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This gets into what I'd consider to be a more fundamental question underlying this, which is something like, if winning requires that you throw away any meaningful confidence you have that the world isn't, by your own standards, made a worse place because you won, then is that tradeoff worth it? I could see the argument for either, but push come to shove, I'd say it isn't. I believe there's actually something better about supporting something with some level of confidence about the goodness of that thing compared to supporting something just because it's my team. I'm sympathetic to the former choice, since winning feels good, and it often translates to direct, tangible positive consequences to someone's well-being, and that can be worth making the rest of the world a worse place for everyone else. But I'm completely unsympathetic to anyone making the former choice while claiming that it's a necessary evil to give us the better future that we deserve; that evil act corrupts our very ability to judge that us winning would make the future better than the counterfactual. If more people just baldly stated, "I don't care if politicians on my side actually make society/our lives/the world/etc. better; what matters is that it's my side, and I want my side to win," that would be worthy of respecting.
Plenty of people will say the ends justify the means. Or to adopt the position of some leftists a number of years ago who used to say, "there are no bad tactics, only bad targets." After all, why even waste your time being in the game if honest actors have no hope of winning it? Darwinism applies just as much to the political sphere, and it's survival of the fittest, win at all costs, because that's our system. We don't have proportional representation here, only the winner walks away with the keys to the kingdom.
For better or worse, no matter who gets into power, getting 'anything' done in politics is actually very difficult. It's a worthwhile debate to ask if it even really matters who becomes President. I'm undecided on the issue, but I agree with Andrew Breitbart entirely when he said politics is downstream from culture. You start locally and expand your sphere of influence.
But is it downstream from the culture of the people or the culture of the elites? These are two very different things.
Arguably, democracy is merely a way for people to have some influence on which elites are in power.
Was for a few brief instances in history before the elites learned to either control elections or, later on, to transfer power from elected offices to non-elected ones that were more controllable.
I mean to say that democracy does not usually change which elites are in power, because power has been migrated to where democracy cannot easily meddle with it.
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