this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2024
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What mechanism would we even use? There is no real "community self-government". Its all states dictating policy to municipalities which dictate policy to neighborhoods. A handful of individuals are expected to represent hundreds of thousands of people, even at the city council level (my Houston city council has 250,000 person districts plus a couple of "at-large" 2M person districts plus a mayor). There's no realistic method for 2M people to communicate with one another efficiently or collectively govern. But there's ample opportunity to demagogue the public and fleece the treasury.
So much of these elections are just optics - your partisan name tag, your race/gender/sexual orientation, your age, your career. These are the only reliable heuristics. Houston got a slew of black woman democrat judges in 2018 to replace a slew of white man republican judges, because "black woman" is code for liberal and "white man" is code for conservative. Some courts definitely improved (because the primary process in some of these districts selected for the most psycho christian nationalists on the conservative end) but others got a lot worse (because you tossed a bunch of milquetoast moderates with job experience for ambitious politicos who were just gaming the system and couldn't do the work).
How the fuck am I supposed to distinguish a legit civil rights lawyer running to replace a certified bigot versus a clueless young ivy league careerist [dem] running to replace a boring old ivy league careerist [gop] at the family court level? There's no real journalism on these races, and even if there was, I simply do not have time or expertise to weed through dozens of races to sort the wheat from the chaff.
So many of these are nakedly just scams. Like, not even politically affiliated scams. Just the exact same people who were blowing up your phone demanding Amazon gift cards to pay the IRS or cashiers checks to settle a fictitious lien on your car six months ago, pushing a new angle because they know it works.