Opinions

American Politics

34 min read
Updated October 3, 2026

Preamble

There is a LOT I could talk about with this entry, but I’m going to focus on one thing: how unrepresentative the American Political system logically is.

A few things are worth establishing before going further. 1) This is an opinion piece, there will be things I am wrong about and things I have opinions about, and this cannot be wholly objective no matter what I say, though it attempts to look at the situation as objectively as possible. Sources are provided at the bottom for anyone who wants to investigate further. 2) The political landscape has become significantly difficult to discuss without immediately triggering defensiveness on all sides, and I have no interest in contributing to that, I just want to look at and discuss the system claiming it is certain things while doing the opposite. Given I have lived in this country my entire life, I have personal justification for this kind of analysis. 3) This entry is not an attempt to tell you what to think or who to vote for, that’s up to you based on your beliefs and priorities. This entry is an attempt to look clearly at a system that has become very good at obscuring itself and the harm it creates for the people it claims to represent. 4) This entry may go out of date. While I somewhat regularly clean up and update everything in the Codex, this topic requires a LOT of research, I don’t always have the time or energy to do that and write about it, and I’m not a politician or a political content creator, so forgive me if some details aren’t quite right anymore. Regardless, the discussion of how unrepresentative the political system logically is should hold up anyway unless the system itself changes, which is unfortunately implausible. 5) This is an application of Adaptivism to the world of American politics, not the other way around. I’m not trying to politicize anything in the Codex, I just find this topic personally worth discussing.

Fundamentally Flawed Structure

The American political system is, by design, clearly not working for the people it claims to represent. This is a structural observation that requires no partisan loyalty to make. The system has problems embedded so deeply that no election cycle, no candidate, and no single policy shift can address them at their root.

To start, the Electoral College was designed for a world that no longer exists, one in which direct democracy was considered dangerous and information traveled by horseback. What it produces today is a presidency decided by a handful of competitive states, while the votes of tens of millions of Americans living outside those states are functionally irrelevant to the outcome. Every voter in Texas and California, as easy examples, both understand, implicitly, that their presidential vote does not matter. This is because certain states are virtually guaranteed to represent certain parties, and because of how the Electoral College works, whichever party gets a majority of votes (even if it’s by a tiny margin) earns all of the state’s Electoral College votes, which is as unrepresentative of an outcome as it can possibly get considering what the people actually voted for. The Electoral College is also why it is possible for a presidential candidate to win the popular vote yet lose the election, which doesn’t make any democratic sense, and in a nation claiming to be democratic, the Electoral College is fundamentally undemocratic and unrepresentative at every level.

The voting system makes it worse. First-past-the-post elections, where the candidate with the most votes (Electoral College votes at the Presidential level, it’s a little different at other levels of government) wins regardless of whether they achieved a majority with the public, also mathematically punish third parties and guarantee a two party system. In ranked choice or proportional systems, a vote for a third party candidate is not a wasted vote, but in the American system, it often functions as a vote against your preferred major-party candidate, often referred to as “strategic voting.” The structure itself enforces the two party system that disadvantages the choices and the interests of the citizens while simultaneously being unrepresentative and undemocratic of what the citizens actually want to or are even theoretically able to vote for.

Gerrymandering distorts representation at nearly every level, and it’s getting worse. In the summer of 2025, Texas’s GOP-controlled legislature aggressively redrew its congressional map, targeting communities of color and attempting to create five additional Republican seats ahead of the 2026 midterms, producing a map where Republicans could win 80 percent of seats in a state where their statewide candidates regularly receive around 53 percent of votes. The gap between votes cast and seats earned tells you everything you need to know about how representative the House of Representatives actually is. Worse, a number of other states followed Texas’s example by redrawing their boundaries to support their political preference, such as California, which responded with its own aggressive gerrymander. Both parties, when given the power to draw maps, and under the excuse of “fighting fire with fire,” use it to entrench themselves instead of to be more representative of the interests of their citizens. To be fair, Republican gerrymandering is far more common than Democrat (especially during the 2024-2028 Republican presidency), and the Democrats “fighting fire with fire” is a somewhat valid excuse for “representation” considering what would happen if they didn’t, but the point is that gerrymandering is fundamentally unrepresentative yet simultaneously incentivized for both parties. Congress is full of representatives who are virtually guaranteed to win their districts regardless of how badly they govern, which eliminates the primary accountability mechanism that elections are designed to provide. This isn’t necessarily the fault of either party since the structure itself incentivizes it, which is the root of the problem, but both parties are still gerrymandering more and more, making it worse.

