I guess we should have voted harder? 'Cause voting is the answer to problems with elected governments, right?
Right?
Right?
No. Where you you get that idea?
This is how you answer the problems in representative democracy:
1. You pick a party that has change to get representatives. You don't have to like it, it's a not beauty contest[1]. You just pick a party.
2. You join the party as a member.
3. You influence the issues inside the party. You join with the same minded people in the party. You recruit more same minded people. You push your agendas and your candidates inside the party long before any elections. You push them into councils and work groups. You push them into campaign committees and party chairs in multiple level.
4. When elections come, you vote. But that's just small part.
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[1] People who bitch and moan how it's dirty and they don't like any party that is in actual position of power. Boo hoo. Get over it and get dirty. It's fight for power, not beauty contest.
I think you just unboxed jessaustin's point.
I'm no political activist, my expertise lie else where. Surely at least some of us should be able to just vote occasionally.
But people who live in democracy complaining that the system is corrupt and not using the system to correct itself are deluding themselves.
There will never be better system that distributes real power without coercive action , corruption and dirty politics.
In the game of American representative democracy, I would not recommend your strategy. It's playing for 2nd place.
If you truly believe what you said, you should be recommending that people act to corrupt a public official in a manner that provides some leverage to them, personally. Alternately, poach the blackmail material from someone who already has leverage.
You have to be inside the party machinery where you can show up and vote occasionally and influence who are the activists that get selected into different party positions. Many of them hidden from the media spotlight but set up the scene. There are different interest groups and divisions within parties. Just being member of few and giving some support for others who do the hard lifting work is enough.
Just follow the issues from within the same way as you do now and raise your head sometimes.
You have no idea what runs through my head sometimes. No idea. If I ever decide to get "dirty", it won't be to your benefit, in any way whatsoever. If I can't obtain power fairly and rationally, I am very unlikely to use it fairly and rationally. I'll use it to screw you over and make myself and my allies rich on your suffering. That's what people with power do now, and I have observed it to be a successful stratagem so far.
The government is running out of opportunities to present arguments against the possibility of me forming or joining a rebellion composed of strange bedfellows. Every time it changes policy to become more hostile to traditional American ideals, it is prying another board off the portal to the abyss.
Don't tell me to stop watching the circuses and go join one. I'll just nail down the tent flaps and set the big top on fire.
If you don't want me to be a walking time bomb, stop tolerating blatantly unethical behavior in your government and your political parties. Now. For me, it is a beauty contest, and the loveliest of the pageant participants is, at best, a "4". And for some reason, the crown keeps getting taken by someone who is a "1" or a "2".
Perhaps I have just lived too long in places with notoriously corrupt government.
On a short time, yes, seems to be very successful. Over a few generations, a less greed "leave some money on the table" approach seems to beat it every time.
But you won't because your peers will put the fire out before it has a chance take hold and then they'll kick you out.
In a mature democracy, no one person can attain enough power to do any long-term damage (at least relative to any other system).
In the USA, a president has limited powers and a limited time frame within which to wield them, after which he will be kicked out, whether he was doing a good job or not, so your analogy isn't really working.
> For me, it is a beauty contest, and the loveliest of the pageant participants is, at best, a "4". And for some reason, the crown keeps getting taken by someone who is a "1" or a "2".
Perhaps this is because it isn't a beauty contest for the rest of the people.
If you want real change to happen, you have to make the current wielders of the state's power at least annoyed.
The US is not a direct democracy. It is a republic, and the -cracy of the demo- is highly leveraged. And that's exactly how one segment of the population could abuse and disenfranchise another with Jim Crow laws.
The Democrats and the Republicans have, with their gerrymandered districts and first-past-the-post voting systems and burdensome ballot access laws, systematically disenfranchised a significant minority of the population, and tricked another significant minority into wasting their energy on their internal party politics.
