| Jumpin said: Yeah, I am not sure why that statement is sending Republicans into a childish hissy fit of CALL CAPSLOCK POSTS ON TWITTER... You see how annoying that is =P Seriously, the fact that the US still has this clown as head of government, and have granted him dictatorial power (or executive) shows an incredible weakness in the country's ability to choose a competent government. I am not saying that to badmouth you, because boy has my own country made similar mistakes in the past. The first step to solving a problem is identifying it, and the problem with the US is not Trump, it's the fact that Trump was even considered to be picked in the first place, and the fact that he's still there. There is some sort of negative influencing factor(s) in your electoral system that needs to be removed. |
There are definitely a lot of problems with our electoral system. First Past The Post voting, gerrymandering, the electoral college, the way we do primaries, and more. However there are factors outside of our electoral system that are affecting the electorate itself that ultimately allowed this. Some news outlets are little more than propaganda for one party or the other, and other news outlets feed off outrage because it earns them ad dollars, giving outrageous things more exposure than they deserve, and if anti-vaxers and flat-earthers are any indication, exposure is all you need for some people. This is due to a systemic lack of education and ineffectiveness of existing education to teach people critical thinking and source literacy. As such they see an article from some not credible source and lack the ability to critically evaluate what they read, and believe that all the doctors are just lying corporate shills and the generations of freedom from dibilitating diseases post invention of vaccines were just a lie. Then they share it, which is a separate issue altogether, social media. Social media shares information for mostly emotional reasons, and is designed to flood people with content so they end up not engaging deeply with it, simply reading a clickbaity headline and believing it because it was from their friend that they trust. If they'd read further or looked at the source in a critical way rather than an emotional one, they'd never have believed it. This is how fake news spreads. Bad sources made by companies only looking for ad revenue spread through clickbaity, emotional headlines through the clickbaity, emotional medium of social media from one poorly educated, uncritical person to another, and they believe it because it confirms their narrative.
More than anything, THAT is why we're in the position we're in as a society now, much moreso than electoral flaws. Maybe eliminating the gerrymandering, the closed primaries, the FPTP voting mechanics, and the undemocratic elements of the electoral college would defeat the two party system and the polarizing effects that push the parties to the extremes, but the utter inability to choose a functional government comes from an apocalypse of misinformation that's only going to get worse.
