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Notes -
The parties are secondary, the essence of the administrative/establishment machine is primary. Say that Jeb Bush was elected in 2016 and went on to go up against Biden in 2020. The reaction against him would not be very great as it was with Trump.
The differences between Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton exist but are fairly small. Both are from well-connected families, enmeshed in the US political establishment. They espouse basically similar policies on globalization, immigration and an interventionist foreign policy. Trump is the outlier here. He had markedly different desires with regard to globalization, immigration and foreign policy, amongst other things. There was considerable conflict between Trump and the Republican Party, they are not the same thing. The Republican Party wanted Jeb Bush or someone who wasn't Trump.
The parties aren't important as actors in and of themselves, they're more like factions of a large distributed entity. At no point did I say that US elections were consistently rigged against the Republican Party, they've rigged elections themselves. 2000 for example. I say that the 2020 election specifically was rigged against the populist right in the form of Trump. There was a much weaker attempt in 2016, they were much less coordinated and effective in inventing and amplifying nonsense like Russiagate and so on.
Both parties, most of the time, represent the establishment and field tolerable candidates for that establishment. There's no triangulation where it's important, the establishment has their own interests as opposed to the general public. For example: wrecking MENA with pointless wars, wrecking education with stupid policies, wrecking the health system by bad regulations, wrecking the food supply with subsidized corn syrup, wrecking inner cities with pro-crime policies. I suppose you can go all chicken and egg as to who leads who on making it fashionable to blow up MENA countries or introducing stupid fads in education. I believe that the elites lead - they aren't paying the price for the policies they introduce and they have the most media power to propagandize their goals. From time to time they change course, bolstering policing or withdrawing from failed wars. But that's usually only when the failures become spectacularly obvious.
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