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  • Because the rich do a LOT to make it turn out that way.

    • News is largely controlled by capitalists.
    • Education has been gutted in a lot of places to make way for private schools.
    • Corporations can contribute tons of money to candidates. Setting aside the possibility that these are effectively bribes, even if that weren't the case, the candidates who get that money get to put out more ads and have more campaign infrastructure such as travel funds, staffers, etc.
    • Various kinds of voter suppression.
    • From the very founding of the country, the election system and government has been set up to hamper political participation. Obviously there was the fairly narrow franchise at the start. But even with that expanded, we have the electoral college, unequal apportionment, gerrymandering, first past the post, closed primaries, a court that's specifically there to slow down popular will, etc.
    • Just being a representative "democracy" puts a barrier between people and the policies they want. You rarely if ever get to vote on policies. You have to vote for a candidate. And the candidate is a whole bundle of policies, but also a record, a personality, etc. So there can be all sorts of political messaging about candidates which has nothing to do with what their policies are. Because of the duopoly party system that is all but ensured by the aforementioned voting system, you aren't even going to have a candidate you can vote for that will represent your interests. And after all that, even if you manage to vote for someone who says they'll do the things you want... then they get into office and you're back on the sidelines. They go and do whatever it was they actually wanted to do, and you have fairly limited recourse for holding them accountable. The most you can do is decide to vote against them next election, but now you're back to square one.
    • Broader, more participatory forms of political organizing have been violently repressed. Just look at the history of union busting or the police violence during the civil rights movement or even now, etc. In the workplace, where you're most likely to find others who share your class interests, your boss has a lot of control over you and it's in their interest to make sure employees don't talk politics and view each other as competition rather than potential allies.
    • Along similar lines, racism has been used as a tool to divide people who would otherwise share class interests so they wouldn't focus their attention on capitalists.

    Moral of the story: There is a long history of people struggling against capitalists for a better life and an equally long history of capitalists using every trick in the book to keep them from that goal. The political landscape you see today is the result of that history. Learn from it.

  • Because they've successfully been conned into thinking that what's in the best interests of the rich is in their own best interests too.

  • Because our brains are not wired for the modern complex world. Most decisions we make, we make thanks to heuristics that are heavily exploited by other people.

  • Two camps

    1. They don't know any better.

    Basically leftists-in-training that haven't read enough wikipedia articles on Reagan yet.

    1. People voting and believing political opinions with their gut instinct

    Don't bother, and if you see one with a nazi flag, punch them in the face.

  • Informed consent: People are not against exploitation. They just want to switch sides. Why would you vote for something that cripples you once you got rich?

    Uninformed consent: They honestly believe they are voting for their own interests.

    Indifferent consent: Usually single issue or ideology-driven voter.

    ¯⁠\⁠_⁠༼⁠ ⁠•́⁠ ͜⁠ʖ⁠ ⁠•̀⁠ ⁠༽⁠_⁠/⁠¯

  • In the US at least, the systematic demolishing of the education system has led to a vast reduction in overall education and critical thinking skills. This was done on purpose. That, combined with the unexpected boon of the Internet, has led to massive wealth shifting from the many to the few.

    You see the results of this change everywhere, especially on the Internet. Lack of basic spelling and grammar skills are just one symptom. All of that is to say that humans are primates and easily trained.

  • This is a complex question, but up front first and foremost in any Capitalist country, voting will always benefit the rich, even FDR style Social Democracy came about as concessions to prevent revolution in the context of a decimated working class and a rising USSR.

    People, generally, vote along their class interests, but these are handled in a different manner depending on which country you are in. Using the US as an example, the DNC caters to social progressivism, while the GOP caters to social conservativism. On foreign policy, the GOP and DNC are near identical, and when it comes to domestic economic policy, the DNC caters slightly more to urban voters while the GOP caters to rural voters.

    This is all, however, in the context of parties that function as businesses that sell policy to Capitalists. Both parties serve Capital, because Capital is what holds real power. It holds power over the media, the state, everything.

    The answer to how to fix this is getting workers to organize. When workers organize, they raise their social and class awareness and can accomplish far more than atomized individuals can.

  • Do we actually vote to benefit the rich?

    Many vote for leaders that openly cater to the rich, but I don’t know that we actually consciously vote to deliberately help the rich.

    Those elected people are the ones telling everyone that the rich are the job creators. They used to feed us the farce that trickle-down was viable, they don’t even bother with the lie anymore. The rich are just squatters on wealth. They get that wealth by consolidating businesses, hoarding assets like real estate, creating artificial scarcity, enshittifying everything, and squeezing labor for more productivity while expending massive effort to minimize overall compensation.

