The fix was in right after the last election. If anyone thinks that their vote matters, they are delusional. The while Trump/Biden thing is used to divide. The election is already decided.
From Alvin Toffler's "The Third Wave" published IIR in 1980:
The Reassurance Ritual
Born of the liberating dreams of Second Wave (Industrial age) revolutionaries, representative government was a stunning advance over earlier power systems, a technological triumph more striking in its own way than the steam engine or the airplane.
Representative government made possible orderly succession without hereditary dynasty. It opened feedback channels between top and bottom in society. It provided an arena in which the differences among various groups could be reconciled peacefully.
Tied to majority rule and the idea of one-man/one-vote, it helped the poor and weak to squeeze benefits from the technicians of power (the guys who run things in business, government and even in unions) who ran the integrational engines (the processes that keep everything working for the guys who run things) of society. For these reasons, the spread of representative government was, on the whole, a humanizing breakthrough in history.
Yet from the very beginning it fell far short of its promise. By no stretch of the imagination was it ever controlled by the people, however defined. Nowhere did it actually change the underlying structure of power in industrial nations--the structure of sub-elites, elites and super-elites, the formal machinery of representation became one o the key means of integration by which they maintained themselves in power.
Thus elections, quite apart from who won them, performed a powerful cultural function for the elites. To the degree that everyone had a right to vote, elections fostered the illusion of equality. Voting provided a mass ritual of reassurance, conveying to the people the idea that choices were being made systematically, with machine-like regularity, and hence, by implication, rationally. Elections symbolically assured citizens that hey were t in command --that they could, in theory at least, dis-elect as well as elect leaders. In both capitalist and socialist countries, these ritual reassurances often provided more important than the actual outcomes of many elections.
Integrational elites programmed and political machinery differently in each place, controlling the number of parties or manipulating voting eligibility. Yet the electoral ritual--some might say farce--was employed everywhere. The fact that Soviet and Eastern European elections routinely produced magical majorities of 99 and 100 percent suggested that the need for reassurance remained at least as strong in the centrally planned societies as in the "free world". Elections took the steam out of protests from below.
Furthermore, despite the efforts of democratic reformers and radicals, the integrational elites retained virtually permanent control of the systems of representative government. Many theories have been advanced to explain why. Most however, overlook the mechanical nature of the system.
If we look at Second Wave political systems, with the eyes of an engineer rather than a political scientists', we suddenly are struck by a key fact that generally goes unobserved.
Industrial engineers routinely distinguish between two fundamentally different classes of machine: those that function intermittently, otherwise known as "batch-processing" machines, and those that function uninterruptedly, called "continuous-flow" machines. An example of the first is the commonplace punch press. The worker brings a batch of metal plates and feeds them into the machine, one or a few at a time, to stamp them into desired shapes. When the batch is finished the machine stops until a new batch is brought. An example of the second is the oil refinery, which, once started up, never stops running. Twenty-four hours a day oil flows through its pipes and tubes and chambers.
If we look at the global law factory, with its intermittent voting, we find ourselves face to face with a classical batch processor. The public is allowed to choose between candidates at stipulated times, after which the formal "democracy machine" is switched off again.
Contrast this with the continuous flow of influence from various organized interests, pressure groups, and power peddlers. Swarms of lobbyists from corporations and from government agencies, departments, and ministries testify before committees, serve on blue-ribbon panels, attend the same receptions and banquets, toast each other with cocktails in Washington or vodka in Moscow, carry information and influence back and forth, and thus affect the decision-making process on a round-the-clock basis.
The elites, in short, created a powerful continuous-flow machine to operate alongside and often at cross purposes with) the democratic batch processor. Only when we see these two machines side by side can we begin to understand how state power was really exercised in the global law factory.
So long as they played the representational game, people had at best only intermittent opportunities, through voting, to feed back their approval or disapproval of the government and its action. The technicians of power, by contrast, influenced those actions continuously.
