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Comment by mindslight | Hacker News Reader

Both major parties are corpo-authoritarian, with the main dynamics of elections being to gauge how much the public is willing to accept and to make half the people think they actually wanted the resulting policies. And for this round the people have spoken that they want it good and hard.

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I don’t think they care about the policy. They just see a one sided debate: companies will to pay and an indifferent public.

That’s a false equivalence. Companies can pay people to agitate for them full-time. Then they can pay the politicians, albeit indirectly. Finally the public have the privilege of using their free time to agitate against the politicians. Which just starts out as unorganized disruptions, “people were mildly inconvenienced on their way to work today”.

That versus cash.

Sure, you're up against "the purpose of a system is what it does". I'm sure many mainstream politicians actually earnestly care about individual liberty and reigning in corpos - it helps them sell themselves to the public. But the net effect is that when the dollars come calling, enough set aside those ideals to make the corpo agenda happen.

Without making some compromises and taking the money they would be replaced by someone who would.

They (well, all of us whatever we do, but some more then others) operate in an imperfect system.

> And for this round the people have spoken that they want it good and hard.

Actually, the people have said "please stop this, this can't go on" at every election since 1992, with the possible exception of 2012 (unless you admit that 2012 President Obama was running against 2008 Candidate Obama.) They again said it in 2024.

I agree that's what the people have wanted to say and that they believe it is what they have said, but they get taken in by simplistic populist messages that transmute their frustration into support for the next corpo con long into when the results have become apparent. But for 2024 the usual excuses of "he reneged", "stick with the incumbent", or "less bad option" don't even work - it's a clear case of people putting their foot on the gas with a known quantity, but thinking it must be a good thing because those other people are really upset about it.

I have a feeling the public is going to be willing to accept a lot of things.

>corpo-authoritarian

"corporate fascist"

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