This all may be true, but I think the more fundamental problem is the ignorance of the average American about how their government works. A former Supreme Court justice lays it out in this prescient video from 2012: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWcVtWennr0. People are frustrated with their government but don't understand how to fix it.
The argument he's putting forth is so incredibly vapid and simple-minded that it's a stunning indictment of the lack of vision of a supreme court judge into the American zeitgeist.
Americans understand the basic concept of the vote. A freaking six year old understands it. There are leaders, and they sycophantically grovel for the favor of the public, which the public gives freely in exchange for the politician promising to give them their hearts' desire. And then the public may or may not get what they want. If the politician cannot appropriately explain the reasons for this, they are dumped and the next sycophant is wrung through.
That's about all they know, and all they need to know, because the people should not have to lobby their government in a democracy, the democratic leaders should already know what the people want and achieve it on their behalf, and in general do good for the people. But that is not what happens in America.
Here, our political leaders don't serve the people. And the people know that. But the people can't do anything about it. And the reason they can't do anything about it is the people voted their way into this mess. Trying to vote their way out will just result in exactly the same thing.
What the former Justice is saying is, the biggest problem in politics and public life is people don't understand how the legislative and judicial and executive processes work. But people do not need to know how this works, they merely need to voice their opinions and vote. And half of the people do vote. The other half don't vote either because they can't, or because they know what the result of voting is.
The American democracy in the 20th and 21st century is an artisanal machine which produces a specific output. Votes and labor go in, and money comes out. But the machine is designed to mostly spit out money which can only be used by corporations and rich people; only a small percentage of that comes out in a form usable by the people. The people know their votes are mostly meaningless, but it is their only tangible method left to express their discontent. So they support the system that produces an awful result because it's the only way they can express that the machine produces an awful result.
I think the people see this contradiction, and I think this is why so many do not vote: it's like complaining that your shoe hurts and then putting it on again to see how it will fit.
His point is that if the voters don't have any knowledge about how government works, they can't evaluate (or check) politicians' explanations for the reasons that they did or did not get what they wanted. And the effect of this ignorance is that there's no reason for politicians to be accountable to voters or voters' interests.
With first-past-the-post and no critical thinking in the electorate, "it's the other guys' faults" is an adequate explanation. Unsurprisingly, 98% of Congressional incumbents continue to get re-elected while Congress as a whole has an approval rating in the low teens.
This doesn't sound like a very sound argument at all, though. The people know they are being lied to. What good is it going to do to 'check' the explanations they are given when they know they are false?
Instead of dealing with a liar after they fail to deliver, we have voted in someone we know is lying before they even take office. Trump is a habitual liar, and the only thing that all Trump supporters have in common is that they claim the opposition lies. We've passed the point where being informed will help. We are now in "Fuck it, pass the crytal meth" territory.
Just electing a new president isn't enough to effect change: we saw that with Obama. People need to understand the role of congress as well. This attitude of "we keep electing liars and they keep failing to deliver" shows a poor understanding of how our democracy actually works -- that's the whole point the former justice is trying to make in the video.
Can you help educate me, then? The people vote for representatives. And then....? Exactly what part of the process are people not doing, or not understanding? Is there some extra step involved?
People tell their elected representatives what they want all the time. And people get ignored all the time. This is because the democratic process in our country is not simply citizens and politicians, it is also special interest groups, corporations, and a super-rich class whose interests supercedes the people's. And within the process, there are people who are paid to influence politicians for all sorts of groups, from citizens to corporations to foreign countries. Politicians have to weigh all of this, which is very difficult.
But as far as the citizens, who are the subject of the justice's comments, are concerned, they only need to vote. Requiring all the citizens to be involved in political action committes just to, for example, retain their basic civil liberties or stay out of foreign wars for oil, is ridiculous. So, what is it i'm missing?
The people vote for representatives. And then....?
The next step is to watch what your representative is actually doing, let them know if you disagree with it, and vote them out if they consistently act against your interests. Most people don't call members of congress very often, and when they do, things do happen.
You can look at the recent news about the House Ethics Committee for an example: “I can tell you the calls we’ve gotten in my district office and here in Washington surprised me, meaning the numbers of calls. People are just sick and tired,” Rep. Walter B. Jones (R-N.C.) said of the simmering outrage over the proposed change. “People are just losing confidence in the lack of ethics and honesty in Washington.” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/gop-to-start-on-amb...)
If you attempt to call your representative's office in DC, either nobody will pick up, or someone will pick up just long enough to quickly talk loudly over you and tell you they do not take calls about your district's issues there, and to call your district's home office.
So you try to find a number for your home district office. If you can find it and call it and try to talk to someone, you will usually either be put on hold, or they will try to find someone for you to talk to, who usually won't be there. So they take a message. The message, written on a post-it note, is filed under "feedback", and not looked at again unless they need to compile a list of popular talking points.
