Is this typical of all governments with elected representation? Are they solving different organizational problems that most people are not aware of? I am curious how such a system arises, maintains itself, and is resilient to change.
'that rich people and organizations representing business interests have a powerful grip on U.S. government policy. After examining differences in public opinion across income groups on a wide variety of issues, the political scientists Martin Gilens, of Princeton, and Benjamin Page, of Northwestern, found that the preferences of rich people had a much bigger impact on subsequent policy decisions than the views of middle-income and poor Americans. Indeed, the opinions of lower-income groups, and the interest groups that represent them, appear to have little or no independent impact on policy.
“Our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts,” Gilens and Page write:
Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.
In their conclusion, Gilens and Page go even further, asserting that “In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover … even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.”'
compare this to actual oligarchies where opposition parties actually can't accomplish anything because they're denied access to elections, or there's legitimate election fraud, or serious voter intimidation, et cetera.
and policy outcomes being determines by random people is actually awful, the average person has absolutely no understanding of basic economics. it's not even desirable.
That the average American has approximately zero influence in politics is a mathematical, deliberately orchestrated truth.
The primary reason that dollars have such an impact on elections is because dollars get spent on advertising and on canvassing and on outreach, and the impact of those things is that it gets your candidate more votes from more people who otherwise wouldn’t have bothered to vote. The way that dollars buy elections is via people voting.
There’s plenty of rational debate to be had about gerrymandering and campaign finance and a whole host of topics, but to throw our hands in the air and say that votes don’t matter is nonsense.
The alternative is that you can't make documentaries about a candidate's bad climate change policy and monetize it as you would a non-contentious issue.
> That the average American has approximately zero influence in politics is a mathematical, deliberately orchestrated truth.
Neither does the individual "economic elite", defined as anyone in the top 10%.
People can complain about the two party system all they want, but ranked choice voting was just rejected in Massachusetts, the most liberal state there is (and I'd be correct to assume that Democrats have more reason to desire this than Republicans).
Gerrymandering is bad and needs to be disposed of. We aren't an oligarchy because there's some gerrymandering.
Money in politics is vastly overrated, and there isn't even that much money in the field to begin with. Bernie Sanders didn't lose his 2020 primary because of money, Trump didn't win his 2016 primary because of money.
That does not seem correct based on the study. 100% popular support increases chances of a measure passing by 0%. If even a small percentage remains politically active, 100% population support should make some difference, and it doesn't.
Secondly, I believe it confuses cause and effect. At some level, people have cognizance that their efforts make no difference, so they don't bother.
Denying access to elections and legitimate election fraud seem worse. However, I feel this underestimates invisible power. It doesn't take overt violence or the threat thereof to thwart democracy. In American politics, money does the trick. We need lobbying outlawed, and to prevent the revolving door between government and big industry allowing for things like regulatory capture. Pointing to lack of overtly violent means used to thwart democracy proves nothing.
As for regular people determining policy, you might have a point. However, between regular people and ultra wealthy people making the laws for their own benefit, I'll take the flawed-from-ignorance laws of the common man over the flawed-by-greed laws of the elite. We should also perhaps try democracy before writing it off. We haven't gotten there yet.
People say a lot of things. People mostly agree with universal background checks for guns. It isn't the Evil Rich People preventing this from happening, and the NRA isn't particularly rich itself even though it's a popular bogeyman.
People talk a lot about climate change until it's time to shape policy on it. Someone answering a poll question doesn't matter, what people vote for matters.
Your argument comes from a fantasy where most people actually agree with you, but the lobbyists just prevent things from changing. In reality, many people are very poorly informed. People don't understand just how powerful political mobilization and voting is. I agree that they think voting won't do anything, but they'd be wrong about that.
If you think what someone answers to an opinion poll matters here, you're just wrong. Show me people voting based on these issues as a primary factor and not seeing results because politicians magically change their minds after winning.
"economic elite" is literally defined as anyone in the top 10% of income by that study. Guess what income group always votes? Those same people. And they're going to be the ones pressing for action the most. [2] And they are more educated, so it's stupid to compare public opinion like this. You need to compare expert consensus to policy and public opinion.
Not to mention the Electoral College and Senate.
What data do you expect?
