[shadowmanifold]

You could even say it started with things like Thomas Paine's pamphlet propaganda.

It seems the problem is we have a system that was born from the printing press and this system simply doesn't work in the age of the internet.

All that really holds it together are these religious sentiments about the inherent good of democracy. Sentiments that have almost nothing to do with lived experience at this point.

It seems to me because of the scaling properties, the internet finds an issue free equilibrium of "vote for me because the other person sucks."

Then it is just a race to get the most views on how much the opponent sucks.

[Discordian93]

"vote for me because the other person sucks." seems to be indeed the status quo that politicians in all democracies feel.mlst comfortable with. I think we need to add an "execute everyone on the ballot" option so that politicians have to do positive campaign because if their only contribution is making people disgusted with politics altogether, they'd be risking their lives.

[NekkoDroid]

A major problem of the US 2 party system is that there really is someone specifically you can point at to villainize. With multiple parties its much harder to say "everyone except us is a villain" (unless you kinda wanna be seen as crazy), in the worst case it's calling out the extremist parties, which still leaves room for many other parties.