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by throwaway6734 1480 days ago
In the US it's the voters not the leaders.
3 comments

What are you talking about?

An entire party is basically accelerationist, and the other one largely just waffles about.

Imagine you are made one of the politicians in the waffling party. Say you find the politician whose stated preferences most closely match your own. They step down. You take their place. What will you do now to ensure the wafflers stop waffling?

The problem isn't that they choose to waffle, but that their power is on a knife edge when they have any power at all and they disagree about what to do.

I'd claim one party is accelerating the fire, while the other is secretly stacking firewood next to the fire while also complaining that the other is using it.

That said, human ingenuity and economic forces are starting to stem the global warming tide, despite what governments are doing.

Voters want cheap carbon and will vote against anyone that makes prices go up.

Look at the current political situation in the US, it's dominated by the cost of gas and groceries. Nothing else really matters.

Really it's both. The leaders find stories the voters respond to, which gives them power. The leaders find and exploit a flaw in the voters which the voters are happy to expose.

The leaders should speak truth and act in the common interest. The voters should love the truth rather than lies, and should be mature enough to own their mistake rather than seek fairy tales in which their selfishness is good, even heroic.

Also, the voters in the US aren't uniquely bad. It's just that there's a deep cultural fissure in the US which is ripe for exploitation. It's easy to make the voters prefer punishing their neighbors over any other goal.

Two-party system makes it really tough to vote for the party that can do what you think is right, no? Either party is the enemy and basically the justification for the existence of the other, and as long as they throw back and forth petty issues those who want power and money get to keep it.