[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/obamacare-vs-affordable-care-... [2] https://econofact.org/voting-and-income
> some voter disenfranchisement
> denied access to elections
> legitimate election fraud
> serious voter intimidation
I don’t completely disagree with you: people do have agency at the end of the day in the US. That said, let’s be careful not to fall into Scotsman fallacies where we don’t accept more subtle forms of oligarchy because they don’t fit our “1984”-esque imagination. Southern states have long histories of subtle voter disenfranchisement (requiring licenses or certificates that Black Americans have in lower percentages, placing polling stations in strategic locations, requiring money to discourage the poor from voting (who lean left), etc.) and it’s short-sighted to “No true Scotsman” that and say “well, it’s not an actual oligarchy because technically people still can vote.” One, in the vein of Niemoller’s “First they came...”, it ignores warning signs or red flags difficult to reverse until it’s too late. Second, it puts the focus on the individual. Sure, people can still vote. They can take off their $#!@ job for a few hours even though their boss is an @$$#@!€ and they need every dollar they can get, take the bus to the voting station 30 minutes away, wait in the line for potentially hours (I waited in just the primary line for 8 hours and I lived in West LA (Democrat, richer, etc.) at the time), only to be told they need a driver’s license which they’ve never had because they’ve never been able to afford a car. Or they actually do have, but this is just one person and most of their friends aren’t voting. Sure, this is possible. But then I ask you to reflect on the purpose of a democratic government if not to enable fair, free, and accessible elections? Especially now that the incumbent president is sueing and refusing to accept the results in a - I don’t way to say decisive, but clear perhaps - election, I guess I would like to know what it takes to consider that “legitimate election fraud”? Is it simply missing the f@$cist aesthetic of red, black, echo-y microphones over a rabid crowd, tanks and semi-automatics down the streets? Once again, once things progress to that level, it might be too late, but that doesn’t mean our current circumstances are any “less” of an “actual oligarchy” just because theyre not as obvious. IMO
Play on a particular grievance or issue of a voter and they'll let you do almost anything else. Be anti-immigrant and you can destroy social wellness programs, stomp on unions, etc.
The average person votes on rhetoric not actions, like voting record. All you got to do is give them a reason to vote for you, and it helps to have an excuse for your actions to prevent political attacks (like the quote above) and your voters will turn a blind eye to everything else.
Universal healthcare -- illegal immigrants!
Robust social safety nets -- the classic "black welfare mother with a Cadillac" canard that comes up every time, where trillions in corporate welfare get a pass by angering people about some hypothetical minority "taking advantage"
Universal income -- black mothers with lots of babies taking advantage
It's incredible, but the modern GOP plays it like a fiddle. It is extraordinary, and the public is willingly complicit.
Here is the basic flow:
- Get elected by lying to voters and/or suppressing the vote
- Use power to choose your own voters / write laws to suppress voters who are against you
- Repeat
So in effect, many elected officials can safely ignore constiuent's wishes because either: not enough can / will vote against you or you can use your power to make sure they can't vote against you.
Then you have the issue of politicians being given bribes... I mean... lobbying money to do what corporations want.
https://publicintegrity.org/politics/state-politics/copy-pas...
How are we even supposed to know what got crammed in there? You'd need a 100 person team, fluent in legalese, reading through 50+ pages to simply learn what comprises this monster in the 1 day they gave them to vote on it.
I feel like in this instance, the number of people who would say "congress should make cracking down on streaming a priority" is near zero, but maybe the number of people who would say "it should be illegal to intentionally host copyrighted material" might be pretty high.
All and all, donors have a huge role to play in determining the outcome of an election as securing funding and political connections with a major party is essential to a successful election. As such, US representatives tend to focus heavily on big donor wishes.
Also, insider trading appears to be somewhat of a problem in Washington these days. There is likely a lot of behind the scenes stuff going on. Why else would an already wealthy individual take a 174k/yr job?
People complain about do nothing congress and stagnation, then vote in hardcore right wing conspiracy theorist QAnon candidates who are unlikely to pass real legislation.
But I think the biggest problem is centralization of media control.
Copyright allows the media to be controlled by tiny fraction <1% of the population.
Control the media and it becomes a lot easier to get away with lying.
We need to #AbolishCopyright
> Is it the high barrier of entry that limits these businesses?
No. Entering isn't hard, it's surviving, particularly if you are good. It's the near impossibility to compete against the big players because of copyright and patent laws.
Without abolishing these unfair laws, you cannot disrupt them. You cannot displace them.
When I was at Microsoft I saw the advantages first hand. If I had the blessing of the C-Suite, I could go and squash any business I wanted to as long as they weren't Apple, Google, Amazon, or Facebook.
Look at Slack, GitHub, LinkedIn, etc. Huge successes, and yet at the end of the day realized they couldn't be viable without joining one of the big dogs.
The problem is those big dogs are black holes sucking up an enormous amount of information, that you cannot take with you if you leave because of #imaginaryproperty laws, and hence you are always at a huge information disadvantage if you try and compete against them and will get squashed.
Come up with a great new Saas app? At some point if you're successful you will have to sell to one of them, or some exec will decide they'd like to take over your market and leverage their information advantage against you—good luck hanging on to your top talent when the big players offer them 3x the salary and job security; good luck building your sales pipelines when the big dogs have access to your customer list and purchasing decision makers with a snap of their fingers; good luck hanging on to your suppliers when the big dogs offer better terms; good luck acquiring customers when the big dogs have 1/10th the CAC.
I loved and was in awe of the talent of the people at Microsoft. But they don't need the #ImaginaryProperty protections. It makes them do shittier work and makes us all worse off (and the only affect is a redistribution of wealth to the top 1%).
I suppose without copyright laws, the small players could coexist but remain small...