The 2024 election cycle saw an estimated $15.9 billion spent, the second costliest in American history. The structure of campaign finance means that candidates at every level must spend enormous amounts of resources courting donors. Large individual contributors and political action committees make up the majority of funding for both parties, which is directly how policy priorities are set. The people whose policies are implemented into government are not the people voting, but the few people wealthy enough to finance political campaigns. The wealthy buy policies they want into power while the citizens are consulted every two to four years at the ballot box and then returned to their appropriate position as a subordinate, which systematically filters out the most structurally disruptive ideas before they ever reach a ballot, regardless of how beneficial they are to the American people. Considering wealth inequality has been growing for decades, this problem has been getting worse for decades.

The Senate overrepresents rural, low-population states by absolutely insane margins, and is arguably more unrepresentative than the Electoral College. Wyoming has two senators representing roughly 580,000 people. California has two senators representing over 39 million. Half the entire population of the country lives in just nine states, which means that same half of the population gets just 18% of the seats in the Senate, while the other half of the population gets 82%. To be fair, while this is theoretically true, it still does play out a bit differently in practice. However, the point is that legislation can pass or be blocked by senators collectively representing a small fraction of the American population, which systematically advantages a particular (and small) geographic and political demographic at the direct expense of literally everyone else. In other words, the Republican party has a built-in advantage in the Senate that is extremely difficult to get rid of (since the Senate demands equal representation in body for all states), which is unrepresentative by design.

The checks and balances that were meant to prevent the consolidation of power have, in recent decades, proven dangerously susceptible to the forces they were supposed to constrain. The Supreme Court has been politicized through a decades-long strategy of judicial appointments, producing a body that increasingly functions as an ideological arm rather than a genuinely independent arbiter. Congressional oversight has been selectively applied and then ignored when politically inconvenient. In 2019, the Supreme Court ruled that federal courts have no authority to prevent state officials from drawing electoral districts to preserve or expand their party’s power, effectively removing one of the primary judicial checks on gerrymandering entirely. Norms treated as sufficient substitutes for law, like the tradition of peaceful transfer of power, the expectation that candidates would release their tax returns, and the understanding that the Department of Justice operates independently of political pressure, have all collapsed the moment someone decided to ignore them.

All of this to say that, regardless of candidate or senator or representative or even president, the system itself is fundamentally flawed at nearly every level, and its problems have only gotten worse as time has gone on and as more and more politicians realize how easily it can be abused.

The Republican Party

The Republican Party, in recent memory, has accumulated a record that is extremely difficult to characterize charitably. Its failures are of basic democratic governance, and the list is long. What follows is just a summary.

The party has systematically stoked racial resentment for electoral advantage for decades. The Southern Strategy, beginning in the late 1960s, deliberately appealed to white voters disaffected by the Civil Rights Act, and the approach never fully disappeared. Immigration policy has consistently been framed around fear of demographic replacement rather than coherent governance. Voting restriction efforts have been concentrated, not coincidentally, in areas with large minority populations. The Supreme Court has progressively narrowed federal protection of ballot access by weakening the Voting Rights Act, while the evidence for widespread voter fraud, the stated justification for restrictions, remains negligible. These laws impose uneven burdens on voters in a system claimed to be fair and democratic, and anyone who examines the specifics of which voters face those burdens is not left guessing at the intent.

The party has defended, promoted, and in some cases venerated figures credibly accused of serious sexual misconduct, including violence against women. To be fair, the Democratic party has done the same, although nowhere near the same degree as the Republican Party. The pattern is consistent enough across enough individuals and enough years that “defending specific people” undersells it: the party has demonstrated that allegations of this kind are not disqualifying (or even illegal) and will be managed with denial and deflection if the accused is politically useful.

