• Because propaganda works. If propaganda didn’t work, companies would not advertise products and politicians wouldn’t run campaigns. Rich sponsors fund politicians who promise to look after their interests. Well-funded politicians run better campaigns and win.

• Because politicians are, nearly without exception, above middle class, if not outright rich. They won’t act too radically against their own class interests.

The only solution I know comes from ancient Athens. Sortition -> you hold a lottery to draw representatives. A few extremely stupid people will be drawn into parliament, but idiots are far better than sociopaths, and the current system gives undue representation to sociopaths (willing to climb over bodies if that gets them to power). If one then dislikes the idea of a considerable percentage of bumbling fools (as opposed to cunning predators) in parliament, one must feed everyone well, treat all childhood diseases and educate everyone as well as possible. As if their rational decisions were needed tomorrow.

Because the rich do a LOT to make it turn out that way.

• News is largely controlled by capitalists.

• Education has been gutted in a lot of places to make way for private schools.

• Corporations can contribute tons of money to candidates. Setting aside the possibility that these are effectively bribes, even if that weren’t the case, the candidates who get that money get to put out more ads and have more campaign infrastructure such as travel funds, staffers, etc.

• Various kinds of voter suppression.

• From the very founding of the country, the election system and government has been set up to hamper political participation. Obviously there was the fairly narrow franchise at the start. But even with that expanded, we have the electoral college, unequal apportionment, gerrymandering, first past the post, closed primaries, a court that’s specifically there to slow down popular will, etc.

• Just being a representative “democracy” puts a barrier between people and the policies they want. You rarely if ever get to vote on policies. You have to vote for a candidate. And the candidate is a whole bundle of policies, but also a record, a personality, etc. So there can be all sorts of political messaging about candidates which has nothing to do with what their policies are. Because of the duopoly party system that is all but ensured by the aforementioned voting system, you aren’t even going to have a candidate you can vote for that will represent your interests. And after all that, even if you manage to vote for someone who says they’ll do the things you want… then they get into office and you’re back on the sidelines. They go and do whatever it was they actually wanted to do, and you have fairly limited recourse for holding them accountable. The most you can do is decide to vote against them next election, but now you’re back to square one.

• Broader, more participatory forms of political organizing have been violently repressed. Just look at the history of union busting or the police violence during the civil rights movement or even now, etc. In the workplace, where you’re most likely to find others who share your class interests, your boss has a lot of control over you and it’s in their interest to make sure employees don’t talk politics and view each other as competition rather than potential allies.

• Along similar lines, racism has been used as a tool to divide people who would otherwise share class interests so they wouldn’t focus their attention on capitalists.

Moral of the story: There is a long history of people struggling against capitalists for a better life and an equally long history of capitalists using every trick in the book to keep them from that goal. The political landscape you see today is the result of that history. Learn from it.

One’s “own best interest” can take a lot of different forms. Especially when the number and variety of plausible candidates are finite. Your preferred candidate for a given office will rarely line up perfectly with your own values. There’s a compromise there.

If I vote for my own finances, it may come at the cost of my morals. It I vote for my own moral interest, it may cost me more. If I vote for my own power, it may cost someone else their freedoms. How heavily do I weight my own interests against those of a wider society? Political identities and philosophies are complicated, and can’t necessarily be reduced to a single binary choice that is “best” in every scenario.

Bexause you have a two party system where both sides are corrupt

The rich are clever and very well coordinated

Fundamental flaw of the democracy: It assumes that people know what’s the best for them

It all boils down to education

They believe it will benefit them one day.

Because they’ve successfully been conned into thinking that what’s in the best interests of the rich is in their own best interests too.

Because everyone thinks of themselves as a potential rich person. Or in other words: people think that being rich is the ideal state, so let’s align everything around that.

If we truly put a yoke on the rich and contained them, we would also be reining in the smallfolks dreams.

By contrast, rich people don’t sit around dreaming about being smallfolk and planning aspirationally for the day that will happen.

Propaganda. Lack of education. There’s a reason they want to defund public schools. They’re not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. :)

The root of it is that we don’t teach skepticism or critical thinking in public schools. Seriously.

Question authority. Question everything. But especially question authority. They rarely have your best interests in mind.

Because powerful people turned politics from a policy / representation in to politics as an identity. People will almost anything for their two minutes of hate.

Manufactured consent

Since I didn’t see it listed yet, fear of change.

Some folks are just fearful of change.

Rarely is a change proposal black and white. We can show you good data to support the change. We can look at it from a reputable source. We can look at how the change affected others. We can agree it’s most likely a good change.

But sometimes we fear it.

What if we’re wrong?