[einhverfr]

That's why voting is the final act of a series of political actions, and merely should be cast as an up/down "keep this guy" vote without looking too close at the alternatives.

We have to take over the conversation and stop listening to the challenger. The challenger doesn't exist. It is up/down on the incumbent.

[VLM]

I fail to see the point of that. By definition, both the incumbent and the challenger were hired by the same political action committee to achieve the same outcome by using different PR techniques.

Your suggestion is that the general public should slightly modify how they select which lie is told to them. The result will be they'll be lied to slightly differently, and no change in actual outcome.

With enough money, and it'll take a lot of money, the public could purchase their own candidates... That would be interesting, although unlikely. And there's an awful lot of intentional divide and conquer PR work already in place to prevent it.

Once wealth inequality and income inequality exceed a certain level the system spirals out of control until it crashes and reboots. In that scenario the most sensible way to limit total overall human suffering is to floor the accelerator and encourage the process, rather than hold it back, so it crashes quicker and we get back to normalcy sooner. Given that background, a lot of current events suddenly make more sense. Look at federal reserve policy, or pretty much anything in contemporary politics.