January 6th, 2021 warrants its own paragraph. A sitting Republican president refused to accept the results of a free and fair election, spread demonstrably false claims of widespread fraud, pressured state officials to overturn certified results, pressured his vice president to refuse to certify the electoral count, and on January 6th directed a mob toward the Capitol while the count was underway. More than 1,500 individuals were charged and more than 1,200 pleaded guilty or were convicted for related crimes. On the first day of his second term in 2025, the same Republican president pardoned virtually all of those convicted for conduct stemming from the attack, and ordered the Department of Justice to seek dismissal of all pending cases. About 600 of the pardoned rioters were accused of assaulting, resisting, or impeding police officers. Rioters wounded more than 140 officers with weapons ranging from fire extinguishers to bear spray to explosive devices. The party, with limited exceptions, accepted this event, and later celebrated it. This is the same party that prides itself as the defender of law and order and the champion of law enforcement, while clearly selectively applying the law to whatever benefits their political agenda.

The states that consistently rank at the bottom of national quality of life measures, like Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and West Virginia, among others, have been under uninterrupted Republican control for years, and score worst on poverty, life expectancy, healthcare access, and education, among many other metrics. To be fair, this isn’t universal, and several Republican-led states, including Utah, Idaho, Nebraska, and New Hampshire rank among the best in the country by the same measures, which means Republican control alone doesn’t determine specific outcomes, but the point is that the states occupying the actual floor of nearly every single metric share the same feature, that being decades of Republican governance with no meaningful electoral check whatsoever. When representatives are virtually guaranteed reelection regardless of outcomes, the incentive to improve those outcomes weakens considerably. Despite the fact that this applies to the Democratic party as well, the states with the worst measured quality of life are exclusively Republican, which says something about how beneficial Republican governance and policy are to the American people.

The dismantling of federal oversight has accelerated. DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, accessed sensitive Treasury Department data without congressional approval, gained access to sensitive systems and information on government payments and employees at federal agencies, and has operated without formal oversight of its leadership, neither of whom were elected or even confirmed by the Senate. Trump purged 18 inspectors across 19 positions, who were quite literally the independent watchdogs whose entire purpose was to detect waste, fraud, and corruption, without stating any legitimate reason. Removing oversight mechanisms while simultaneously expanding executive power is not concerned with efficiency, despite that being the stated intention.

The party has, over the past several years, systematically worked to restrict what can be taught, who can be taught, and funding for public education. Since January 2021, 44 states have introduced bills or taken other steps that would restrict teaching critical race theory or limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism. The framing of these efforts as protecting children from “divisive content” is deliberate misdirection because book bans as a concept and so-called “divisive concepts” laws are authoritarian interventions and have nothing to do with actual education, they are intended for controlling what students are allowed to know about American and world history. At the federal level, House Republicans proposed cutting overall Department of Education funding by 15%, including a 27% reduction in Title I funding, the primary federal investment in schools serving low income students, and in March 2025, the Republican president signed an executive order directing the Secretary of Education to work towards eliminating the Department of Education entirely, with the Secretary herself stating that shrinking the department as much as possible was in effect its “final mission.” A party that genuinely believed in educating its citizens would not pursue the simultaneous defunding, restriction, and dismantling of the institutions responsible for educating citizens. The Reagan-era assertion that an educated electorate threatens Republican power has aged into modern day policy. The stated intention is quite literally to produce less educated voters whom are far easier to manipulate and control.

Healthcare access has been degraded through repeated attempts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act without a coherent replacement, through the undermining of Medicaid, and through the removal of protections for people with pre-existing conditions. The party has pursued policies that have made it materially harder to be poor, sick, LQBTQ+, or non-white in America, and has done so while describing these policies as freedom.

Political violence has proliferated, and politicians have been subjected to a dramatic rise in intimidation. Major incidents during 2025 included the firebombing of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s official residence, and the murder and attempted murder of two Minnesota state lawmakers and their spouses. This political violence, among other forms of violence, has been, in one way or another, encouraged and justified by the Republican Party. Justifying political violence for any reason is undemocratic by every measure.

