I generally dislike blaming voters for the state of our politics rather than politicians (and judges) for the state of our voters, but David Wasserman does have a good point:
Here’s the truth: Washington is rigged, but not in a literal sense and not in any of the nefarious ways those loud voices are contending. Instead, the blame may lie more with voters than politicians: Our legislative process is not designed to withstand the current levels of partisan polarization in the electorate.
Voters’ vexation with standard-issue, do-nothing D.C. politicians and party elites helps explain the Trump and Sanders phenomena of 2016, and the “rigging” theories seem to arise out of that frustration and suspicion. Yet much of this anger with “insiders” is misdirected. If only our political problems were due to “rigging” elections, we could arrest someone and get on with it. But our problems are much more structural.
At a minimum, things have evolved in such a way that all the incentives for politicians are skewed toward pleasing their own base and riling them up to get donations. Most of the traditional punishments for being an intransigent bastard are no longer functional, or are swamped by fear of more compelling and immediate punishments.
Too often, though, people try to craft solutions to this problem by wondering how we can get politicians to stop believing in stuff and just agree to compromise on everything. This is how you get to the fallacious “both sides are equally to blame” argument. It’s not true. Only one party has given up on governing. The other party is willing to legislate, even when in the minority.
In other words, you can try redistricting reform or California-style elections or campaign finance reform, and those things may help on the margins. But it’s the ideology of the Conservative Movement that breaks Congress, and if they’re currently splitting apart and going the way of the Whigs, then a lot of this may eventually solve itself.
Of course, I lot of dishware can get broken between here and there.
It’s almost like they don’t believe in government and are merely anarchists…oh wait, hang on. They ARE anarchists. What do you think they’re planning to do with that baby in the bathtub? Give it a medal?
As DerFarm out last time, they are not anarchists. Anarchists are left wing, not reactionary government officials.
They want the money that subsidizes the government without the financial controls. That is grifting, not anarchy.
Ultimately political stability starts with a stable economy, and relative equality of income and opportunity. Add in a buffer from foreign threats to safety and good government on the hygiene factors (roads, schools, environment, etc.) and consensus policy making will rule the day, with the fringe factors kept far out of sight.
But it starts with the economy. When people’s livelihoods are threatened, or if their merely perceived that their financial situations is getting worse, the doors open for the fringe factors. Ronald Reagan doesn’t win in 1980 if the economy hasn’t been in the dumps for the years prior.
I’ve suggested for a while that we need to get back to marginal tax rates of 90+%, not just for the US but for all of the developed world and ideally all of the world. The most stable period in modern world history coincided with such tax rates being the norm in the developed world. With such rates, income inequality is kept within reason. With such rates, people can still make a wad full of money up to a point, but there is no incentive to squeeze every last dollar out of the company you are in charge of or the hedge fund you are managing and into your personal account. During the period between the gilded ages the big growth industries were in areas like steel, automotives, and technology. During the second gilded age the big growth industry has been finance – skimming money off of the productivity of the rest of the economy. Of course the current system screws the hundreds of millions of “little people”. And of course they start seeking out extreme solutions from their politicians because they don’t know how to solve the economy, but they do know that what the current politicians are doing won’t solve it.
Once you get those things out of the way the government can start focusing on the hygiene factors – and people will vote to make sure that they do so, as long as economic woes aren’t paramount in their minds.
And by the way, this is the KEY lesson that will always be Obama’s greatest failure. After the stimulus package at the start of his term he did zilch about the economy except a pointless and optically counter-productive jobs summit with CEOs at the start of 2010. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know the official line is that Congress wouldn’t let him do any more. First, he misadministered HAMP really badly – instead of helping home buyers he administered it to extend their mortgages for one or two years until the banks could absorb in all of the foreclosures. Second, he misadministered TARP so that it, too, was used to help the rich and do nothing for regular people. Third, even if he didn’t get Congresses approval he had other discretionary things that could have been done to boost the economy along and make noise about it so that people could see him taking action.
Instead he listened to Tim and Larry and Rahm. Very bad, man. Hope Clinton gets it. James Carville may have been right only once in his life, but “It’s the Economy, Stupid” should be her buzzword driving her decision making.
there was other stimulus outside of the Recovery Act
The multiple times extending unemployment benefits & the payroll tax holiday to name a couple
The fact that they weren’t called stimulus is the main reason they were able to get through Congress.
