Why American elections are so weird

It’s fitting that America elected a racist gameshow host (once). American elections are a racist gameshow.

Nobody else votes like this. South Korean elections take 23 days. In India the campaign period is roughly a month, though actual voting takes another month (you count a billion votes). In most cases (besides gigantor India), we know the result the same night because projecting a large popular vote count isn’t that hard.

Americans, in contrast, campaign for two years, refresh a map for days if not weeks, and barely even report the popular vote at all. This obviously is a terrible way to run an election. It is however, an amazing TV show.

Think about it.

What if you had a media property that ran for two years, repeated every four, and captured literally the entire market? The 2020 campaign cost $14 billion, most of it plowed into advertising. This show also drives organic eyeballs and dollars in every direction. TV, social media, live events, podcasts, merchandise, the whole shebang. What a terrible, wasteful election for a country full of poor people. But what an amazing show.

That’s what American elections are. A TV show. They’ve figured out how to get the whole country stay up for hours watching literally no news until each state gives a rose to a lucky suitor. It’s insane. You could project the popular vote in a few hours.

They’ve also figured out how to drag this process on for years. American elections employ countless writers, TV hosts, event coordinators, caterers, pollsters/astrologers who all have great job security. It doesn’t even matter if they’re wrong. American elections are decided within every poll’s margin of error but pollsters still have jobs. You’ve had the same commentators being wrong for decades now.

The whole thing is a show. It’s a recurring sacrifice to the media priesthood which then confers ritual legitimacy on your elites. What you call government is a racist Rube Goldberg machine erected by your dirtbag founders to preserve white power, which it still does amazingly well.

The popular winner has lost twice in my lifetime, both pretty important elections. In one case, it led to America’s endless Terror War. In the other, to total collapse.

A small historical digression

What you call an electoral system is just structural racism that was designed for white landowners and still does what it was built for. The Electoral College was designed around enslavement. It was designed to count enslaved bodies towards their owners but not their votes. The first time it tipped an election was in 1800, when it put enslaving rapist Thomas Jefferson in the White House:

Southerner Thomas Jefferson, for example, won the election of 1800–01 against Northerner John Adams in a race where the slavery-skew of the electoral college was the decisive margin of victory: without the extra electoral college votes generated by slavery, the mostly southern states that supported Jefferson would not have sufficed to give him a majority. (TIME)

I grew up in Ohio loving Thomas Jefferson, but I was only taught his words, not his actions. It was like thinking that Tony the Tiger really made Frosted Flakes, and they really were GRRREAT! It was just advertising. It was all part of the show.

America was not founded on freedom. Most of the people that fought for freedom couldn’t even vote. Only 6% of the population had the franchise at independence, you had to own land, and nevermind the blacks and natives. America was never the land of the free. It was founded in 1619, as the land of the enslaved.

America wasn’t founded on voting lol, it was founded on voter suppression. More people are disenfranchised by the prison state TODAY (6 million) than at peak enslavement (4 million).

America still has colonies (Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa) which are taxed without representation. You know, what they left England over. America still disenfranchises millions of brown people by calling them ‘illegal immigrants’, despite that literally being how the land was colonized.

That is what Trump’s great racism is about. Making America GRRREAT Again. It’s about power. Keeping it where the founders intended, with rich white people.

Back to regular scheduled programming

Do you know why I never thought of this when I was living in America? Because I was too distracted by the show. I loved the show. The whole thing is designed to keep you watching, so that you never stop to think.

The most obvious question never really occurs to Americans. Why doesn’t the person that gets the most votes win? Why is it not one person one vote? Instead of facing this simple lie they remain distracted by a whole-ass years long circuses called elections. The Romans would be proud. You don’t even have to give them bread.

The fact is that Americans have no constitutional right to vote at all. You stare a map of people that literally vote for you (that’s what the Electoral College is) and call it democracy. You watch ads for two years about democracy but do not actually have one. It’s all a show.

After being fooled for two elections in a row and having their entire civilization collapse as a result, many Americans are starting to figure this out. That their mythology is myth. That their founders were foul. That they have government by rich white men, for rich white men, and that everyone else can perish from the Earth.

Other countries have elections. We vote for people and the winner wins. We don’t spend years on it and it doesn’t cost billions of dollars. Americans do not have free and fair elections. They literally have expensive and unfair ones. These are not elections. It’s all a big show.

Sharknado

Your reality has now caught up with your dumbest television. In fact, reality first diverged in 2015, and you’ve ended up in the worse timeline by far.

In 2015, the washed-up TV star and Twitter racist Donald Trump was cast as President in Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No. He dropped out because he didn’t want to shoot in LA. Please think about this. You are now living in a timeline which is worse than Sharknado. Sharknados only killed 902 people total. On election day alone, at least 1,100 Americans died of COVID-19. People, loved ones, human beings, not on TV. I’m terribly sorry for each one.

America, you are your dumbest media now. You are worse than your dumbest media. America is not a democracy or even a republic. It’s a reality TV show. Of course you elected a reality TV show host. He knew, more than anyone, how to play the game.