THE REVOLUTIONARY SCIENCE

The internet is wild

if yall haven’t been living under a rock for the last year and a half, you may have heard that trump won the election. and you may have also heard that trump was helped out by russia in a ton of ways. one of those ways was by the russian troll farm, the internet research agency (IRA). there were 84 accounts on tumblr spreading anti-hillary propaganda and general discontent, mainly targeting POC and “socially aware” youth. some of those accounts were HUGELY influential, “4mysquad” being one of the top ones with tons of followers and popular posts.

a lot of them started with relatively innocent, pro-POC posts to gain a following, before moving on to anti-police, anti-hillary, and general anti-establishment to create distrust in the only major-party candidate against trump. like I said, many of the accounts were hugely influential so their posts spread FAR. all that visibility led to increased voter apathy, meaning less voter turnout and fewer people voting against trump. and tumblr was silent on this after the official indictment of the IRA, until literally just yesterday. 

Matt Yglesias’s tweets have been on point lately.

There really is an absurd number of people on the left in America who actually believe that the primary election was rigged (it’s not), that superdelegates are reason Clinton won and are unfair (they’re not), and that Sanders was at a deficit because the Democratic establishment backed Clinton (sure, I’ll give you that, but they’re SUPPOSED to).

It’s unfair because political parties create a system where only those with connections and money are able to crack the barrier to being electable. There’s also the loyalty that one has to have to the party. Sanders was never a loyal Democrat, he didn’t have Democratic connections, so he was at a clear disadvantage to Clinton. It may seem unfair, but of course political parties are going to favor those that will further the party’s agenda. This makes it tough to break from a status quo, which can be bad when the status quo is so damaging to certain communities.

But! Political parties exist to keep out extremists. Sanders may not have been horribly damaging to the country if he was elected, but imagine if somebody like Jeremy Corbyn from the UK’s Labour Party tried to enter a US Democratic primary that didn’t have defense mechanisms to keep him out. Look at what happened on the Republican side, how Trump was able to infiltrate it, play to a base’s anger, and essentially take over the whole thing. Loyalty also creates accountability for politicians. If they’re loyal to each other and to the party as a whole, they’re less likely to start going their own way, advocating extreme views that are likely to cause massive disruption or catastrophic damage. To a degree, party control over who is able to participate keeps politics from going crazy. It’s part of how political parties operate.

But really, how does someone like Bernie, with more critical views in a party atmosphere, endanger us? History is full of radical change that occurs through politics. Bernie just tapped into other's political interests in substantial ways. If his popularity is a real expression of people's interests, then your problem already exists without him: people aren't satisfied.

People were so disguted to vote for a candidate, they wore gloves to put the ballot paper in the ballot box without touching it.