    And they own the media. All of it. Even the “liberal” media is mealy at best about taxing wealth or anything critical of the uber-wealthy, anything right of center is openly against tax, particularly of anyone with wealth, making the wealthy the “victims” of the left’s ideas while the wealthy are just parasites victimizing us all.

    All that aside, the real crux of the issue is identity politics. Being a sycophant of the rich is no longer any different than being a evangelical supply-side Jesus CINO, pro-gun, anti-government, anti-tax, anti-environmental regs, blah blah and all the rest of the mulish conservative BS.

    They don’t actually care if we cater to the rich. They care that their team says we should bend over and give the rich everything. Just like their team says school shootings are an acceptable price for having your own personal arsenal, or spreading a potentially deadly disease is better than being inconvenienced by closed restaurants.

    Obstinate tribalism has gleefully supplanted critical thought.

  • They get manipulated about and distracted by certain issues. The people who want power know this and exploit topics such as guns, abortion, fear of crime, racism/nationalism, sexism, economic issues and taxes. Plenty of people vote republican because they have been convinced that Democrats will take their guns, allow in too many immigrants (with the implicit idea that immigrants are bad somehow), be worse on the economy, raise taxes, let criminals get off easy, reduce the influence of Christianity, and so forth.

    There’s also the decades of propaganda about socialism and communism, and against social safety nets as well as government and anything run by the government vs a private entity. So basically, because they’re not very aware or well informed and all themselves to be convinced by propaganda.

  • One's "own best interest" can take a lot of different forms. Especially when the number and variety of plausible candidates are finite. Your preferred candidate for a given office will rarely line up perfectly with your own values. There's a compromise there.

    If I vote for my own finances, it may come at the cost of my morals. It I vote for my own moral interest, it may cost me more. If I vote for my own power, it may cost someone else their freedoms. How heavily do I weight my own interests against those of a wider society? Political identities and philosophies are complicated, and can't necessarily be reduced to a single binary choice that is "best" in every scenario.

  • Who is there to vote for otherwise? Two sides of the same coin. The rich try to keep politics about anything except wealth inequality. The rich keep the good candidates off your ballot long before it’s time to choose between tweedle Dee and tweedle dum.

  • Fundamental flaw of the democracy: It assumes that people know what's the best for them

  • The majority of people vote with their gut and won't look deep into what politician A is promising, so long as one of the promises is exactly the thing the person wants. For a considerable number of gamers, it's dealing with woke culture. Trump is a fervent enemy of "the woke", but he also promised hefty import tariffs on everything, so consoles can get really damn expensive. But hey, the woke sjw's are getting owned!!

    This piece on Aftermath touches an important point as well, that left leaning content often takes care to not spout random bullshit, while right leaning will just say whatever because haha engagement goes brrrrrrr.

    Going off a tangent, the Brazilian right complains that "the poor vote with their bellies", implying they'll vote for whoever promises "free money" or "free meals", usually in the form of govt programs. During election years, the right will try to claim they were the masterminds behind every sort of program meant to help poor people, such as Bolsa Familia, while loudly and constantly complaining about their existence and doing everything in their power to block money outside election years. It's common to find people who depend(ed) on Bolsa Familia to survive that complain about "freeloaders" that "want to be fed by the government". A good portion of right-wingers also believe that the govt pays a whole minimum wage to every person in jail, despite this bullshit being debunked several times already.

  • Because it's no longer about benefits or interests.

    It's about the "my side won, your side lost, get over it" mentality. It's about the tribalism and making sure you keep your ire focused on your fellow man rather than looking up and seeing the source of your problems

    And it's not just the US. It's fucking everywhere.

  • I can use my brother as an example for that:

    My younger brother is entirely sold on billionaire philanthropy. He watched interviews where people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos on talk shows and podcasts, places where people like this go to advertise themselves, and has been completely convinced that they're innovative, smart people.

    Smart people who, through just being so damn smart, managed to become billionaires.

  • Usually this happens when you dont have a democracy. Establish a system with rank choice voting and a few dozen candidates, and you'll see votes closer signed with voter interests

  • Kind of an indirect answer, but I've heard people state that they vote against their own personal beliefs because they think that there needs to be a balance between "good and bad". Obviously, this is complete bullshit. Even if there should be a "balance", we already have enough problems as is, we don't need the government making it worse.

  • TL;DR: I blame FPTP.

    Hm, I'd argue that this is a byproduct of the spoiler effect — I think it's due to strategic voting. I think that it's likely not due to people consciously voting against their own interests to benefit the rich (assuming that they indeed do this ­— ie that voting to benefit the rich is against their interests), but instead that the entities that support these sorts of beliefs, also tend to align with other beliefs that are more important to the voters, and "benefiting the rich", while possibly perceived negatively, is a sacrifice that the voters are willing to make.

128 comments