TARP was created by the Bush Administration and President Obama recovered virtually all of it back. Although there wasn’t really anything in the TARP law that could be used to help people he still did with the bailout of the automakers and HAMP, while not a great program did help some people.
Lastly, you say he should have done administrative things to “make noise” and he did. He got Apple to move jobs back here, mandated federal contractors to pay 10.10 min wage and ordered the completion of the International Trade Data System, a digital trade record book, by 2016. This move will streamline and simplify the process through which small- and medium-sized businesses set up the export of US goods – just to name a few
People put the blame where it needs to be on the Republicans in Congress since if they weren’t such a bunch of asses we could have accelerated the recovery and done a lot more to improve the economy.
California is not an encouraging model. Our assorted electoral reforms on redistricting and jungle primaries helped a bit on the margins, but the government still didn’t get functional until Democrats had complete control of the government (requiring a 2/3 control of both houses). We can operate a seat or two short of the 2/3 majority, but that’s it.
Kansas might return to functionality next year, but that took essentially another Great Recession for the state due to Republican policies, and it will be a base minimum functionality.
Basically the crazy does not respond to anything like normal incentives.
The weather is quite nice, though.
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I disagree that redistributing reform would only change things on the margins. Without the Gerrymander the crazies would be running in more moderate districts and the house would be in democratic hands. There would still be crazy people running for election but they would have less power.
One other thing Id add to the list of changes: a return to the fairness doctrine in the media. Much of the craziness is driven by The Wurlitzer, it needs to be toned down.
Redistricting reform
Let me offer a couple of problems with your theory.
After the 2000 census, the GOP controlled the redistricting of Pennsylvania, and they carved it in a way to really maximize their seats. But, to do this, the created four suburban Philadelphia districts, one of which was a very safe Democratic seat encompassing part of the city and most of Montgomery County.
The other three seats were drawn to be lean/safe Republican, meaning that they didn’t think they could lose them, but they took their chances by making them somewhat competitive. This allowed them to control three out of four, whereas making any single one safer would have made another more competitive.
Things went as expected in 2002 and 2004, but in 2006 they lost all four seats.
Gerrymandering frequently involves drawing competitive seats, although they hope they are not quite competitive enough.
Another problem is that the population has self-sorted, so there are several precincts in Philly where Romney truly received zero votes, and there are areas of Pennsylvania where Obama received less than 20% of the vote. Even without gerrymandering, the Republicans gain an unnatural advantage from this that enables them to control the House even when losing the national popular vote. Gerrymandering by the Democrats can partially address this, but it cannot solve it.
And, in any case, without Democratic gerrymandering in states like Illinois, the skew would be even more pronounced.
So, drawing reasonable districts isn’t much an answer to our political gridlock. It’s what the Republicans believe that is the problem.
Good points, particularly regarding self-sorting. I wonder how much the concentration of dem voters in cities is really hurting them in regaining the house, as opposed to the gerrymandering effect? Some enterprising political scientist should have his grad students run simulations of the effect of california style redistricting reform on house elections across the country. Would the effect be marginal, or would dems regain the house? I would have said the latter, but now I’m not sure.
There are two distinct issues here, and one has to do with drawing districts with criteria other than partisan advantage and the other has to do with California’s top-two jungle primary system.
Now drawing districts according to some rational criteria, like compactness, common community interest, and following natural borders, like rivers and county lines, all of that can make a few more districts competitive. And competitive districts incentivize moderation.
More important, however, is the idea that the jungle primary will advantage moderates. This is obviously supposed to be the case when two Democrats or two Republicans advance to the general. Presumably, the Dem voters will vote for the more moderate Republican and vice-versa. See how that works out with Harris-Sanchez, though.
These reforms can make a small difference, but the problem is still that Republicans put ideology over career advancement/preservation.
They are too incentivized to act in partisan ways to change. You will find a small handful of exceptions, like Rep. Charlie Dent here in Pennsylvania, but nothing like the not-so-dearly departed Blue Dog Caucus.
The GOP is broken. They don’t want to govern, even in the majority.
That’s the problem.
totally agree with this, I think blaming gerrymandering is a cop out
The problem is turnout both at the presidential and mid term elections.
