The 2024 presidential campaign is underway, and all the hopefuls are saying the same thing: “America’s broken, and I’m the only one who can fix it.” America has a lot of problems, but the country isn’t broken – what’s broken is the government, and our politicians are the last people who want to do anything about it.
Most House districts are so gerrymandered that hundreds of thousands of voters in those races just don’t matter at all. Our winner-take-all system means that third-party candidates spoil the vote at best, and it basically guarantees that there will only be two huge, siloed parties.
In presidential elections, because of our electoral system, winner-take-all can actually become loser-take-all, where someone who loses the national vote by millions can still become the president. Most importantly, because our campaign finance laws are ridiculous, national campaigns are stupidly expensive and only getting more expensive, which means that politicians have to take hundreds of millions of dollars from rich people and corporations, giving those rich people and corporations easy access to and influence over politicians. When politicians are supposed to be representing everyone, including that tiny fraction of people who are not absurdly rich and are not corporations, that’s not a good thing.
Knowing that’s what the system is – knowing that you have to sell your soul to the party, to the corporations, and to the rich individual donors – why would anyone who actually has a soul ever want to run for political office? Maybe that explains why so many of our politicians pretend to care about the country but really only care about power, money and status.
None of those problems are sexy. They aren’t hurricanes flooding homes or dead bodies in the streets. Honestly, they’re boring. Campaign finance reform, ugh. Independent redistricting commissions, so done. Proportional representation, kill me now. But these boring things are at the center of what’s screwing up the government, which is in turn screwing up the country.
Sometimes incredibly boring things are also incredibly, absurdly important things. Like concrete. Like a foundation. Like cracks in a foundation. Not so boring when your house caves in, is it? And yeah, there are many, many big problems in America, but we can’t really solve anything if our government isn’t working. And even though there’s been some forward in a few places, like in Maine, in most of the United States these problems are getting worse, not better.
So what can we do? We’ve got a democracy. If you want change, people always say, “Vote.” For who? For Donald Trump? A wannabe dictator? For Joe Biden? The guy most Democrats don’t even want? For the record, I do think someone who didn’t try to overturn an election would make a better president than someone who very obviously did. But why does it come to this choice? You really couldn’t ask for a better metaphor for America’s broken political system than the 2024 presidential campaign: two absurdly ambitious, utterly exhausted men, their best years very far behind them, still here, still grinding it out, to the bitter end. For what? For the good of the country?
To solve certain problems, you can use a claw hammer. But sometimes you can’t do that: The cracks and the rot just run too deep. That’s when you need a different kind of hammer. Our politicians are terrible. They’re products of a terrible system. And because that system is the reason that our politicians have power, they’ll never change it.
Luckily, most of us aren’t politicians. If the system’s broken, you don’t try to work within the system. You go around it. You go to the streets. And you bring a friend. And they bring a friend. And if there’s enough people who are fed up enough with the corruption and demand change and shut things down for long enough and scare the people on top enough, then the system changes. That’s democracy, too. And it’s definitely not boring.
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