Cutting Medicaid, gutting inspectors general, weakening food and water safety regulations, and dismantling protections for pre-existing conditions are not policies that fail to help people, they are policies that actively make specific, predictable harms more likely to occur for specific people. The point of these policies is quite literally to make the lives of certain people much more difficult for no legitimate reason. People become sicker because a regulation that used to catch a contaminant no longer exists and people lose coverage because a program that used to cover them was cut. These are the direct, intended consequences of decisions made by people who understood what those decisions would do and the consequences it would produce. The Republican Party’s record is one that actively encourages, accelerates, and worsens the problems faced by everyday American citizens. As bold as this next statement is, this is not an opinion, this is what they are doing, and most of the Republican leadership isn’t even trying to hide it if you look at their official, public statements about what apparently needs to change in this country to “improve” it. The Republican party has proven over these past few decades that it is not concerned with improving the lives of its own citizens, rather with who they can actively oppress in the name of freedom. There is soooo much more I could talk about with the Republican party, but I think you get the idea. This is a political party that is actively, clearly, and admittedly trying to worsen the lives of the people it claims to represent. By every single measure, it has completely and intentionally failed to represent its citizens, except the wealthy.

The Democratic Party

The Democratic Party is, by most honest assessments, the lesser of the two evils. However, don’t get me wrong: that is not a compliment. The bar is on the floor, and meeting it solves absolutely nothing.

The party has, for decades, gestured towards progressive values while consistently delivering far less than promised. Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress and the presidency from 2009 to 2011 and produced the Affordable Care Act, a meaningful but limited reform that preserved the for-profit insurance industry and left tens of millions uninsured. Medicare for All, which polls consistently show majority support for, has never seriously advanced under Democratic leadership despite being on the platform. Biden campaigned on debt relief, yet partial relief was blocked by the Supreme Court, and large portions of young and progressive Democrats became disillusioned by Biden’s failure to move forward a federal minimum wage increase during ongoing financial and economic struggles, uncertainties around student debt, inadequate progress on the climate crisis, and his unflagging support for military operations in Gaza. Housing costs, wealth inequality, labor rights, and corporate power, the issues most directly affecting ordinary Americans, have not been the legislative priority of Democratic governance, despite being the rhetorical priority of every single campaign cycle.

For years, young Americans have supported progressive causes, like climate action, abortion rights, gun control, and student debt relief, but have seen little policy change. The consequence is a generation losing faith in mainstream politics, a generation I am admittedly a part of, and when that generation stayed home or voted third-party in 2024, the Democratic party responded by blaming the voters rather than examining its own failures. This is not the first time the Democratic party has blamed its base instead of its results. The Democratic establishment treats its progressive base as a reliable resource to be taken advantage of every two to four years and managed the rest of the time, rather than a constituency whose demands have merit.

Conveniently (intentionally), the party itself has repeatedly worked to suppress the candidates most likely to challenge the current arrangement. In 2016, leaked internal communications showed the DNC’s own chair working against Bernie Sanders’ campaign from within an organization that was supposed to be neutral, a scandal significant enough to force her resignation. In 2022, House leadership helped found a PAC to protect incumbents from progressive primary challengers, however, when progressive incumbents faced primary challenges from the party’s corporate wing, the same leadership did nothing to defend them. In 2026, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee intervened in a California primary to back a corporate-backed candidate against a progressive challenger, and around the same time, centrist Democratic operatives began openly discussing how to organize against a wave of democratic socialist primary wins. The party has been actively hindering the progressive policies that people actually voted for. Whichever candidates are most likely to challenge the donor-driven status quo are the ones the party works hardest against, regardless of how those candidates poll with actual voters.

The Democratic Party also has a tendency to prioritize symbolic representation over material improvement, such as celebrating the appointment of the first person of a particular background to a particular office while the conditions for people from that background deteriorate. Symbolism has value, but it is not a substitute for policy, and a party that cannot clearly articulate what it will materially do for working people, and then actually do it, is a party that will keep losing to one that at least tells a compelling story, however dishonest and harmful that story may be.