If we could find the magic to get turnout to levels it was at it’s peak we could solve a lot of the “gerrymandering problem”
With increased polarization, population self-sorting has in fact increased polarizing because there is no friendly pushback from neighbors. General social isolation driven by work schedules also has increased self-sorting.
Redistricting reform won’t provide nearly enough relief as long as entrenched political parties keep this country locked in a horse-and-buggy electoral system.
In their modern form, its easy to put the blame on Republicans, but Democrats share a dirty little secret. Democrats AND Republicans would rather be guaranteed #2 slot, than risk competition in a more effective system.
Blaming the voters for this electoral system is perverse.
A solution would be (when in charge of redistricting) to make at least a third to half seats at large– both in the US House and in state houses. more at large seats make it harder to gerrymander the rest, and also adds to the power of the urban voters.
The root issue is modern conservatism’s roots in the anti-communist movement, it fear in the 1960s that the commies were winning, it’s copying of Stalinist political methods as it understood them, and its assumption that politics is war by other means. That last puts a military, take-no-prisoners, hardball tone to everything they do and subverts civil society into propaganda and governance into gridlock.
It is the core philosophy, strategy, and tactics of the retransmogrifying modern conservative movement alone that has brought us to this point of failure, this drive to use failure as a winning platform for more failure, and the institutional locking up and freezing of the system to block any change not serving the 1% and any governance that might have social (er, socialistic) benefits. This is the creation of John Stormer, H.L. Hunt, Joseph Welch, and William Buckley.
Responsibility for the current disaster also go to the following all-YAFfer supporting crew:
Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, and Tom DeLay shoved it forward in the 1990s
Sarah Palin, Steve King, Michele Bachmann, Louis Goehmert and other clowns entertained the conservative troops with their craziness and pushed the rhetorical limits into the gutter.
Paul Weyrich and all the mailing list and newsletter grifters for networking the crazy theories and setting up the policy direction for each new GOP administration after 1980.
Grover Norquist for the key value of the conservative movement — drowning government in a bathtub.
How many billions of dollars has the conservative movement, with the aid of the Vichy media Wurlitzer spent to create the voters that we have.
It has been the billionaires’ favorite investment strategy for the past 50 years. No wonder the economy is a mess.
Like a lot of Beltway pundits (I don’t know if he is one), David Wasserman is blaming the victim.
Low information voters are low information voters because they live in information environments of total assault and distraction. Of course, they shut down.
The voters don’t know what happened to them because there has been a large interlocking propaganda strategy to make sure that they never learn.
Vox had an interesting article that claimed the rise of slicing demographics into generation started the lack political engagement trend since prior to that young people were often initiated into politics by their elders. With each generation compartmentalized their concerns became much more narrowly focused on their peers.
Focused on peers as social trend authorities. That political insight was a consequence of the 1960s and all of the marketing an media focus on “youth culture”, because the Boomers were getting cash of their own (even if from their parents) and were making their own spending decisions in a time of perceived affluence (optimistic futures).
Marketers created “teen boards” at department store of the kids who were the status cliques in their schools in order to push clothing, record, and entertainment purchases. And this happened even down to individual stores in small cities.
Of course, churches and William Buckley were on the “get the youth” strategy beginning in the mid- to late-fifties. Buckley’s YAF was organized in 1960 (when Bernie Sanders was 19 and in the target cohort for Buckley’s conservatism).
On the left, “Early in 1960, the SLID [Student League for Industrial Democracy] changed its name into SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] at the behest of its then acting Director, Aryeh Neier.”
The year 1960 was the year of maudlin rock hit ‘Teen Angel” issued in 1959 to an audience of now restless “Silent Generation” teens who would be in the real Civil Rights generation. Jesse Jackson was 19. John Lewis was 20. Robert Zimmerman (Bob Dylan) was 19 and already in his career. Mary Travers was 24. Mitch McConnell was 18 (I know that reality is hard to believe).
Youth was not seen as experential cohorts because social change had not be normalized; the Depression and World War II were seen as interruptions; the 1950s as a return to normalcy. For politicians, youth were the objeccts of political education (civics courses), and formation with families (the hereditary party affiliation) but not a demographic in a market. By 1968, that changed.
