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Comment by peroporque | Hacker News Reader

I will never understand how people in the US are okay with this. Don't people care about justice at all over there?

You see giant protests occupying cities for weeks and your first thought is that americans are totally OK with the state of things? All those folks on the street in Hong kong - they must just be out there celebrating their loss of liberties! It's a big party!

There may be giant protests, but Americans continue to elect leaders that refuse to serve their interests.

Continued gerrymandering keeps the incumbents in power. Ongoing voter suppression targeted at minorities silences their political voices and swings elections, denying democracy its due. Since 1990, the Republican party has won the popular vote for president once, but won the presidency 3 times. 2018 was a wave year where the left picked up a huge number of seats in the house. And the federal government isn't everything. State and local governments hold enormous power, and where progress can be made, progressives are elected. Theres also huge amounts of money in politics thanks to a really destructive supreme court ruling. And do you really think the people in Minneapolis protesting are going to vote for trump and support officials that refuse to serve their interests? I understand you might not be familiar with why people are protesting and the ways the political system is broken. Hell, I don't know what's going on in the UK with brexit and their protests everything for example, and I dont know what the electoral dynamics and structural problems are. And that's fine, because I'm not going around oversimplifying issues I dont understand and saying "wow these dumb Brits are so self destructive why do they keep voting for dumb stuff." Same thing. I'd recommend actually understanding what's going on before making sweeping incorrect statements about how America works. Again - Americans electing leaders that refuse to serve "their" interests. Do you think this deeply politically divided country is some sort of monolith? Do you really think the people protesting are the ones that voted for Trump?

There are serious structural problems with American elections - it is not as simple as that.

Indeed.. When the public has only two candidates to realistically choose from, both of whom represent parties which run on massive legalized bribery ("donations") and coordinate to systematically keep incumbents out - it's not fair to blame the American public for "electing" leaders that maintain and strengthen the status quo. They don't really have much of a choice.

Those protests in the US have nothing to do with justice. They are about power.

Not really. When you ignore all the marketing material about "freedom" and such that accompanies a discussion about the US, you see that we are an extremely authoritarian country.

Of course you have. These guys come to mind articlesofunity.org for example.

We're not okay with this but we have no way to change the laws that are made by our Lords.

Well to be fair. If more population were concerned an actively participating in democracy, by at the least get out and go to vote, some thing would change, for sure.

USA has the lowest participation on any democracy I know.

Universal obligatory vote is something that does wonders and produce actual change.

I do vote but I also live in a gerrymandered district so my representative is pre-chosen for me. I also live in a non-battleground state where essentially my president is pre-chosen as well. My vote actually doesn't matter much at all.

In large portions of the country, there is nothing contested and nobody to vote against.

Structural problems can cause lack of participation.

I don't know if I would want voting to be obligatory, but it certainly should be universal.

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