That system is designed to exhaust my energy and radiate the resulting heat away into space, so that it does not adversely affect the workings of the machine. That's why those people who say "join a political party and participate in the process" can go set their heads on fire.
If your political process does not respect your voice, you should resist it, not join it. Misbehave a little. And have a little respect for those with fringe opinions on the opposite side of your spectrum that are also forced to misbehave so that their voices might be heard. There is a path to ethical misbehavior, and I aim to walk it, rather than swim the unethical cesspool of the political parties' unseen inner workings.
Not everyone should vote. If your views are substantially outside the mainstream there is no point in voting.
That's funny. Reminded me of this: https://twitter.com/sinderbrand/status/819315489021325312
There's still a big reason to vote: pick the candidate with the least amount of problems that has a chance of winning. But I do agree that voting is usually too-little-too-late if you don't already have the majority of voters knowing about your cause.
But in the US, there's also the question in which state you live in. For example, there's no point voting Republican in California, nor Democrat in Texas.
I live in Ithaca, NY. That means we have a very, very liberal municipal government, gerrymandered-to-shit knucklehead (mostly) Republican legislative representation in Albany and DC, and a moderately liberal governor (Cuomo). These layers matter.
But if you don't mind tyranny then by all means don't vote.
(In addition, imagine an interest group instituting a "we'll pay your poll tax for you!" campaign, but only in counties carefully selected for demographics.)
There's also the problem that many jurisdictions have 2+ elections each year. A federal poll tax would create quite a bit of room for local poll taxes that would be that much more abusive.
Tangential, but this is a great example of a fabricated wedge issue in American politics. The solution is so simple, just issue everyone a free national ID card. Passports should be free too and could also double for this purpose. Then the Republicans can stop complaining about voter fraud and Democrats can stop complaining about voter disenfranchisement (the latter of these I am legitimately concerned about, I just wish someone would actually follow through and do something about it).
Also, it's ridiculous that there isn't a national holiday at least on the day of the presidential elections.
Predictably, nonwhite voters tended to be failed.
But I agree with the other commenter, selecting the questions in a fair way would be challenging.
One possible sequence:
1) Trump fever sweeps Rs to power in 38 state legislatures two years from now.
2) Those legislatures pander to morons by passing a Constitutional Amendment barring those without physician-issued certificates of femininity from women's restrooms.
3) Millions of Californians take to the streets in protest for weeks at a time, unable to accept life under what comes to be called "wrong-partheid".
4) Desperate business owners cast about for some way to get everyone back to work, and hit upon secession. A plebiscite is called, and with 90% of California citizens voting, every county except Modoc and Lassen vote to secede. Those counties petition Oregon for admission, but are turned down and have to join Nevada instead. Then Las Vegas has a vote to secede from Nevada, but last-minute distributions of maps illustrating where the water comes from cause secession to fail.
At this point, Trump could send in the Army to enforce the Union, but I really hope he doesn't. If he did, many soldiers would refuse the order, and many generals would push for some other solution. Perhaps California will bribe Trump with some real estate deals. They can write it into their new constitution to make sure it's legal.
After that I would hope for many more secessions. This nation needs to be drastically shrunken to put all the lobbyists out of business.
The US is an Oligarchy. Some people are really angry right now, because their stawperson didn't get elected. But they weren't angry for the past eight years of domestic spying, predator drones and kill lists. This anger only helps solidify the rule of the elite, because it keeps Americans fighting each other, and not the war industry or the banks or various other entities that can basically get their laws passed no matter who is elected.
http://fightthefuture.org/articles/the-fallout-of-american-a...
I really like the EFF, and I'm glad they're fighting for our rights to speech and privacy, no matter which party is in office.
Side note: As an Australian, it absolutely blows my mind that voting is not compulsory in more countries. I have no idea why voting isn't compulsory, like taxes.
