> Don't tell me to stop watching the circuses and go join one. I'll just nail down the tent flaps and set the big top on fire.
But you won't because your peers will put the fire out before it has a chance take hold and then they'll kick you out.
In a mature democracy, no one person can attain enough power to do any long-term damage (at least relative to any other system).
In the USA, a president has limited powers and a limited time frame within which to wield them, after which he will be kicked out, whether he was doing a good job or not, so your analogy isn't really working.
> For me, it is a beauty contest, and the loveliest of the pageant participants is, at best, a "4". And for some reason, the crown keeps getting taken by someone who is a "1" or a "2".
Perhaps this is because it isn't a beauty contest for the rest of the people.
My analogy is intended to illustrate that the citizen participation in political parties is in some measure a distraction to safely diffuse the dissent energy in the system.
If you want real change to happen, you have to make the current wielders of the state's power at least annoyed.
The US is not a direct democracy. It is a republic, and the -cracy of the demo- is highly leveraged. And that's exactly how one segment of the population could abuse and disenfranchise another with Jim Crow laws.
The Democrats and the Republicans have, with their gerrymandered districts and first-past-the-post voting systems and burdensome ballot access laws, systematically disenfranchised a significant minority of the population, and tricked another significant minority into wasting their energy on their internal party politics.
That system is designed to exhaust my energy and radiate the resulting heat away into space, so that it does not adversely affect the workings of the machine. That's why those people who say "join a political party and participate in the process" can go set their heads on fire.
If your political process does not respect your voice, you should resist it, not join it. Misbehave a little. And have a little respect for those with fringe opinions on the opposite side of your spectrum that are also forced to misbehave so that their voices might be heard. There is a path to ethical misbehavior, and I aim to walk it, rather than swim the unethical cesspool of the political parties' unseen inner workings.
But you won't because your peers will put the fire out before it has a chance take hold and then they'll kick you out.
In a mature democracy, no one person can attain enough power to do any long-term damage (at least relative to any other system).
In the USA, a president has limited powers and a limited time frame within which to wield them, after which he will be kicked out, whether he was doing a good job or not, so your analogy isn't really working.
> For me, it is a beauty contest, and the loveliest of the pageant participants is, at best, a "4". And for some reason, the crown keeps getting taken by someone who is a "1" or a "2".
Perhaps this is because it isn't a beauty contest for the rest of the people.