My dad had a state job, officially non-partisan. But his job depended on his personal acquaintance relationships (today called “networking”) with elected officials who served in various roles affecting budgets where he worked. I got to tag along to Farmers Society pinnics, got introduced at local air shows, and so on. That was my political formation — and my dad’s authentic belief that public service was a possible vocation.
With the growth of cohorts as a marketing target, the notion of political formation and education has become the trivial requirements for public schools or a patient ordeal for true believers in a hoary institution. Young Democrats and Young Republicans still exist; hopefully, they do more than provide free labor for the parties. Or become a school for dirty political trickery and ratfucking (a traditional role of fraternities).
The efforts of Republicans to get split tickets in the Solid South during the 1950s caused disengagement from party politics there–until Ronald Reagan and Rush Limbaugh. Now in the two-party cities, there is more involvement at election time.
Not just for “conservatives” anymore and never was exclusive to them. Or maybe you missed some key moments at the 2016 DNC convention.
But never organized as a war on the other party. Even the DNC 2016 convention was framed within a two-party system that has a party in power and a loyal opposition. What dropped as conservatism took power was being loyal when they were in the opposition. From 1946, they pursued a politics of personal destruction against Democratic-aligned constituent groups like labor, journalists friendly to Democratic positions, and other parts of the political infrastructure neutral or aligned with the Democratic Party. After 1968, they pursued it against President Carter, Clinton, Gore, and Obama, getting more shrill as it failed more and became more obvious. There is a difference in kind with what Democrats have done within the party IMHO. Within the party never threatened the governance of the country.
And with the Obama administration you had obstruction of the operation of the government by the solid unity of the modern conservative movement and its transmogrifying external movemental roots, financed as usual through astroturfing operations. That is a subversion of political process for the ends of those providing the funds.
Both sides do not do it. One side has a strong financial interest in the stability of the system. Ironically, that side is not named “conservative” but is. That’s what I saw in the DNC 2016 convention.
Interesting commentary and thanks.
I am concerned about how far to the right the Democratic party has gone. It’s been a process for quite some time now. I feel what we’re left with now is a Democratic party that is mostly Center Right and mostly emulates the old school Republican party of about 40 years ago, except that there are lashings of some social progressivism on top. The current Republican party has turned itself into a fringe party of white supremacist/nationalist extremism.
So we have sort of center-right, mostly rational Democrats, and we have extremist fringe racist Republicans. What a choice.
The Democratic party is now full-throated a NeoCon WAR, Inc, party, replete with the requisite GOP-slogan: USA! USA! USA! For sure Hillary will take us to war somewhere(s).
But we’re told how very progressive Hillary is. I’m finding that hard to see, myself.
But I do agree that, for the most part, the Democratic party is still attempting to work with the Republican party as the loyal opposition. We get nothing like that from the Republicans, who have pretty much waged full scale war against Democrats.
It’s all very frustrating and not very encouraging.
The Democratic Party is pretty close to its historic position. It never has been a progressive party. In the Progresive Era, it was the Democratic party urban machines that the temperance-pushing suffragette progressives were pushing against. In the South, from 1875 to 1964, the Democratic Party was the party of terrorist-produced “home rule”, Jim Crow laws, and lynching. Until 1964 and the revolution stared by Fannie Lou Hamer and completed in the Voting Rights Act.
The New Deal never challenged segregation and it took nine years an a war for FDR to recognize and institutionalize labor power within the war effort. That high tide of progressivism to fight Hitler was lost with the next Democratic President and the first post-War GOP Congress. Thereafter corruption (Lord Acton was right) and communism (after all where did the labor movement come from) dogged efforts of Democrats to support labor (as did the Jim Crow split within the party).
Face up to the history. From the beginning, the Democratic Party was the war party in Congress. Jefferson sent the first expeditionary force to Libya back when it was the Sultan of Tripoli’s turf. Madison thought that he would triangulate between those who sought to take Canada and those who would avoid war with Great Britain; the Federalist liked trade. The Democrats liked land. The result was a burned national capital and a national anthem. James Polk invaded Mexico to expand land suitable for cotton production and tie Texas tighter to the US. Southern Democrats were the backbone of Secession (but again, that was before 1964 and the trickle of Southern Democrats becoming Southern Republicans led by Strom Thurmond). Woodrow Wilson took the US from Neutrality to World War I on the same arguments of necessity as all US wars. FDR likewise took us into World War II. Truman into the Korean war and creation of the military industrial complex and surveillance state. Kennedy invaded Cuba and took us to the brink of a nuclear war before reversing course. Johnson escalated the war in Vietnam, which caused the lefty-progressive rebellion and Gene McCarthy movements in 1968. Carter opened a covert war in Afghanistan and armed Islamic jihadis. Clinton had the war in Bosnia and in Kosovo and bombed Baghdad twice (and also Sudan).
