Thread by @drvolts

🧵The main thing Americans do not understand/appreciate about presidential elections is that you are not voting for a person, you are voting for an *administration* -- cabinet members, appointees, military leaders, advisers & analysts, the whole civil service, etc. etc.

You're voting for an executive branch -- that's an *enormous* organization. The president himself makes only a tiny fraction of the decisions in the day-to-day management of that org. It's a whole apparatus, vastly larger than one individual.

Yet people instinctively think -- and the media reinforces this misperception at every term -- that the president, this one person, is "in charge" of the US & responsible for everything that happens, that their unique personal capabilities determine the country's fate.

The fact is, a Harris admin, or a Whitmer or Buttegieg or Polis admin, or a second Biden admin ... wouldn't be that different. The team, the personnel, the apparatus, the principles & goals would largely be the same. Not identical, of course, but clustered in the same ballpark.

And of course the differences between any two of those absolutely *pale* relative to the difference between any of them and a Trump admin. Trump is not just Trump: he's a cabinet, a military, an FBI, a Justice Dept., etc. He's a whole different government w/ different goals.

The differences between the *administrations* are vastly larger & more significant than the differences among the individuals running. It's the teams that matter, the whole package, the whole worldview.

The political media does nothing to educate voters about this -- on the contrary, at every opportunity they *reinforce* this confusion. They frame the election as a choice of who you want to hang out with, get a f'ing beer with, hear talk on your TV. Who has better vibes.

If you want a white Christian patriarchal autocracy, you should vote for Trump *even if you think he's a sundowning conman*. His personal qualities just don't matter that much relative to the enormous difference between his admin & any Dem admin.

This is, in fact, the calculation many Trump supporters, especially among elites, are making. I'm sure they'd prefer someone who isn't a disregulated, narcissistic rapist with zero knowledge of how govt works. But they'll happily take that if they get their tax cuts/gay bashing.

They realize that they're not voting for a buddy or a cheerleader, they're voting for an *administration*. They're voting for all the Heritage drones who are going to be put in charge of various subdepartments. They're voting for the whole apparatus, flawed figurehead aside.

In that (and perhaps that alone) they are sensible. Trump does suck but his personal suckiness just isn't that significant relative to the gargantuan changes he (& the RW team) would bring to US govt.

The same calculus ought to guide all voters. Yeah, I don't think it's great that Biden is declining or that he only has 4-6 hours a day of lucidity. All things being equal I wish he'd step aside, if only because the press is never ever going to let this go.

But the differences between Biden & Harris (or Generic Democrat) are absolutely dwarfed by the differences between either admin & a Trump admin. There is no rational thought process that goes "eh, Biden seems kinda frail, let's bring in christofascism."

A voter who views this as a close call, who is making a decision based on which personal characteristics they prefer, is, almost by definition, deeply misinformed about the stakes. A media with *any* sense of public service would seek to educate & inform that voter.

Instead we have this pathetic media, which is behaving in a way indistinguishable from an organized mass effort to *further endumben* voters, to amplify & reinforce every bit of voter ignorance, every midsguided voter bias.

I don't have any pithy way to wrap this up. I guess I'd just say, in an ideal world with fully informed voters, *zero* people would be making their decision in this election based on Biden's performance on some cognitive test. The fact that the entire election ...

... has come to be centered on this one thing is yet another sign of deep political & social dysfunction.

We're deciding between fascism & multiracial democracy. Fucking focus!