Do you have any insight as to why this is? Do people just not mark more than one or two preferences, given that they have more choices? I understand the "big" parties work hard to get there, and they'll work even in the limits of a system to stay on top.
I also had Australians tell me about the "top" and "bottom" of the ballot. The bottom can have a long scrolling amount of entries, and Australians who care will go to various websites where they can input their issues, get a list of which MPs agree, print out this list and take it into a voting booth to see which parties they should vote for. O_o I've been told most Australians only fill out the top.
So what ends up happening is instead of a diversified senate with plenty of conflicting opinions and a broad knowledge base acting as the gatekeepers of whatever ridiculous legislation the lower house can dream up, we end up with the two major parties controlling the whole senate.
And whenever that's not the case (which sometimes happens due to the preferential voting) the media runs a huge billion dollar campaign about how the entire country is going to stagnate into a giant flaming pile of shit unless one of the major parties gets a majority in the senate and is allowed to push all their horseshit through unopposed. Then next election the uneducated masses vote against their best interests in droves once again.
The system is fucked. I don't see an easy solution, it's not like forcing below the line voting would be any better because then all the braindead racist bigots like Pauline Hanson would be voted in in a landslide due to sheer media coverage and we'd lose any lesser named senators that managed to grab an infinitesimal piece of power by aligning themselves with a major party.
Maybe if someone has a good solution they could enlighten me, I'd love to hear it.
EDIT: I should mention, if you elect to vote below the line you have to literally number every senate candidate, which is generally 50-100 boxes. The system itself is imposing a huge barrier to the average person placing an educated vote.
"Barry because he something about climate change once." If you willfully ignore everything that has happened, then perhaps you're not impressed or don't see drastic differences.
"How do you talk people down after spending a year telling them Hitler was coming to power?" Which is of course not in the least bit realistic.
Sure, one can create strawmen all day, and use those strawmen to push whatever argument they want, but nobody is the wiser for it. If you actually try to look at the world with as clear eyes as possible, rather than through the most rosy-colored or other filtered view, you will have a better chance of getting through days without them being hard and also of convincing people of your points of view.
And it's not a mainstream perspective, it is at best a hyperbole of people saying hyperbolic things.
Two hyperboles don't make a right.
2. https://www.salon.com/2016/12/20/14-signs-show-trumps-politi...
3. https://newrepublic.com/minutes/124205/yes-donald-trump-fasc...
4. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/11/foul-stenc...
5. http://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/?toURL=http://www.forbe...
6. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/america...
2. No mention of Hitler. A point by point comparison to a historical and previous description of fascism.
3. Not Hitler, talks about conservatism and totalitarianism.
4. No mention of Hitler anywhere.
5. " I am not suggesting that what is happening in the United States replicates in every sense what happened in Italy and Germany. "
6. "The Republican presidential candidate is not a Fascist, but his campaign bears notable similarities to the reign of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini."
Compare these viewpoints to the claim of "But people really were saying Trump is literally Hitler."
Edit: I should also say that I don't doubt you could come up with something somewhere where somebody claimed that Trump is "literally Hitler." However, it is not a prevalent or even mainstream viewpoint. Even calling Trump a fascist, and defending it based on evidence, is a pretty extreme and rare viewpoint.
"How do you talk people down after spending a year telling them Hitler was coming to power?" vs. "How do you talk people down after spending a year telling them a fascist was coming to power?" isn't a very meaningful distinction to me in that context. Your mileage may vary. Many mainstream outlets have expressed that opinion for a long time, and it's a point of view I've seen defended here on HN many times in political threads. I don't think it's a fringe viewpoint at all.
The "literally Hitler" smear is an attempt to distinguish that careful, and important distinction, so that the entire thought can be dismissed as ridiculous.
Looking at each of those articles where they say "not hitler, but he still is making noises like he'll be bad," do you think that needs to be walked back? Were they ignoring reality, or facing an unpleasant reality?
