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Elections are, in no small part, symbolic melees. We do things memetically and through balloting as a slightly-more-symbolic version of the "stand on opposing hill-tops outside of spear range and ineffectually chuck things at each other while yelling to establish bravery and dominance" paradigm that prevailed throughout most of human history, and a much-more-symbolic version of the "line up in two opposing phalanxes and grind against each other until someone breaks and runs away" that got more common in Europe during recorded history.
Either way they're still contests with dominance and submission on the line; we've just decided to accept proxy battles for the real thing.
Exactly.
The way I've heard it is that an election is a simulated civil war. Both teams show up, you count up the members, assume the larger side would win, then everybody accepts the results and goes home because actually fighting the war would involve lots of unnecessary death and destruction.
Problem #1: Because of median voter theorem, both sides converge to political positions that are almost equally appealing to the center, meaning each side is only winning elections by a few percentage points of the population. This makes it much more likely that the losing side could win the war than e.g. a 30%-70% split, and makes the incentive for the loser to flip the table much larger.
Problem #2: When democracy was first implemented, the franchise was limited to white landowning men. Each expansion of the franchise to people who make for worse soldiers and workers (women, blacks, etc.) has represented a decoupling between the number of voters on each side and that side's actual military and productive capacity, meaning it is no longer at all obvious that the smaller side would lose a civil war. As the sides specialize to appeal to different demographics, the incentive for the party of white men to realize that they are getting screwed for no good reason and start shooting is, again, greatly increased.
(The elites know this, which is why they spend so much time and effort preventing white men from developing class consciousness.)
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