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americans are selfish
(quokk.au)
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this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2026
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Americans are reaching very high levels of political disengagement. Most Americans know it doesn't matter who they vote for. They haven't seen real reforms out of either party, except to make the rich a lot richer. Combine that with the hassle it is to vote in many places and people have just stopped caring unless their personal life gets too bad.
It's exhausting voting for promises that never materialize or seem to always monkey paw into a way for corporations to suck up all the benefits. People are tired.
And yeah, it's on purpose. The more disengaged people get, the more the elite can legally rob them.
This is such a cop out. American people have been actively supporting the growth of the rich because they have always believed that as individuals they are just one step away from being there themselves and don't want anything interfering. People have tried over the last 4-5 decades to change things but they get voted down continuously.
That way of putting it has always belied the sheer amount of propaganda the rich have poured into making people believe they can be the chosen one to get rich. From scam artists selling get rich quick schemes to syrupy news stories about the kid who dropped out and got rich. Financial news regularly runs stories meant to make people think they're not budgeting hard enough if they can't make ends meet. (spoiler alert there's always a tertiary source of income involved, but it's buried deep in the article.)
And when things are clearly enunciated, like plans to tax people over 400k, there's suddenly tons of stories about how they're just normal people who can barely make ends meet. They're just like Mr. Fast food worker, they might even have to sell their house if you taxed their stocks! (Just never ask which vacation house that is or how many rooms it has)
Rather than "copping out" by pointing all this out, I want a counter narrative. Until we get a strong counter narrative people will continue to succumb to this propaganda.
I almost forgot, the numerous commercials where corporations swear they're a good corporate citizen and you can trust them to have your best interests in mind. While they put all their wrong doing under legal secrecy so people can't even see the problem we need to fix. For example did you know Walmart and Pepsi got caught in a massive price fixing scheme? One that likely extends across most Walmart grocery products and could be partially responsible for our high grocery prices? (Pepsi collaborated to make sure no other store could afford to sell Pepsi products for less than Wal-Mart by charging those stores more if they dropped their prices. This effectively let Wal-Mart set the price floor wherever they wanted.)
You don't get this stuff on CNN. And it's the stuff that actually impacts our daily lives.
I get the disengagement since I see it constantly online, but taking part in politics shouldn't be only about who you vote for. It's also about trying to affect what candidates you get, the boring groundwork that requires a lot of effort
I agree. And the Americans who need help the most do not have the time or energy to put into it. So it's left to the people who do and very few of them actually care about the working poor.