"Literally Hitler" is not a thoughtful, fair, or even useful characterization of these viewpoints.
This story in particular is a very clear indicator of what Obama has been the whole time - a mere salesperson for the oligarchy. The standard backstop excuse, that he "needs to compromise to get anything done", doesn't work when it's his last days of office! But the sunk cost fallacy is a powerful thing that causes people to overjustify their choices.
They're receptive when the criticism is leveled at the "other team", but given an opportunity to vote for "their team" they'll fall right into line. This time it happened with Trump voters, because "the media establishment HATES him". So they're all convinced he will actually change things in their interest - nevermind the Obama they've been hating on for the past 8 years ran on the exact same message! The best I've been able to do is to preemptively ask them to try to evaluate his actions on whether they're actually disrupting the status quo we all hate so much, or just pandering to polarizing surface issues while leaving the fundamental corruption intact. But I don't have hope that a year from now they will remember such criticism as being from an a priori perspective rather than simply shoring up their defensive ranks over the moral panic du jour.
Voting pragmatically in local elections likely still makes sense even for people with extreme views. A few of the races are likely to be close and have candidates with disparate viewpoints.
People don't pay attention to what mayors actually do, plus a terrible mayor can live off the planning of the previous administration for most of their term in office (and thereby take credit for things they didn't touch).
If you are actually confused about my meaning I'd be glad to explain further.
The problem with a two party system dominated by a president is that many important issues bundled together. Democrats let me down on privacy, but the new Vice President's signature policy focus is persecuting gay families like mine.
I just want to say that we can vote even while agitating within our own parties and social groups for improvements on privacy.
Voting outside the mainstream over time (for some definition of "substantially outside") can normalize and legitimize viewpoints that would otherwise be regarded as fringe forever. We've seen that with the Green party here in Canada.
That said, I agree (if you think this) that the fetishization of voting for the sake of voting is pretty naive.
What's the scale of the timeframe we're talking about here? Doesn't seem like the Green Party in the US has a chance of getting normalized on a scale of 2 generations (~50 yrs), based on the past history of voting.
Having people vote based on the idea that at some point in the future, possibly not in their lifetime, their viewpoint may (or may not) become mainstream/legitimate is absurd. People are not that far forward thinkers.
That is the point. Vote is increasingly becoming deselect method (Govt that is least bad) than select.
Voting, combined with checks and balances, term limits - is more of a hamster wheel for power seekers. The combination of those things makes power really difficult and costly to attain, transient, and limited (hopefully). And it helps ensure that power transitions peacefully, more or less. Its less about the actual candidate, and more about churn.
The US isn't as bad as that very corrupt democracy, but I do not share many people's views that when a country switches to democracy things will improve. There are far too many factors in play, and people voting is only a small factor amongst all of them. The culture of the people probably matters a lot more than whether they get to vote or not.
However, it seems to me that it keeps _individuals_ churning through the powerful offices of state yet ensures that those individuals are only only drawn from a particular _restricted group_.
That's the reason for the animosity to Trump. Within that restricted group he wields more power with fewer ties than other group members.
If he were one of the usual oligarchs who has to compromise with the investment banks and lobbyists for powerful special interests he would be more controllable. But who knows what someone with their own resources might get up to.
This environment of abridged civil liberties, police militarization and increased surveillance is what many Americans wanted, post 9/11.
Donald Trump's election signals a successful vote for more of the same - although one that assumes, in ignorance, the commonly held belief that Obama as a Democrat weakened and undermined the surveillance state and that a corrective policy shift to the right is necessary.
No. Nobody wants to live in the iron curtain.
This is an absolute and total failure of leadership, from the Bush administration through the Obama administration. 16 years of inexcusable failure. (It probably goes back even further)
People with bombs have not created fear, politicians have.
America has long been happy to have a more violent police force and higher rate of imprisonment than other countries so long as that violence is directed against nonwhite people. It seems people imagine that they'll be the priviliged ones behind the iron curtain; the neighbourhood informers.
