Because powerful people turned politics from a policy / representation in to politics as an identity. People will almost anything for their two minutes of hate.

“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

–Lyndon B. Johnson

The sooner you realize the vast majority of humans are simply not very intelligent, the more everything starts making sense. And the more depressed you will be.

Because the rich do a LOT to make it turn out that way.

• News is largely controlled by capitalists.

• Education has been gutted in a lot of places to make way for private schools.

• Corporations can contribute tons of money to candidates. Setting aside the possibility that these are effectively bribes, even if that weren’t the case, the candidates who get that money get to put out more ads and have more campaign infrastructure such as travel funds, staffers, etc.

• Various kinds of voter suppression.

• From the very founding of the country, the election system and government has been set up to hamper political participation. Obviously there was the fairly narrow franchise at the start. But even with that expanded, we have the electoral college, unequal apportionment, gerrymandering, first past the post, closed primaries, a court that’s specifically there to slow down popular will, etc.

• Just being a representative “democracy” puts a barrier between people and the policies they want. You rarely if ever get to vote on policies. You have to vote for a candidate. And the candidate is a whole bundle of policies, but also a record, a personality, etc. So there can be all sorts of political messaging about candidates which has nothing to do with what their policies are. Because of the duopoly party system that is all but ensured by the aforementioned voting system, you aren’t even going to have a candidate you can vote for that will represent your interests. And after all that, even if you manage to vote for someone who says they’ll do the things you want… then they get into office and you’re back on the sidelines. They go and do whatever it was they actually wanted to do, and you have fairly limited recourse for holding them accountable. The most you can do is decide to vote against them next election, but now you’re back to square one.

• Broader, more participatory forms of political organizing have been violently repressed. Just look at the history of union busting or the police violence during the civil rights movement or even now, etc. In the workplace, where you’re most likely to find others who share your class interests, your boss has a lot of control over you and it’s in their interest to make sure employees don’t talk politics and view each other as competition rather than potential allies.

• Along similar lines, racism has been used as a tool to divide people who would otherwise share class interests so they wouldn’t focus their attention on capitalists.

Moral of the story: There is a long history of people struggling against capitalists for a better life and an equally long history of capitalists using every trick in the book to keep them from that goal. The political landscape you see today is the result of that history. Learn from it.

“I might be rich one day”

Because they’ve successfully been conned into thinking that what’s in the best interests of the rich is in their own best interests too.

Generally people tend to focus on one thing and don’t pay any attention to the side effects. Morons want lower taxes for themselves and don’t pay attention to the fact that the wealthy get the most benefit out of conservative cuts or that they just defunded the benefits of having a government like enforced food safety regulations. Or they care about abortion because they buy lies about post birth abortions and ignore everything else. Or they just teally hate immigrants and want to be mad and don’t care that the party of hate works against their other self interests.

Many people are stupid. Like really, really stupid.

Because our brains are not wired for the modern complex world. Most decisions we make, we make thanks to heuristics that are heavily exploited by other people.

Two camps

1. They don’t know any better.

Basically leftists-in-training that haven’t read enough wikipedia articles on Reagan yet.

2. People voting and believing political opinions with their gut instinct

Don’t bother, and if you see one with a nazi flag, punch them in the face.

In the US at least, the systematic demolishing of the education system has led to a vast reduction in overall education and critical thinking skills. This was done on purpose. That, combined with the unexpected boon of the Internet, has led to massive wealth shifting from the many to the few.

You see the results of this change everywhere, especially on the Internet. Lack of basic spelling and grammar skills are just one symptom. All of that is to say that humans are primates and easily trained.

Ignorance and gullibility. I fall for misinformation all the time, especially when it confirms my own biases and it takes real effort to maintain a mindset of “yes this sounds true, but is it actually?” It is also terribly inefficient. If someone tells me, when I was a kid, that daddylonglegs spiders are the most poisonous, I am likely going to just go “neat” and now I think that and say it. If you stop and verify EVERYTHING EVER you have no time to do anything in life. This makes the filter of critical thinking…critical.

Also, it isn’t about being stupid (though that helps). Some of the smartest people I know are conspiracy theory nutjobs. They can easily draw parallels between disparate facts, but can’t filter their findings or understand correlation doesn’t equal causation.

The root of it is that we don’t teach skepticism or critical thinking in public schools. Seriously.

Question authority. Question everything. But especially question authority. They rarely have your best interests in mind.

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A lot of people have aspirations of themselves being rich and if they can vote like rich people they participate in the rich aesthetic.