- Sep 13, 2002
- 93,789
- 189,397
- 113
Very depressing. Very accurate.
(P.S.: Don't come at me with any TL/DR bullshit -- if you don't care to read about our failing political system, that's your problem)
Andrew Tanner
May 4
·
America Balkanized. Base map from USA Today Election results maps 2020, black lines my addition. Circle size is proportional to the margin of victory for each candidate in that county.
Disclaimer: could things change over the next two and a half years? Sure!
Trump or Biden could die. Aliens could show up to save or destroy the world. There could even be a wave of global revolutions that finally achieves true communism in our time.
Anything can happen. But most things won’t.
The harsh future Americans face is one where the America rips itself to pieces after a Presidential election neither side is willing to accept the other could have won fair and square.
Watching the Supreme Court fall to partisan interests to the degree it clearly has, given the imminent death of Roe v. Wade, offers more proof of America’s grim future.
Understanding why the American system is self destructing requires setting aside partisan ideology and looking at the guts of how the machine actually functions. Not as we would like it to, but as it truly is, and how powerful social and economic forces made it this way.
Few Americans can even approach the necessary level objectivity anymore, which is a huge part of the problem. I only can because I’ve been part of both political tribes during my four decades of life and have studied power dynamics intensively from a systems perspective.
I grew up extremely rural, religious, and patriotic. I later earned my undergraduate degree in political science from UC Berkeley — yeah, that Berkeley. Days after I graduated from Cal I reported to Fort Knox to begin what turned out to be a single year on active duty as a cavalry scout in the United States Army. And enlisted side, not officer, though I wound up walking the first steps along that path up until a knee injury crushed that ambition.
Like Treebeard from Lord of the Rings, I have no fixed side — I care only for the forests, so to speak. If that means I organize an army to tear down an evil wizard’s city then screen the Riders of Rohan from Mordor Orcs while they charge to Gondor’s aid, so be it. And it it means walling off the woods I care for while a futile war passes them by — I’ll do that too.
A truth partisans on neither side in America will admit is that Democrat and Republican are now mirror images. Not morally equivalent, but morality doesn’t matter when each team’s members insist only their worldview can be moral.
The Founders never meant for this to happen when they wrote the Constitution. For all their manifold failings, they did their best to create a working political system. But they lacked the scientific understanding required to realize that political institutions are, in a very real way, a kind of eternal game.
One meant to take advantage of people’s natural tendency to act in their own self interest, driven by their particular worldview, to produce a reasonably fair game people don’t reject when they lose and — this is most important of all — where no one wins all the time.
Politics is basically society’s sewage system — inescapable because everyone is entitled to their own execrable political beliefs, yet the thing must be properly designed and maintained to avoid everyone smelling terrible and spreading disease.
Democracy’s power is that it induces people to participate in the making of laws that impact their life, making them more likely to tolerate them. It can be done directly, through representatives or a hybrid of both, but the iron law is that it must be seen to work. When people lose faith in the game they pursue their own agendas so intensively that the whole thing flies apart.
The two party doom loop that is driving America’s accelerating divorce is a function of the fact that America’s governing institutions are desperately, horribly outdated. The Constitution has not been Amended for fifty years after being regularly tweaked across two centuries to keep it in line with changing times.
The two major parties have completely gamed out the American political system, in effect seizing control of all levels of government in most states. They have both aggressively gerrymandered House districts to limit competition. The Senate remains a policy choke point either party can use to prevent any change they fear will harm their interests.
Small wonder that Americans disapprove of most federal institutions by wide margins year after year and perpetually express a desire for more political options that never emerge —the system is essentially rigged so that they can’t. And powerful media interests fight to prevent any change, because the two-party disaster is so brutally easy to profit from.
Both parties have become nothing more than profit-seeking political brands whose members wrap themselves up in sanctimonious rhetoric designed to reduce all political debates to a kind of team sport. Every single elected federal politician in America is fundamentally a fundraiser, a servant of donors instead of the people.
Under the hood of the nonsense partisans spew is a simple goal: get you to give them money.
The two false choices in America, Republican/Democrat, Conservative/Liberal, Right/Left, are eternally reified by a media establishment which knows us-against-them morality tales are much more eyeball grabbing than honest, impartial analysis.
The way American politics is covered is specifically intended to produce subscribers or content advertisers will pay for ads to appear next to. That’s it, that’s all — no other factors matter more in a world of for-profit news media than the size of the audience and how efficiently it can be induced to engage.
This business model relies on creating sticky positive feedback loops where people feel like their involvement and engagement matters. People naturally prefer to read news that is slanted to confirm their preexisting beliefs, and absent a countervailing force all profit-seeking media is doomed to fragment along ideological lines to more efficiently reach target audiences.
In a multi-party system the damage this causes is mitigated by complexity. In a two-party system where each side bases its actions on how it thinks its sole opponent will move you have a recipe for disaster.
The Supreme Court’s mad decision in Citizens United formalized this system, allowing a massive injection of cash to turn American politics into an enormous growth market. Instead of political participation mattering mostly at the ballot box, now it feeds a perpetual bloodletting that always escalates because that’s how American media narratives work: increasing tension culminates in a grand epic showdown where good confronts and defeats evil.
This is not democracy, folks, no matter how many times someone with a fancy Ivy League PhD insists otherwise. When rich people’s votes are effectively weighted by their ability to offer massive support to political candidates or parties you have a qualitatively different system than democracy.
