You need some perspective. Citizens didn't ubiquitously abandon their rights. But rather we have been the victims of a cold calculated class war waged upon us since nixon. It all began to fall apart 54 years ago and the ruling class solidified this reality with many actions firstly being the pardoning of Nixon. His nomination of Lewis F powell to the supreme court who was a vocal Fascist and set the stage for citizens united which legalized corruption and turned the corporatist nature of our institutions into an obvious reality. Nixon also ended the gold standard which was the first domino toppled that would inevitably devalue the us dollar intentionally to reduce the cost of labor that could not be outsourced and turn the working class into a low paid service industry of wage slaves. Reagan re legalizing stock buybacks and signing cafta which would become nafta sending every good manufacturing job and the 7 satelite roles for each of those jobs to the third world for 90-95%+ reduction in cost.
Meanwhile our education system was attacked (roger freeman who was advisor to both Nixon and reagan said the quiet part out loud when he said “We are on the verge of having a highly educated proletariat, this is dynamite! We need to be more selective about who we allow to go through higher education” they removed classes like automotive shop, wood shop, financial literacy, home economics art and music to make us dependent upon consumerism and unable to repair the goods we purchase to maintain our quality of life. This turned our education system into a conformity academy creating obedient workers and punishing those who broke the mold in order to produce generations of citizens just smart enough to run the machines but not smart enough to understand how ruthlessly we are being exploited and fucked Then our parents were inundated with the advent of entertainment television and were too distracted to understand the magic glowing box their leisure and recreation time revolved around was a propaganda dissemination device conditioning them to mindlessly support ideas and policies against their own self interests. And for a while journalism did it’s job there was something called the fairness in media doctrine where news programs had to devote an equal amount of time to both sides of an issue and there were attempts to legislate this into law but theu were vetoed by the Reagan administration and again by the bush senior administration and soon after fox news was born with the primary purpose of insuring no conservative presidential administration was ever held accountable for malfeasance the way nixon was ever again.even though he got off extremely light unfortunately and now we are where we are partly because of the failure of our social Institutions to seek justice for such blatant corruption. nevermind the unconstitutional and illegal war on drugs he unleashed which has been a tool to persecute leftists from the very beginning
And our elections are a total joke. Even if they weren't compromised true leftist economic populism has been eradicated from social discourse ever since LBJ declined the party nomination and then RFK was subsequently assassinated. And this was just one of over a dozen assassinations of popular leftist and left aligned leaders in a 2 decade time span.
Princeton did a study that showed the amount of influence one has on potential policy and legislation is directly proportional to your wealth with regular working class people having an irrelevant statistically near zero effect on any potential policy/ Legislation regardless how popular or unpopular it is. The media owned by the same billionaires who bribe both right wing parties in the usa just manufacture our consent and the majority just believe whatever they see that is convincing enough.
So the reality here is our entire sociopolitical system is corrupted by money. There is a class of ultra rich powerful people/ groups who legitimately believe they have divine provenance over society because of their socioeconomic status and can dk whatever they want with impunity. So the idea that they would for some reason see the us election system as being too sacred for them to manipulate in the same way they manipulate every other aspect of society, is just extremely naive.
In Germany the supreme court heard a case on election integrity sometime in the last 10-15 years (i can’t remember when exactly and Im too lazy right now to search and risk my rant be lost because of my shitty phone resetting the app) but their supreme court ultimately decided that electronic voting is unconstitutional because it is impossible to differentiate between fraudulent results and legitimate ones for any layperson who isn't a cybersecurity or IT expert.
There are many Americans who have allowed this and been convinced it’s a good thing but even they have been victimized to support something that is so blatantly antithetical to their own self interests. There are a very small amount of us who see what is happening and although we don't have a looking glass to see exactly how it happened we are smart enough to understand how we ended up where we are.
Probably some stuff I’m missing here. U could go on at addendum about how the world bank and imf are lying about the true measure of inflation to keep the working class from rioting and fomenting revolution and the passive income continuing to roll into the bank accounts of the super rich. So now the majority of Americans are so impoverished living paycheck to paycheck with no emergency savings and this renders us unable to organize and foment the revolution we need that is obliviously the only way since it is clear the system will not allow any remediation through it’s own mechanisms.
But yeah the only Americans you should be hard on are maga dipshits and neo liberals who honesty believe we can vote our way out of this obvious broken shitshow.
Young cardamom is the OG, they call him Mayor Cardamom now though!