Christine DeLorey

There is a specific political experience that is uniquely American. It is the experience of watching your government do something unconscionable: surveilling its own citizens, poisoning a city's water supply, letting people die for lack of insulin, sending soldiers to die in a war built on fabricated intelligence. And responding by voting for one of the two parties that have jointly administered every one of those outcomes. Not because the voter is stupid. Because the voter has been given a cognitive framework in which those two parties represent the outer limits of the possible. In which anything outside those limits is naïve, is dangerous, is a vote for the other side, is a luxury of people who don't understand how the real world works. The real world being: this. What you have right now. The poisoned water. The unaffordable insulin. The surveillance. The war. This is presented as the floor below which things would get worse if you stopped choosing between the two parties that produced it. And the remarkable thing, the thing that should stop you in your tracks, is that it works. People who are suffering under the system defend the system because they have been convinced that the alternative to the system is something even worse. They cannot tell you what that worse thing looks like. But they are very afraid of it. The fear was put there deliberately. The fear is the mechanism.