(P.S.: Don't come at me with any TL/DR bullshit -- if you don't care to read about our failing political system, that's your problem)
Andrew Tanner
May 4
·
2025: The Year America Tears Itself Apart
Buckle up and hang on, because America is locked into a terrible trajectory that likely ends in terminal division.America Balkanized. Base map from USA Today Election results maps 2020, black lines my addition. Circle size is proportional to the margin of victory for each candidate in that county.
Disclaimer: could things change over the next two and a half years? Sure!
Trump or Biden could die. Aliens could show up to save or destroy the world. There could even be a wave of global revolutions that finally achieves true communism in our time.
Anything can happen. But most things won’t.
The harsh future Americans face is one where the America rips itself to pieces after a Presidential election neither side is willing to accept the other could have won fair and square.
Watching the Supreme Court fall to partisan interests to the degree it clearly has, given the imminent death of Roe v. Wade, offers more proof of America’s grim future.
Understanding why the American system is self destructing requires setting aside partisan ideology and looking at the guts of how the machine actually functions. Not as we would like it to, but as it truly is, and how powerful social and economic forces made it this way.
Few Americans can even approach the necessary level objectivity anymore, which is a huge part of the problem. I only can because I’ve been part of both political tribes during my four decades of life and have studied power dynamics intensively from a systems perspective.
I grew up extremely rural, religious, and patriotic. I later earned my undergraduate degree in political science from UC Berkeley — yeah, that Berkeley. Days after I graduated from Cal I reported to Fort Knox to begin what turned out to be a single year on active duty as a cavalry scout in the United States Army. And enlisted side, not officer, though I wound up walking the first steps along that path up until a knee injury crushed that ambition.
Like Treebeard from Lord of the Rings, I have no fixed side — I care only for the forests, so to speak. If that means I organize an army to tear down an evil wizard’s city then screen the Riders of Rohan from Mordor Orcs while they charge to Gondor’s aid, so be it. And it it means walling off the woods I care for while a futile war passes them by — I’ll do that too.
A truth partisans on neither side in America will admit is that Democrat and Republican are now mirror images. Not morally equivalent, but morality doesn’t matter when each team’s members insist only their worldview can be moral.
The Founders never meant for this to happen when they wrote the Constitution. For all their manifold failings, they did their best to create a working political system. But they lacked the scientific understanding required to realize that political institutions are, in a very real way, a kind of eternal game.
One meant to take advantage of people’s natural tendency to act in their own self interest, driven by their particular worldview, to produce a reasonably fair game people don’t reject when they lose and — this is most important of all — where no one wins all the time.
Politics is basically society’s sewage system — inescapable because everyone is entitled to their own execrable political beliefs, yet the thing must be properly designed and maintained to avoid everyone smelling terrible and spreading disease.
Democracy’s power is that it induces people to participate in the making of laws that impact their life, making them more likely to tolerate them. It can be done directly, through representatives or a hybrid of both, but the iron law is that it must be seen to work. When people lose faith in the game they pursue their own agendas so intensively that the whole thing flies apart.
The two party doom loop that is driving America’s accelerating divorce is a function of the fact that America’s governing institutions are desperately, horribly outdated. The Constitution has not been Amended for fifty years after being regularly tweaked across two centuries to keep it in line with changing times.
The two major parties have completely gamed out the American political system, in effect seizing control of all levels of government in most states. They have both aggressively gerrymandered House districts to limit competition. The Senate remains a policy choke point either party can use to prevent any change they fear will harm their interests.
Small wonder that Americans disapprove of most federal institutions by wide margins year after year and perpetually express a desire for more political options that never emerge —the system is essentially rigged so that they can’t. And powerful media interests fight to prevent any change, because the two-party disaster is so brutally easy to profit from.
Both parties have become nothing more than profit-seeking political brands whose members wrap themselves up in sanctimonious rhetoric designed to reduce all political debates to a kind of team sport. Every single elected federal politician in America is fundamentally a fundraiser, a servant of donors instead of the people.
Under the hood of the nonsense partisans spew is a simple goal: get you to give them money.
The two false choices in America, Republican/Democrat, Conservative/Liberal, Right/Left, are eternally reified by a media establishment which knows us-against-them morality tales are much more eyeball grabbing than honest, impartial analysis.
The way American politics is covered is specifically intended to produce subscribers or content advertisers will pay for ads to appear next to. That’s it, that’s all — no other factors matter more in a world of for-profit news media than the size of the audience and how efficiently it can be induced to engage.
This business model relies on creating sticky positive feedback loops where people feel like their involvement and engagement matters. People naturally prefer to read news that is slanted to confirm their preexisting beliefs, and absent a countervailing force all profit-seeking media is doomed to fragment along ideological lines to more efficiently reach target audiences.
In a multi-party system the damage this causes is mitigated by complexity. In a two-party system where each side bases its actions on how it thinks its sole opponent will move you have a recipe for disaster.
The Supreme Court’s mad decision in Citizens United formalized this system, allowing a massive injection of cash to turn American politics into an enormous growth market. Instead of political participation mattering mostly at the ballot box, now it feeds a perpetual bloodletting that always escalates because that’s how American media narratives work: increasing tension culminates in a grand epic showdown where good confronts and defeats evil.
This is not democracy, folks, no matter how many times someone with a fancy Ivy League PhD insists otherwise. When rich people’s votes are effectively weighted by their ability to offer massive support to political candidates or parties you have a qualitatively different system than democracy.