(This is also why e.g. HOAs have such oppressive rules, they're aimed at eradicating "difference" and a form of soft-redlining)
An interesting add-on to this is to poll about how one feels about Edward Snowden. The result is that the majority view him negatively. (http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/04/21/edward-snowde... and http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/edward-snowden-rasmussen-po...)
So unfortunately there is a pretty significant group of people that are okay with increased surveillance.
Note that from what I see, this divide doesn't appear to be traditional US liberal/conservative. In fact, if anything, the divide carries more of a generational rift, where older people are more okay with surveillance than younger people are. (The USA Today poll on Snowden mentions this, and there is also this: http://www.people-press.org/2013/07/26/few-see-adequate-limi...)
For those concerned with digital privacy and rights, I guess the question would be how to counter this narrative of fear that from my viewpoint drives these sort of opinions.
You would get an entirely different set of answers.
Or, if you for example told them that they were currently classified by religion and political leaning, and that they are loosely associated with the bombing of abortion clinics (but don't worry, lot's of people in Indiana are)
Is that why most of it was achieved through executive order?
Actually that's not why people voted for him. Of all the issues people voted on, national security was/is at the bottom of the issues that were important to them.
While he does believe in collecting basic meta data, he supports having judicial oversight and having courts make rulings on when that meta data can be accessed:
http://truthinmedia.com/trump-supports-reauthorizing-patriot...
>> This environment of abridged civil liberties, police militarization and increased surveillance is what many Americans wanted, post 9/11.
Actually police militarization goes back to 1981, when Reagan passed the Military Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Cooperation_with_Civi...) which allowed the US Military to co-operate with local law enforcement agencies during the early days of the War on Drugs.
You also have to remember the environment at the time when the flood of cocaine into this country was turning Florida communities in war zones. Remember the 1979 Dadeland Shopping Mall killings?
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2009/10/12/cocaine-cow...
Dadeland did not just represent the year’s 37th and 38th drug homicides. The brazen assassination, at midday, in a mall packed with families and ordinary Miamians, was a worrisome escalation. Miami’s police chief told a friend that he feared the Colombians were turning Miami into Medellín. The shootings also introduced “cocaine cowboys” to millions of Americans and almost overnight gave South Florida a Wild West reputation. A prominent Miami executive, Arthur Patten, told Time: “I’ve been through two wars and no combat zone is as dangerous as Dade County.”
As a Christian, this makes perfect sense to me - hope should not have been in the government in the first place. But even if you're not a Christian (or any kind of a theist), if you look at the situation honestly, it seems pretty clear: Hope is going to have to come from somewhere else. The government isn't going to provide it. Sure, they sell hope. That's what their campaign says. But they don't actually deliver what they sell.
And whichever combination of methods is needed also often takes many years to be successful.
Take the largest ~20 cities in the US and they would be city-states while literally everything else would be a single country.
That is, there are cultural differences between the city and rural majorities, but neither group is particularly homogeneous.
It's pretty interesting to contemplate what elections would look like if all states simply apportioned their electoral votes according to Maine/Nebraska rules, or a popular-proportion scheme, and disposed of the unit rules entirely.
No, it isn't, because while different ideologies have slightly different proportions among the states, the big divide is more urban/rural than regional. Breaking up just gives you the same problems multiplied numerous times with different winners and losers in each of those fights.
The faux-participation model devolved in recent election to shout stuff on online, shout stuff at TV, shout at people listening, and cast vote for one of two scumbags. The real work that got people elected was done by a combination of campaign donors, campaign workers/volunteers, media people, marketing experts, and recently hackers. This collectively filtered the election into a small number of scumbags that voting people chose from. People wanting someone better must get into the groups I listed to help someone better get into that list and stay on it despite smear campaigns. Or use the tactics you mention after election process does what it nearly always does.