In short, there never has been that golden age of innocence when the Democratic Party was consistently progressive in all its policies and actions.
By that standard, yes, the Clinton platform is the most progressive in history. And the state of the Union is the most progressive in history by a lot of measures.
And we progressives know exactly where the nation is not progressive at all: income inequality, discrimination against all sorts of classified ‘others”, militarization of police, school to prison pipeline, deteriorating infrastructure, and war without end. Pretty much the hidden state of the nation for most of its history.
Yes, it’s frustrating as hell, given the lofty promises of democratic governance.
And yes, the business of government is still business. Yes, that is from Republican Calvin Coolidge.
Here is the Democratic take on that idea, from Will Rogers;
Larger discussion than can be effectively held in a comment and response format. I was only addressing a piece of it — the Cold War/anti-communist component.
The exploitation for that by politicians has flipped back and forth as to which party is gaining more from it at any point, but both parties have indeed been doing it for a hundred years.
For decades, it wasn’t so easy for GOP politicians to sell war to their base voters. Not actual, on the ground, wars anyway. Even today we can see a residue of isolationism in the GOP.
It took casting Stalin into a Hitler role in the PTSD atmosphere of 1946-1947 to make the Cold War and communism a political litmus-test issue. It then became the case that the dogwhistle “my opponent is soft on communism” was heard as “my opponent is a traitor”. For people of a certain age, Russia holds the same connotation now as it did then; Putin is not a Russian Orthodox nationalist oligarch; he is still a KGB communist.
The association of Trump and Putin looks farfetched and forced to us, but some consultant in the Clinton campaign apparently thought that given Trump’s demographics are loaded toward people with a memory of the Cold War, hinting (or even saying out loud) that Trump is a traitor could push those buttons.
The “socialist = Traitor” dogwhistle has mostly been rendered ineffective through overuse on the Clintons, Obama, and Sanders–not to mention Sanders’s owning it and saying, “So what.” But Russia is still a foreign state with its own military are intelligence apparatus and som competing interests with that of the US. And a lot of investment in neocon propaganda to rest a “traitor” slur on.
Dies Committee and HUAC standing committee 1945-1975 were chaired by Democrats. So, let’s not whitewash the anti-communist participation by Democrats.
One VIP Democrat did stand up to them. Twice:
Nobody Had to Ask Her
Exactly who I thought it would be.
A four for getting that right.
Real Democrats fearlessly sticking up for others instead of saying who needs that grief?
And all of those Democratic chairs were pieces of work, weren’t they.
This hung over the Republican majority House in 1947:
It was the “bipartisanship” of the age. And it drove Democrats into a Red Scare as quick as you could say “Grand Bargain”.
But it was pure conservative Republican anti-New Deal demagoguery behind it. Dies, Hart, and subsequent chairs were the Joe Liebermans (chair, Senate Homeland Security Committee) of their day.
Great post – thank you for the reminder!! What an amazing lady!!
Thanks for the detailed list. But how did the Heritage Foundation not get mentioned in that list? Their founding in 1975 is considered landmark. They were the primary force behind Reagan in his 1976 and 1980 campaigns AND the primary force behind his domestic policies for his first 6 years.
How could I forget the great architect of the information environment, Lewis Powell.
Since everyone seems to be rolling with their own theory I’ll do my ‘founders gave us a system thats obsolete’ and declare parliamentary superiority.
The average voter has never been expected to read and comprehend everything in a piece of legislation, but the legislators, government officials, and the media were once able to supply a summary of the provisions that ordinary people could comprehend and form their own opinions on it without too much concern that there were mega-loopholes and/or tricks and traps that could be exploited to favor elites at the expense of the commoners.
