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Comment by saraid216 | Hacker News Reader

> American "democracy" has degenerated into a circus the permanent government uses to decide which frontman serves its interest better.

Can you actually point to a period of time when things were better?

Framing the problem as one of degeneration, rather than as one of inadequacy, is in my opinion one of the most critical problems with our approaches to change. It makes us look for ways to repeal implemented changes assuming that we'll regain a golden era by doing so, rather than actually looking at the situation, operating from first principles, and building something actually effective.

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A problem with broken democracy that reinforces what you point to is that most people can point to a period of time that seems better to them, because the broken system was producing outputs more to their liking, even with the same flaws.

Another factor is that changing external circumstances and changing degrees of sophistication of internal actors in exploiting the system can produce misleading apparent shifts in how broken or not the underlying system is.

>Framing the problem as one of degeneration, rather than as one of inadequacy, is in my opinion one of the most critical problems with our approaches to change.

This is the smartest sentence I've read on any topic so far this week. It's an insightful comment with applications in many other domains as well (e.g., IT, data security, etc.).

"Can you actually point to a period of time when things were better?"

Yesterday.

And yesterday, the answer would have been, yesterday. And so on.

Literally, day by day it gets worse. So, the day before was clearly a time when things were better.

Before too long you'll hit some pretty terrible times in American democracy. McCarthyism, internment camps, slavery, trail of tears, witch burnings, and on and on all the way back to the beginning.

So which changes, exactly, do you propose to rollback in order to get to yesterday? And which changes to get to the day before that?

If you tell me that "day by day it gets worse", then you need to explain day by day how it gets worse, in concrete and specific detail. Otherwise you're just spouting empty rhetoric and doomsaying.

Sounds like something by the Bee-Gees.

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