Comment by tossandthrow
4 days ago
Especially in the US, this is a strawman. There is simply not enough granularity of choice that you can make voters accountable for every action Trump does.
4 days ago
Especially in the US, this is a strawman. There is simply not enough granularity of choice that you can make voters accountable for every action Trump does.
Trump was wildly transparent about what kind of person he is. In this case, you can and should.
Guy: "Why do we have nukes if we don't use them?"
Same Guy: "If Europe doesn't buy more weapons from us, Russia should invade Europe, torture, plunder and kill people and do their worst."
People: "I guess I vote for that guy!"
Guy randomly bombs Iran, Yemen, Nigeria, Venezuela, Iraq, Somalia and Syria - people "Huh? I didn't vote for this".
The US only has two parties and decisions are decoupled from the wishes of the people.
It is already a stretch to call it a democracy - which is required to insist on democratic reasoning.
The US only has two parties because people only want two parties. The "our team vs. other team" is so ingrained in US all thinking, people can't stop. Football is not played with three teams. The election system doesn't help, but there is nothing in the constitution that says "Only two parties".
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I believe the problem with democracy is that it's affected by various problems analogous to the ones of markets, but often amplified.
In this case, to me, it really seems a matter of extreme information asymmetry as you'd never see in a regular market.
Does he actually mean those things, or is that some sort of joke? How do you even know? BTW, he didn't actually use Nukes, and I don't believe he will. On the other hand, he said he wanted to end wars and sounded like he was against starting new ones.
I've seen people regretting voting for Trump because of tariffs, even though they supported tariffs in the first place. They had no idea that Trump's "tariff" would mean some blanket tariffs at those rates. They thought it was some small tariffs on "key industries".
A further confirmation of the information asymmetry is that after a year, support for Trump is far below what would be needed to elect him.
I'm not sure what the solution is.