Excerpt from this Substack post: https://nickrafter.substack.com/p/the-rent-may-always-be-too-damn-high
this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2026
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A Boring Dystopia
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Left and right shouldn't matter. Policy is what matters. Simple as
Well there are left wing and right wing policies. The difference is there are no good right wing policies.
There are great right wing policies for the right wing.
So only for people with shit for brains.
I don't think so. I think they are opportunists. It's not that they're dumb, it's that they're selfish.
If they were only selfish, but smart, they wouldn't be voting for politicians whose demonstrated aim is to reduce their constituents' wealth and funnel it into a class of people which their constituents have zero chance of ever joining.
No, they're dumb. They're certainly also selfish, but that's because they're dumb and can't comprehend the value of helping someone else, because the feedback loop on that mechanism has more than one step before they receive value back, and because the value received is most often in intangibles.
Let's agree that they are a) Selfish, b) Dumb.
A candidate might have hundreds of policies. Often they claim to support certain policies because they know those policies are popular, but don't have any real belief or intention to follow up on those policies.
Political parties are effectively a "brand" so that people who don't have the time or energy to read hundreds of policies and to ensure that the candidate claiming them is trustworthy and believes what they're claiming. Parties often kick out members who no longer align with their views. A voter can vote for a certain party's representative and know that what they're getting aligns with that party's general stance.
Left and right is a useful way to represent where various parties fall on a specific spectrum of beliefs. In reality there are multiple axes that can represent economic freedom, alignment with Christian religious beliefs, the strength of a social safety net, isolationist vs. interventionist foreign policy, etc.
But, "left" and "right" came from where groups of politicians stood in the early days of the French republic. They tended to group up with other like-minded people so even if they disagreed completely on certain things, they had generally the same world view. So, "left" and "right" is a good way to simplify things to know if in general a politician shares a certain set of beliefs.
Right and far right. Fixed that for you.
Also everyone knows both candidates are full of shit and won't do anything that they promised.
left and right dictate the direction of policy. given that though the republicans in the us abandoned all conservative philosophy and embraced just facism.
It must be very limiting to only have two directions
most people don't want to move in the other directions. they are either for facism or democracy and don't move much. More flip.
In a local election that's true. When it comes to seats in a larger body, you've gotta take the bad with the good to get anything done. If we added a dozen anti-abortion democrats in the Senate, Trump would be impeached. And abortion would be stuck. A shitty trade off, but one that would move closer to removing abortion bans in the longer term.
(ignoring the house just for the example)
That's a great way to get stabbed in the back.
Look at what happened with Joe Lieberman. Dems backed him up even after he lost his primary in a bright blue state, and he repeatedly threw them under the bus.
Same with Jim Justice in W. Virginia.
That just means you made it to the front in the first place.
Indeed, but let me dream