocks. This is can be felt in all walks of life and is an undercurrent to many people’s existence. As a society, we are inventing new game-changing technologies that are drastically improving the success and viability of commercial capitalism. The core of my thesis is that capitalism and democracy do not work together as they currently exist. My goal in writing political blog posts is to start touching issues that many people of my generation have begun questioning, but are quickly dismissed as radical/irrational. For me, this is largely a thought exercise — I’ve got a more structured book that will explain important details/methodology that I believe are vital to the upcoming revolution.
Chances are, everyone reading this are in similar chapters, even if we’re not on the same page. My goal is not to villainize individuals, but rather to shed light on why America’s current political environment does not work, regardless of your ideological leaning.
In my upcoming series of posts, I will be focusing on a couple of taboo issues. These include why the American democracy is a puppet government for the rich, why using history as evidence is a faulty epistemology used by the politically lazy, and what a post-democratic system would look like (Preview: not the Soviet States of America).

Back to the topic at hand — we need to kill democracy. Right now, an imbecile holds the keys to the world’s nuclear annihilation, our legislative system has stopped working to improve national well-being in favor of improving individual political longevity, and the highest legal authority is about to be further against the needs of human progress (Kavanaugh is diet evil, doesn’t taste the same but that shit will kill you).
We’ve hit a time where we need to stop the silence, start the talking, and plan the doing. We live in an information glut caused by everybody having unverified encyclopedias inside their pockets. This has caused political awareness to be at an all-time low, as it allows for non-critical reaffirmation of long standing beliefs. If you believe that tobacco will give you superpowers, everybody around you tells you tobacco will make you fly, and google personality analytics determine you only want to see “tobacco is great” commentary, your information stream will reentrench your thinking no matter how cancerous it is.
This trend of political convenience, while easy, has eroded one of American democracy’s core pillars — government for the people. Instead, by information manipulation (say that 5 times fast), the beneficiaries of political policy have become those with the most economic power. This trend was predicted by Marx — as business has advanced it has become more autonomous and politically dominant. Citizens United was a turning point in this process, as corporations gained a more direct route to political say. We can see this corruption in every federal policy passed since 2010. Although it is impossible to deny the historical importance of Obama, even he was a pawn in this corporate takeover.

So why is business controlling the decisions of policymakers a problem? There’s a simple answer — democracy as a system is fundamentally determined by people’s opinions, which boils down to “you’re supposed to vote for shit that helps you”. By having a fraction of a fraction of the population able to control policymakers through campaign contributions, we’ve reached a new state where policy is determined by economic power, and populations are seen as means to ends, not people. This means that those without consolidated economic power will lose when their interests run counter to those with cash. This turns the impetus for policy into a selfish, financial game as opposed to the broadly utilitarian system originally outlined by a bunch of 18th century slave-owners. This is why net-neutrality was destroyed, Bernie’s “import cheap pharma from Canada” law was neutered by a Democrat, and the Dakota Access Pipeline will still be built. I chose these 3 policies as examples, because polling shows that less than 30% of the overall American population supported these policies, yet here were are today.
The revolution will not be televised

Before the dawn of social media, Gil Scott-Heron explained one the core tenants of how the system will change. Little would he know the importance of platforms like Twitter and Instagram in organizing this change, but his message still rings true — media is politicized and controlled by business interest to destroy conversations like this one. We live in a constant flux where the method of control has shifted from television to internet, with new messages bombarding our Snapchat and google news stories to distract us from issues that demand attention. This strategy has been scarily effective, as we can now see in the oval office. But while the orangutan in charge has attracted the angry gazes of the people, we are failing to see the discrete ways that government has hamstrung the American people. Jean Baudrillard, who’s philosophy has admittedly played a large role in my personal viewpoints, explained this phenomenon as simulacra — a series of political stages in which the general population is bombarded with conflicting messages until losing sight of reality. We currently exist in the third stage of this concept — where the information conveyed masks reality, pretends to have basis, but is actually arbitrary and semantic — in essence, Trump’s cult of personality.
By yelling angrily about immigrants and democrats, Trump acts to distract the country from institutional and existential crisis. The process, of creating fictional enemies to unite one group against another, is as old as humanity. The problem here is that due to our political laziness, we’ve taken the bait. Trump did not kill democracy, he just clarified why it doesn’t work in modern times. The divided states of america may not sound as sexy, but it’s more accurate given the corruption of money in politics.

By convincing the dumber half of sheeple to unite, Trump demonstrated the effectiveness of bullshit — The internet has damned democracy by lowering the barrier to promulgate misinformation.
Without an accurately informed citizenry, uniting the people will be impossible. This is why creating a new system that verifies the factual validity of communication will be vital to the revolution’s success. In future posts, I’ll answer a couple of key questions that I’ve left hanging in this one: what would a new system look like? Is revolution possible? How do we fight misinformation? How do we unite the people?
Thanks for reading, feel free to leave comments/questions, I’ll just delete anything troll because idgaf.
BR,
Nate