The Democratic Party is not, for the most part, authoring policies designed to actively harm the people it claims to represent, which is why it is the lesser of the two evils. But it’s also not, for the most part, actually implementing policies designed to help the people it claims to represent, or to improve the system as a whole. Democratic leadership has a strong unwillingness to disrupt the systems that keep it indebted to the same elite donor class as the Republican party. Healthcare has stayed profitable for insurers instead of becoming a right, student debt has stayed a crisis instead of becoming a fixed problem, and housing, labor rights, and corporate power, the problems most directly facing ordinary Americans, have stayed untouched for decades instead of becoming the active priorities of the party claiming to represent those same Americans and promising to solve those very problems. None of this has made anyone’s life actively worse the way Republican policy has, but it has made the lives of Americans passively worse by leaving the status quo in place for decades while calling that preservation a form of progress, ironically being a form of conservatism. For the people still waiting on the promises made to secure their vote, the Democratic party is still harmful, just not as much as the Republican party. The Democratic party has proven over these past few decades that it is not concerned with improving the lives of its own citizens and that it is completely ineffective in implementing anything it promises to.

Both Parties

Neither party is prioritizing the interests of ordinary Americans or what the citizens even voted for. Both are primarily organized around the retention of power, and the retention of power requires satisfying those with the resources to sustain it, including donors, industries, institutional allies, and the media ecosystems that depend on conflict for their revenue. The American political system is among the most elaborately constructed systems for ensuring that those making consequential decisions, the wealthy and powerful, remain as insulated as possible from those consequences. The citizen is consulted every two to four years and then returned to their appropriate position as a subordinate, meaning by design and by definition, the United States of America is fundamentally not a democracy OR a republic, it is just straight up an oligarchy.

Both parties also depend, structurally, on the existence of the other as a threat. The Republican Party fundraises on the idea of radical leftism. The Democratic Party fundraises on the idea of fascism. Neither has a particular interest in solving the problems that generate their respective bases because a political landscape of perpetual emergency is enormously profitable. The crises and urgency are real, but the crisis management has been captured by the same interests that create and sustain the conditions being managed.

This creates a system in which the ordinary American, regardless of political orientation, is largely a spectator to decisions made about their lives by people who do not experience the consequences of those decisions (that actively make life in America worse) and are not ultimately accountable for them. It is fundamentally and intentionally unfair, unrepresentative, deceitful, and harmful.

Wealth Inequality

Almost every structural problem described in this entry comes back to money. Wealth inequality in this country is responsible for funding the campaigns, staffing the lobbying, and shaping the policy, which the policy it implements then further worsens wealth inequality by design because the economic reality most Americans live in is one the system has almost no incentive to fix because it’s exploiting it.

According to the Federal Reserve’s Distributional Financial Accounts, the wealthiest 1% of American households hold roughly 32% of all household wealth as of early 2026, up from about 23% in 1989, while the top 10% hold roughly 68% collectively. The bottom half of the country, meaning half of all American households, has about 2.5% of the wealth in the entire country. Income inequality has effectively the same problem. Emmanuel Saez’s long-running analysis of tax data shows the top income share is climbing back to levels not seen since before the Great Depression and French Revolution, and is very similar to the Gilded Age, which uh, is not a good sign. This gap has been widening for decades because the people who represent both parties have supported it.

By Federal Reserve figures, the top 1% own roughly half of all corporate equities and mutual fund shares held by American households, while the bottom 50% own about 1%. What the bottom half does own is mostly a home, if at all, plus cars and household goods, which are basic living essentials, not assets that grow and generate more wealth on their own. So the gap is not just a gap in how much people have, but whether or not they have assets that then compound over time to reward them, and the people without them are locked out of producing that wealth in the first place. This is why the wealth gap keeps widening even if the economy is doing well on paper.

Forbes’ 2026 list counts 989 American billionaires with a combined net worth of roughly $8.4 trillion. As previously stated, the bottom half of American households holds about 2.5% of the country’s household wealth, and that comes out to roughly $4 trillion. In other words, fewer than a thousand people hold about twice as much as half the country combined. That wealth has also grown faster than anything else in the economy. Past a certain point, money can’t really be spent, only used on campaigns, media ownership, lobbying, buying up competition, and the ability to make any politician’s career easier or harder. It also compounds on its own, since even a modest return on a billion dollars exceeds what a typical household will earn in an entire lifetime, by a longshot. The billionaire class is what the structural problems described earlier produce when they last long enough, and it is the group with the greatest incentive and the greatest means to keep wealth inequality worsening. I was initially not going to discuss wealth inequality in this entry because I didn’t think it was fully relevant to misrepresentation, but this is why it is relevant, because billionaires just buy policies that help them and hurt everyone else, and nothing stops them. Besides, in a land of extraordinary abundance, why should a tiny fraction of the population be so incomprehensibly fortunate, while the majority of the population struggles to get by?

