Democracy of the vote without democracy of information is not democracy.
It doesn't matter if people are able to vote as long as the media-owning class are able to manipulate HOW they vote. "One person, one vote" is meaningless if influence and control of information is highly concentrated in an elite few.
Mass media propaganda, internet censorship, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, government secrecy and the war on journalism are all anti-democratic in nature, because they restrict the information the citizenry are allowed to access to inform their vote.
And none of those instruments of narrative control have any influence from, or accountability to, the rank-and-file public. This means that while everyone gets a vote, HOW those votes are applied is subjected to aggressive and ubiquitous manipulation by the ruling class.
The US empire's unprecedented investment in soft power control systems has given rise to the most sophisticated propaganda system that has ever existed. Human thought is being manipulated at mass scale like never before. If you control how people think, you control how they vote.
Most of the propaganda people consume every day is not to manufacture consent for any one specific agenda, but to manufacture consent for the overall political status quo which keeps our wildly dysfunctional systems in place. That's what maintains the false two-party puppet show.
It wouldn't be possible to keep two evenly divided political factions impotently playing tug-o-war without ever actually changing anything without copious amounts of propaganda. The entire status quo is built upon the ruling class's ability to manipulate minds at mass scale.
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