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Comment by mixonic | Hacker News Reader

"One objective reality is that our government doesn’t work, not because we have dysfunctional politicians, but because we have dysfunctional voters."

We have a dysfunctional political system that provides voters with leaders who are compromised. Who then pander, rabble-rouse, and pick narrow issues to speak loudly about to raise money. Who then lose our trust and respect, corrupting the institution. Voters are not too "dysfunctional" or ill-informed to make reasonable decisions. Approval of the US Congress was at %10 in August, the lowest in 38 years. The electorate isn't smiling through the failures of government.

The People are not the problem. I think Tyson would have answered different after a few hours with Lessig. Blaming governement's failures on a ill-informed electorate is second-rate at best.

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> Voters are not too "dysfunctional" or ill-informed to make reasonable decisions. Approval of the US Congress was at %10 in August, the lowest in 38 years. The electorate isn't smiling through the failures of government.

The 10% approval with Congress is only half the story. Those same people will tell you that they're 80-90% satisfied with their own congressional representatives. The reason the electorate is so dissatisfied with Congress as a whole is because they think either things aren't getting done, or they aren't going their way. Both are true.

And yes, voters are ill-informed and unlikely to make reasonable decisions. One needs look no further than Glenn Beck and the conspiracy material he peddled for several years to see how far the news has gotten from reporting actual news. I remember the "cash 4 gold" advertisements being prominent during his show; do you think that informed people were the ones making that business viable enough to advertise like they did?

A media that relies more on data, that provides context and scope; this is what we need to have to get informed voters, but a lot of people aren't smart enough to place value on that when they can get a daily dose of things to rage about and blame for their issues with the world. (I would further argue that people of lower socioeconomic status simply don't have the time or energy to deal with complex information when they're mostly focused on making ends meet, but that's a separate argument).

>>"The 10% approval with Congress is only half the story. Those same people will tell you that they're 80-90% satisfied with their own congressional representatives. The reason the electorate is so dissatisfied with Congress as a whole is because they think either things aren't getting done, or they aren't going their way. Both are true."

Very good point, reminds me of the Demotivational poster, "Meetings - none of us are as dumb as all of us."

http://www.despair.com/meetings.html

A political system that effectively rules out more than two contenders can't be greatly representative, since it's easy for the two contenders to collude - even unwittingly - and provide no effective choice.

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