How many federal elected officials even read the Gramm-Leach-Bliley and Commodity Futures Modernization Acts? How many even know and comprehend all the provisions in them, much less how they would work in the real world?
Voters can be blamed if they in fact knowingly voted for policy A or B and it didn’t turn out as well as advertised. Instead voters get a never-ending amount of bait and switch. How many people voted for WJC in ’92 because they wanted a reduction in capital gains taxes? Other than the ’93 income tax increase proposal, I didn’t approve of or vote for any of the economic/financial legislation that WJC touted while in office.
Voters can be blamed for being suckers for politicians that manipulate them through cheap (government costs) emotional appeals. But such politicians that do that are sleazebags not fit for public office.
What voters can’t be blamed for is what is hidden from them. The open doors for lobbyists and big campaign contributors on the Hill, in the WH, and at the Secretaries offices. (If the issue is sufficiently discrete and the public learns of it, it gets shut down. ie GWB and Obama can’t “rent” out the Lincoln Bedroom. However, the Lincoln Bedroom is available under the White House guest program and the USG collects the charges.
This degree of economic pain for the 99% did not happen by chance. It was gamed and executed by deliberate means.
Interestingly I just read this article, this morning. It agrees with you completely.
https:/www.thenation.com/article/should-the-democratic-party-be-added-to-the-endangered-species-lis
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Having read the 2000 pages of the Affordable Care Act and skimmed the amendments to it, the page count is slighly misleading. Legislation has a standard format (unless there is some ratfucking going on). That standard format accounts for around 10 pages. Some of those smaller bills were understandable because the actual core of the legislation was only one or two paragraphs.
Anything involving money, has loads of extra pages to hand auditing requirements, regulatory instructions, and so on. The public does not understand this well enough to actually skim bills because no one has bothered to show them how to do it.
OTOH, tax bills, which are usually very short are impenetrable to all but tax lawyers because they sonsist mostly of external references to the existing law and specified edits to the language. Those little short edits to the language is how loopholes are put into laws. As Gramm-Leach-Bliley showed, even after the passage of the legislation a minor change of language (for clarity) or punctuation can dramatically change a law.
“Voters can be blamed for being suckers for politicians that manipulate them through cheap (government costs) emotional appeals. But such politicians that do that are sleazebags not fit for public office.”
I guess you would argue that we should blame Trump voters for being suckers for fear mongering. Fair enough. However, emotional appeals exist on the left, the right, and in whatever part of the spectrum Trump inhabits. Seems to me that Bernie Sanders did a masterful job of making emotional appeals. Were his supporters thus “manipulated”? I doubt you would say so. I doubt many think of themselves as having been manipulated.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that all politics involves emotional appeals, and it would be a big mistake to pretend otherwise. If Barack Obama had campaigned for president in 2008 sounding like a bureaucrat, we’d presently be approaching the end of President Hillary Clinton’s second term. Instead Obama delivered his hopey changey message–an emotional appeal–and we’re where we are today.
P.S. One critical additional point to make about Trump: the man is a sociopath. Lying and manipulation come to him effortlessly.
Are you a psychiatrist and have you clinically evaluated Trump? He’s a nasty piece of work, but armchair, layperson clinical diagnoses of real physical/psychological conditions is a foolish exercise. One that even made a real a real physician (Dr. Frist) look foolish for doing.
You will note that I said, “cheap emotional appeals.” Appealing to people’s sense of right and wrong with regard to public policies that are consistent with the letter, spirit, and tradition of the US Constitution and laws prompts an emotional response but isn’t “cheap,” “USA! USA! Yeah!” is cheap and hollow. Propaganda is cheap (and yes I know it has been used to sway public opinion in favor of doing the right thing, but mostly it’s been used to gain support for doing the wrong thing). Emotional appeals to bigotry are always cheap, and yes, those that are captured by such appeals fail the test of good citizenship.
Marie3: Please back up. I basically validated what you wrote, with some politely worded, minor points of discussion or disagreement. Good Lord, I thought that’s what a forum like this is for.
“Appealing to people’s sense of right and wrong with regard to public policies that are consistent with the letter, spirit, and tradition of the US Constitution and laws prompts an emotional response but isn’t ‘cheap’.”