If you are seriously involved in local politics, there are opportunities to meet them in person and tell them about your issue. People with enough time to travel to where their rep is just to tell them how they feel are called "people with no life", unless they do it for a living, in which case they are called "lobbyists". But lobbyists talk with green pieces of paper, and reps hear that a lot louder than people in their district complaining to an intern on the phone.
Yes, it's true that enough vocal opposition can turn a rep toward doing what people want. But it takes too much time and energy and special attention and focus to constantly have to hammer one specific point home to a rep just to get them to do what they said they were going to when you elected them. If they are doing the people's will, usually they lose their re-election funding, or are undone by their party's political machine, or a different one.
The best you can ever hope for is that your party, who is not in the majority, will back your rep, who is not the head of any important congressional committee, on an issue that is against the interests of people with a lot more money and influence than you, so that someone can say they tried to pass a bill. All of that hinging literally on the word of a stranger who told you they'd give you everything you want if you would just give them a job and trust them.
The ethics committe thing is a good example. Everyone, on both sides of the aisle, got flooded with calls because the very superficial idea of limiting or removing an ethics committee seems like a bad idea. What it turned out to be was newly elected officials trying to remove roadblocks to getting changes made so they could reform the system, but people are reactionary and stupid, and that change sounded bad, so they stopped it. What's funny is the party leaders who had been there forever predicted that reaction and told the junior members not to vote that way, because they're good at reading popular sentiment and predicting reaction. Now the old stalwarts look good and the newly elected reps look bad. All because citizens got involved in politics.
> because the people should not have to lobby their government in a democracy, the democratic leaders should already know what the people want and achieve it on their behalf.
I'd agree that people aren't any less knowledgeable now as they were as the former justice describes 'in his day'. I'd even give that it's not the most pressing issue, however, I think it's a far cry to expect a politician just inherently want to/do good for the people.
Any system left unchecked gets warped. It's just as much the citizen's civic duty to pay attention as it is the politician's to do good for the people.
I'm not an American and I don't really understand why you say this. Only a small percentage that the machine produces comes out in a form usable by non-rich people? Then what's, for example, Obamacare, which seems to be a system that finally resembles how health insurance works in many European countries? And isn't that same Obamacare under fire by lots of people who think that the machine shouldn't support the people and that everybody needs to support themselves instead of taking a piece of tax money?
Obama care removed some barriers for those with pre existing conditions and forced young healthy people to sign up to pay for it under threat of tax penalty, it didn't collectively negotiate drug prices with insurance companies or provide universal coverage, the way UK, Canada, etc do.
No, Obamacare only pretends to resemble European-style healthcare. In fact, it merely forces everyone to sign up with private health insurance companies. Which still take their huge profits.
This is how healthcare is set up in Switzerland and the Netherlands.
It is just an implementation issue how payments (through tax or otherwise) are routed. In a system that involves market forces, the key thing is that if everybody is insured, including the healthy, the cost per person comes down.
Yes, and private health insurance companies have profits so huge that they're pulling out of the insurance markets left and right and saying "sorry, we're just not interested in this business anymore!" Arizona's had it worst – many places there are on their last insurer – but that's just a taste of the phenomenon.
The premium hikes are paying for the treatment of the "uninsurable" and chronically ill. Even the profitable for-profit insurers are only running margins of 3%, maybe 4% in a good year. You could turn them all nonprofit and it wouldn't really help premiums. (And people tried! Look at the health-care co-op collapses in Colorado, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, New York, Nevada and Tennessee, and Oregon, as well!)
If we want to compare apples to apples, national healthcare doesn't work in Europe. It works in a variety of individual countries within Europe, some of which are imperiled. (And Canada has a population a tenth the size of the US.) Some of those countries have culturally homogenous well-educated populations smaller than the United States illegal immigrant population, so there's a demographic difference. That said...
Euro health care, writ large, works in the sense that "this is a substantial tax on our national incomes and possibly contributes to an economy which continues to suffer low growth rates and youth unemployment rates regularly in excess of 25% – and given the Euro crisis on top of that there may be some ugly cuts in the future, especially in places that aren't Germany." (Canada's health care at least has less of that problem.)
These national health care systems generally deal with cost control for the chronically ill and the elderly by rationing care through waiting lists for various operations... or, in the case of the Netherlands, by building a culture which pushes the elderly into assisted suicide.
(This is as opposed to the US who has historically dealt with them by making them pay for their own care, but has recently switched to dealing with them by hiking everyone's health care premiums to the point of unaffordability.)
Don't think I'm pitching solutions here!! I've just got buckets of cynicism for everyone!
> Some of those countries have culturally homogenous well-educated populations smaller than the United States illegal immigrant population, so there's a demographic difference.
