Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
A second point...
No. Your vote is not necessarily supposed to have a consequence. We're a Republic to avoid exactly that result.
One of the hallmarks of populism is affinity for referendums, which is direct democracy. Trump is a thing that happens when the Republic's management devices fail and it veers toward actual pure Democracy (the irony, of course, being he won via the electoral college, a failsafe mechanism).
We have deals in place to avoid having someone try to build a border wall, flip Roe v. Wade, execute drug dealers, threaten to nuke North Korea, etc. Traditionally, we maintained this by using a complex political process to weed out Father Coughlins and William Jennings Bryans. And we used coalitions of bureaucrats, lobbyists, and corporate benefactors to stifle those who sought to "drain the swamp" (Carter was the first to pledge to do so, and fell on his face).
Your vote kind of mattered, but kind of didn't, as the Founders intended. But through a confluence of greed, ignorance, and arrogance, we've let the old failsafes become weak and ineffectual.
I'm a pragmatist. I believe Carlin's riff on the American Dream -- that we have "owners" rather than leaders, and that our society, our economy, our systems, are largely a game, to be surfed as one sees fit. That's been the case throughout history, in regard to almost every mature govt that's existed. That in mind, I expected the forces that keep things in order to do their jobs. I expected Hillary to walk away with it.
It's entirely reasonable to conclude a third party vote won't matter in a race like Hillary v. Trump. I was wrong. But what's interesting isn't what coalition I fell into. What's interesting is what failed... How the "soft shadow state," the "inside handshake" between the power centers, failed to keep a two bit PT Barnum, and his army of voters, under control.
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