Same reason every independent store and restaurant gets replaced by a chain.
People want what’s familiar. Both these men won their primaries and have the most support out of anyone in their parties.
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nieceandtows@programming.dev 4 months ago
Why the fuck are these two the choices?!
kandoh@reddthat.com 4 months ago
jorp@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Your example works but it’s more like because capitalism concentrates wealth and power and little guys have no chance
GraniteM@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Look at the last handful of democratic presidential losses to see this in action:
Gore gets nominated due to familiarity. He has the charisma of a warm sponge. He loses to George W. “I’d have a beer with him and hey wasn’t his dad president?” Bush.
Kerry somehow rises to the top of the next democratic primary, a fact that I will never understand, because also has the charisma of a warm sponge. Bush is familiar and a wartime president. He is re-elected in defiance of God and nature.
Obama comes along and is a once in a generation political talent. Things are pretty good for a while.
Hillary gets nominated and wins primarily based on name recognition. She presents herself as having the charisma of a warm sponge, when we all know full well that she has the charisma of a wood chipper, and since we’re pretty good at detecting artifice she loses.
In 2019 we’ve got a pretty good set of primary choices, but Biden gets into the ring and that’s pretty much fucking it, because, again, he has name recognition, so he blows past some better, younger choices and manages to leverage his name and Trump’s fuck-ups enough to win.
The pattern is that name recognition will get you a real long way, especially with low information voters, and that is a real goddamn problem when there are objectively better options who aren’t as famous.
So anyway, I think we need a constitutional amendment forbidding members of one’s immediate family from running for president after one has been president. No sons, daughters, husbands, wives, etc. Fuck dynasties. Fucking fundamentally un-American.
FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Because we’re ruled by the billionaire class, and they like giving us two useful idiots to choose from.
Fades@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Because that’s all our owners will let us have. Thanks citizen United for hammering in that final nail in our collective coffin
JimSamtanko@lemm.ee 4 months ago
Do you think it’s just that, or that maybe the fact that too many people don’t give a shit I between election years might play a role as well? Because from what I e seen over the decades- is that a lot of SJWs rise up every four years to complain about shit- then disappear until the next election.
Without fail.
s08nlql9@lemm.ee 4 months ago
Enshittification is not only in corporations
Melatonin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
NO. The question is, if we had a sane and cognizant third choice fit for the job, why would it STILL be one of these two BOZOS getting elected in November?
What a tragedy.
mhague@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Why does the Superbowl only have two teams? It seems unfair since I don’t know how the two teams were selected and don’t really care enough to pay attention / find out.
JimSamtanko@lemm.ee 4 months ago
Because not enough people give a shit in-between election years.
Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Because the system is set up to prevent any real change for the benefit of the common people. So your choice is between the friendly, somewhat reasonable oligarchy stooge and the utterly deranged oligarchy stooge.
alvvayson@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
A somewhat less pessimistic take: the system is set up to be self-stable.
And it was also designed so that States would have most of the power, not the Federal government.
At various points in history the common people did get benefits. New Deal. Universal suffrage. Civil rights. Abolition.
But it always requires a critical mass of the population to support change.
Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Like in the 2016 election? Or in 2000? The system is set up to prevent the will of the people from being enacted and it takes a massive crisis for everyone to be pissed off enough to do something. Add to that the control of nearly all media by the oligarchy and you get to where we are today.
NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 4 months ago
The US government system was set up to be better than the monarchies its designers had grown up under. In this sense it has been wildy successful. But… it wasn’t really designed to scale to the size it has, nor to account for the massive changes in technology that have occurred since it was written.
The leaders of the time decided to replace the first attempt only 6 years after it was ratified, and I believe they fully expected any future goverent to do the same if they found the current system wasn’t working. They did try to make the new system more adaptable by adding the Amendment process, which was frankly genius and unprecedented in government systems prior to that.
I think it’s very important to remember where and when the system we have came from, and to try to think like the people who wrote it, and to remember that at the time they had no other models for successful government beyond the writings of Enlightenment-period historians. It’s very easy to criticize the current system. It’s far more difficult (and substantially more important) to draft a better system.
alvvayson@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
Both elections exactly prove my point.
The federal system is set up to favor State power, which is why the US presidential election isn’t decided by popular vote. By design, Wyoming and California are considered equals in many respects.
It’s a bad system, but it’s very much entrenched in the constitution.
And it also requires critical mass. It’s basically impossible to enact meaningful change with a 50-55% majority. You need 60% or more to get big changes. And a majority of states.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Yeah, but then we changed it because of the civil war…
The system was designed for the president to be a mostly performative figurehead. Then we gave the president real power, but left determination like the president didn’t matter.