Dogwhistle for "can't have nice things because blacks". Notwithstanding the relative homogeneity of their populations (the US is well down the list BTW), what difference should it make?
> Dogwhistle for "can't have nice things because blacks"
Eh. To constrain it deliberately to white people, think "established prosperous modern family, maybe WASPs or atheists, living in the Washington, D.C. suburbs with two stable incomes, commute on the Metro" vs, oh, "army veteran in a community in rural Appalachia which is reeling from the end of coal mining and wreaked by both prescription painkiller abuse and obesity, heavy smoker... local no-name church is the main community center ... considering a job driving a truck."
"Inner city African-American community" or not is but a small portion of this class of differences. Copenhagen vs Aeroskobing is a smaller gap than New York City vs Beards Fork, WV.
Except that's not how Obamacare works at all! It involves an expansion to Medicaid and Medicare, which are huge failures, and the forcing of healthy Americans into the health insurance market. In fact it has nothing to do with healthcare at all; it only has to do with health "insurance" as if by forcing more money into the system we'll somehow fix it. Because what the American health insurance industry - of which a very small part is healthcare, since even hospitals are putting most of their effort into getting as much money out of the public and private "insurance" schemes as possible - really needs to be "fixed" is more money! I use scare wires around "fixed" because, from the point of view of those running it, the health insurance industry is better than it's ever been.
In very general terms, the majority of the American populace does not think about politics in terms of rhetoric. They think in terms of jobs, moral values, and pride. You can see this in every corner of American life, in the highly educated upper classes and the poor, in the suburbs and the inner cities and rural farms.
Things like "Obamacare" don't mean anything to them. It's just some crap the people on the TV talk about. If it can be explained to them in a way that it's anti-job, anti-moral-values and anti-pride, they will vote against it. And vice versa.
But the major problem with the system here is most people find Congress and politics in America in general to be corrupt. That's why they elected Trump. He's not a politician. He's so far not a politician that half of the people who voted for him don't agree with what he says. But he said he would get them jobs. And support their moral values. And re-instill their pride in America. That is all they want, and he says he will give it to them, so they vote for him. In this way, they understand perfectly how the American political system works.
Obamacare was a pet project of a particular group's vote (again, people voted and they got what they wanted, essentially). But Obamacare can be dismantled over the same amount of time it was put into place. It has nothing to do with the American political machine's output; it was more of an accident.
In general, the political landscape here is very opposed to socialist programs like this. Medicare and Medicaid were extremely controversial in their time in the 60's - people went much crazier over the idea of those than Obamacare. But Republicans (who are the primary opposition to these programs) have actually expanded them over time. It's best not to think about how the machine works. Social programs are a red herring. Logically, a large group of people paying into a system that would lower your health care costs and save you money would be a boon, but it isn't seen this way here. It won't grow your wallet as quickly and simply as a tax cut.
Honestly, the details of each party's arguments are immaterial. Each party makes promises and people vote primarily with their wallets in mind. The idea that they would receive less money or pay more tax is inconcievable, partly because of how low wages and savings are and how high student loans are and how the economy has tanked etc etc. Every year, the rich (and corporations) get richer while the people do not. That's the big pink elephant everyone is aware of, and they know voting won't change anything, but they have no other choices.
The machine produces money in different forms, and the form made for the consumption of the general public is regulated to be very small. Most of it goes to corporations and the rich. I don't think people have really grasped this concept, and so they can't really attempt to change it. So their votes continue to not count for much, which they recognize, so they don't vote.
In the past, the machine worked differently. Instead of votes and labor, it was "empire" and labor that produced money, and because "empire" involved looting other lands that the people didn't live in, they kind of reaped the benefits. There was more money to go around, so people didn't notice how small a part of the pie they really got, or they were just socially conditioned to it with things like class rule.
In an American Democracy, we removed the old class rule and replaced it with a system of voting for a group of individuals who would maintain the illusion of a lack of class rule, as a sort of proxy for the upper class. It works really well because nobody seriously talks about reform or rebellion here. Theoretically, it is completely possible for the people to self-determine huge shifts in how the country works. That somehow frees us up to not care that we don't actually control how the country works. (We technically do, but in practice the rich and corporations who use the political puppet proxies to administrate the nation are actually in control)
I apologize for rambling. I don't get to talk politics much.
the even more relevant problem is the ignorance of the average American about how their banking system works, especially as it quietly steals over decades the marginal value of the working person's dollar and throws it in huge chunks at the feet of the 1% - bankers, through first crack at low interest rates and other more blatant mechanisms like TARP, government contractors, scientific researchers who get to exercise patents on what they're already being paid to do by the public. Of course the government throws some of the most impoverished a bone (with lots of paperwork) and 'redistributes' using taxation to keep the illusion that they are doing something about it.