To be fair, wealth is not the same as income, and it is not something most people use for daily expenses, so a household can be poor in terms of wealth yet still get by month to month. The top 1% also does not hold nearly everything, and much of the top 10%’s wealth is retirement savings and home equity rather than fortunes. But those caveats change nothing about the actual problem. Hell, they’re not even excuses or justifications. The share held by half of the entire country is close to nothing, meanwhile the share held by the top keeps increasing, and the assets creating that gap are the ones most people never get valuable access to. This means the financial conditions of the top 1% keep improving while the conditions for the majority of the country are actively getting worse as the elite funnel more and more money towards themselves and away from the rest of the population, money that then does not stimulate the economy or create new jobs because it’s just being hoarded. Regardless of whether or not billionaires deserve their wealth (they don’t), the way they use it, or lack thereof, hurts the economy at large and consistently undermines democratic procedures.

Somehow, despite how insanely problematic this is, Americans do not seem to understand just how extreme it really is, and when they are informed, they tend to overwhelmingly reject the existing wealth distribution. In a 2011 study by Michael Norton and Dan Ariely, respondents across political affiliations, income levels, and genders consistently and dramatically underestimated how concentrated and unequal wealth actually was, and when asked to describe the distribution they would consider ideal, they chose one far more equal than even their own underestimate. And that was 15 years ago, imagine how much worse the problem is today. This suggests that the existing distribution of wealth in the country, produced by the existing political system and the billionaires who exploit it, is not one that the public chose, wants, or, for the most part, even realizes exists, since a system that was actually responsive to the wishes of its citizens would have been pulled toward that preference decades ago. Instead, we have gotten further and further away from that almost universally desired preference for decades, and it now has essentially no path to becoming policy, because the people whose money literally funds the entire political system are the ones with the most to lose from fixing wealth inequality, so why would they? The concentration of wealth is the reason the political system stays unrepresentative and the political system is the reason the concentration of wealth stays ridiculously unequal. Neither can be fixed while the other exists, which is also why it is the one problem almost every American is affected by regardless of who they vote for or even what policies they support at large.

Propaganda

The American media has completely fractured basic factual content. There are millions of Americans who are living in a constructed reality that bears little relationship to what actually happens in real life.

The entire architecture of partisan media, online ecosystems of increasingly extreme content, and algorithmically driven social media feeds functions to keep people without accurate information and hostile to correction, and both parties have been weaponizing this as much as possible. Studies on disinformation’s role in the 2024 election found that the primary success of disinformation campaigns was not necessarily tipping specific electoral outcomes, but polarizing American society and producing public distrust in media and democratic institutions. An electorate that does not trust its institutions, its press, its elections, or even its neighbors is an electorate that is far easier to manipulate and far harder to organize around anything requiring collective belief in shared facts. The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Global Risks Report identified misinformation as the most critical challenge to political cohesion and societal trust globally. What makes the American version so dangerous and problematic is that it has been industrialized instead of treated like a problem, which continues to deepen polarization and destroy the shared factual foundation on which democracy depends.

Propaganda connects directly to the structural problems described earlier. A gerrymandered system produces representatives who are accountable only to their base, not to a general electorate. A fractured media environment ensures that base can be kept radicalized and misinformed indefinitely. This makes reform structurally difficult in a way that goes beyond normal political disagreement because you cannot vote your way out of a problem when a significant portion of the electorate cannot agree on what the problem even is, what would actually solve it, and who are actively resistant to productive discussions about those topics because they’ve been radicalized.

Every dollar of political spending, every gerrymandered map, and every algorithmically amplified outrage cycle serves the same underlying function by keeping attention pointed sideways, at whoever happens to disagree with you, rather than upward, at the donor class and institutional interests actually shaping and implementing policy. This isn’t a conspiracy, it’s an emergent property of a system where division is profitable and unity is a threat. Media companies profit from conflict, political parties fundraise off mutual fear, and politicians retain power by ensuring their base sees the other side as the enemy rather than the system itself. The incentives reward division, consistently, at every level, and the people benefiting from those incentives have no reason to interrupt or change something that works this well for them, which is why this problem is so difficult to solve, because the people in power, the same people who would have to change the existing system, benefit from the existing system.