The way you worded that is rather…clinical…but suit yourself. I would simply write that you place a great deal of emphasis on the word “cheap” in the phrase “cheap emotional appeals”. However, I think if you were to ask around, you would find that one person’s idea of “cheap” in this context may differ a lot from the next person’s.
You know what’s really weird here, Marie3? Not long ago, you commented on this blog to some other people that I was a troll who had nothing of merit to say. I’ve therefore been avoiding sarcasm–something you might want to try yourself, by the way–and when commenting on anything you wrote, tried to be plain-spoken, positive, respectful. The result? You still denounce anything I write as a personal attack.
Lastly: My family and I were victimized by someone who fits the description of a sociopath to a T. After that sort of trauma, my spouse and I have finely tuned sociopath meters. We’ve encountered a few other “charming” people in the years since who set off alarm bells. I’m going with experience and intuition here, Marie3. If you wish to denounce my description of Trump, frankly, I don’t give a damn. And now buh-bye.
The government is functioning. It’s killing and bombing wherever it wants. It’s collecting taxes and spending it on all kinds of things here at home like social security Medicare and Medicaid. It’s managing the bureaucracy of regulation and investing in infrastructure.
We all want more or different things but that doesn’t mean government is dysfunctional. We lack any sort of consensus for significant change. So it really is the voters fault.
The standard cop-out of elected officials: the voters are getting exactly what they want.
I’m not so sure it’s a cop-out. It seems to me that a standard approach on the left is to appeal to voters’ “false consciousness”: The people have been propagandized and manipulated to vote against their own self interest. In the context of this posting by Booman and the accompanying comment thread, the false consciousness has been promulgated by the conservative movement. The problem I have with this line of argument is that it tends to infantilize voters. They’ve been manipulated by forces they’re too weak to resist, but we know better and are here to explain. (As an aside, this is the line of argument that was being used in the spring, during the primary campaign, to “explain” why Bernie Sanders had little support among African Americans except for those under age 30 more or less.)
Agreed. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have an opinion on the topics of government and politics. How can we pretend they aren’t free agents coming to their own conclusions?
When the conclusions being made ignore facts, science, common sense and logic and arguments made on their behalf rely on lies and distortion being broadcast by various partisan outlets then I think we can infer something more than voters being free agents.
Everyone here can make a list of such zombie conclusions…
The issue there is not the manipulation part, it’s the reduction of “interest” to a stereotyped economic interest that is the same for all voters.
And voters do not always know when they are being blatantly lied to, absent some authoritative representative of the truth has gained legitimacy to provide that check and balance. For a bright and shining moment, the press and broadcast media served that function. Which is why the Wurlitzer became a necessary function of the GOP.
Changing the political system is difficult. It requires full engagement. The lack of change tells me that people are satisfied with the status quo… or at least they were until Sanders and Trump showed up and gave them an outlet. But there is still no consensus and so we shall remain as is. What’s wrong with that?
Your tag line implies you know that change requires this engagement across all levels of government. Lots of people just want management of the status quo. Why do we need all this drama all the time? We don’t. Extreme partisans just want to fight about their silly policy fantasies.
The people who vote for conservatives ARE the movement.
Without the voters, conservative leaders are just as powerful as the guys on the subway platform warning about the end of the world.
To disassociate the results from the voters who enable them just seems flat out wrong.
Personally, I blame the people who vote for conservatives for everything. Norquist is just a purity blowhard without the conservative politicians signing his tax pledge to avoid a primary opponent that the primary voters will support.
If the conservative primary voters demanded a candidate who wanted to expand SS/Medicare, that’s what they would get.
I’d say that yes, the system is broken, and yes, those eligible to vote are to blame, and the reasons they’re to blame are:
The politicians are primarily to blame for the DWS-like failure to grasp either of these failings.
No. Blame the voters. They had one job: to cultivate their minds to the point where they would dismiss the likes of Trump out of hand.
Never look at the storyteller(s). Always look at the audience.
They had one job: to cultivate their minds to the point where they would dismiss the likes of Trump out of hand.
And then they could have voted for and nominated who?
The GOP family legacy candidate for a fourth term in the WH, one of the obvious losers, or the more rightwing radical Cruz?
If there were something in between the ears of the Trumpsters and they said, “As presidential elections have become a joke, might as well vote of real joker,” they would have earned some respect. As it is, they just look pathetic.