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Good idea! Suppose there's a foreign country with a two party system where each party wins roughly half the time and economic performance and thermostatic effects strongly predict electoral outcomes. Which conclusion does Occam's razor support, that this is a fair competitive system or that it's massively tilted in favor of one party? On which position does the burden of proof lie, that the elections are fair and both parties are pretty good at triangulating, or that they're rigged completely but only so that the party rigging them wins by a small margin half the time?
I'm not sure that the institutional delegitimisation of the Republican Party is old enough to confidently state "each party wins roughly half the time".
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This rebuttal hardly makes sense. Lets say one party can steal 1/10 votes in a metro area. that just gets baked into triangulation. Lets say the media collaborates with portions of the government and a party to shift views in a direction. That gets baked into "triangulation", but even then there can be inflection points, such as the 2020 election which indicate a discontinuity in election results, which is fishy.
Governments are not like people, there is little advantage in giving them the privilege of guilty beyond reasonable doubt. Don't you find is suspicious that election fraud is the only area of the world where statistical and circumstantial evidence are routinely called "no evidence?"
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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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What the "rigged" narratives claim about the system doesn't necessarily result in one party wiping the floor with the other every time even if it's strongly true. After having been the case for a long time, the machines of both parties adjust to the system and obey the rigger's desires to a much greater extent than they ever do the voters they are supposed to represent. As such, they may continue to trade wins back and forth a normal amount of times, yet somehow never actually enact policies that are strongly desired by their bases.
Say, that sounds an awful lot like what both political parties are actually doing. Even aside from how the Trump phenomenon has affected the Republican side the last few cycles, don't forget how mad much of the Democrat base seems to get that they keep getting standard machine politician candidates like Hillary and Biden for their presidential candidates rather than anyone more exciting.
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