The genius of this arrangement, if it can be called that, is that it doesn’t require the American people to be wrong about their grievances. Working people across the political spectrum are correct that they’re being squeezed, that institutions have failed them, and that the system feels rigged. But redirect that legitimate anger at immigrants, or the other party’s voters, or “the deep state,” anywhere except the actual mechanisms of concentrated power, and you’ve “solved” a problem without having to address a single underlying cause. An electorate convinced that its problems are caused by each other is an electorate that will never organize against the people actually making consequential decisions and who are ultimately not held accountable for those consequences.

A system where the presidency is decided by a handful of counties in a handful of states while tens of millions of votes are functionally irrelevant by design, where the party that wins fewer votes can still win more seats because the maps were drawn to guarantee it, where a senator representing a few hundred thousand people wields the same power as one representing tens of millions, where getting elected at all requires courting the tiny fraction of the country wealthy enough to fund a campaign, where wealth inequality is so unbelievably skewed that half of the population is actively losing money through no fault of their own, where the officials writing the laws can legally trade on the information those laws are built from, where the courts meant to check that power are stocked for decades by whoever happens to be holding office, where both parties depend on the other’s existence to keep their own donors and voters afraid and giving, and where the entire system is kept running by a media ecosystem engineered to make sure the people getting squeezed by all of this spend their anger on each other instead of on the people actually implementing policy is not a democracy with some flaws in it, it is a system pretending to be democratic while making sure nothing that actually represents the interests of the citizens is ever even allowed to be voted on, let alone passed, let alone implemented, let alone enforced.

What can we do about all of this?

There is no satisfying response to all of this. As much as I would love to say to form a third party to fight against the oligarchy, that is just not going to work for the same reasons it never has. Even if it did, the system is not going to be repaired by any single election, movement, or moment of collective awareness. The structural problems are deep enough that meaningful reform would require the cooperation of the very institutions and interests that benefit from the current arrangement, and they will do everything in their power to make sure it stays that way. Considering they are effectively the ones in power, that matters a lot. That being said, disengagement is not a solution either. It is, in fact, exactly what the system benefits from most. An electorate that has given up is an electorate that offers no resistance. Cynicism, even when it is earned, is a political outcome that the existing system benefits from.

What the individual can do is refuse to be fooled. Refuse the tribalism that turns political policy into an identity, refuse the false comfort of believing that voting for the lesser evil is the full extent of civic participation, refuse the idea that politics largely doesn’t affect the average citizen when the evidence does not support it, refuse the manufactured urgency that keeps you angry and spending your attention on the content that generates the most revenue for the people who produce it, and be skeptical about all of the media you consume. Question policy constantly, pay attention to how bills actually get funded, which lobbyists wrote which legislation, how redistricting decisions get made, and whose interests are being served. Engage locally, where the ratio of individual effort to actual outcome is significantly more favorable than it is at the national level. Support structural reform, like ranked choice voting, campaign finance limits, independent redistricting commissions, and strengthened ethics requirements. Don’t do any of this because any single reform will fix everything, but because they address root causes rather than symptoms, and it’s still a step in the right direction, however long it will take to get there.

And be honest by acknowledging that the system is broken and corrupted in ways that go beyond whoever happens to be in office, while still recognizing that who is in office matters enormously for the people most directly harmed by bad governance. Do your best to have productive discussions with those around you, not to tell them they’re wrong, but simply to explore the ideas and discuss the problems at their root. Remain humble, don’t pretend you know everything and the perfect solution to all of it, but keep trying to understand the problems and support and design solutions to them. Stay informed, stay humble, and stay participating. It’s not going to be easy, but it’s all we can do in a system designed against us.

The Codex is built on the premise that awareness, however uncomfortable, is preferable to ignorance, because at least it provides agency. The American political system is one of the most consequential things to see clearly and simultaneously one of the most aggressively obscured. That alone makes it worth looking at directly, even when the view is not particularly encouraging. But there are still things we can do about it.

Sources

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