As an non-american this baffles me.
Why is there so much distrust towards the government, police, and military in US ? Isn't the US the oldest democracy ?
Society is built on trust - once that doesn't exist then nothing gets done.
Why is there so much distrust towards the government, police, and military in US ? Isn't the US the oldest democracy ?
Society is built on trust - once that doesn't exist then nothing gets done.
Alright quick pet peeve: First off I agree that the constitution was specifically written to make it hard for a dictatorship and or tyrannical government.
But my pet peeve is: You cannot use the 2nd amendment as an example of that. It was written four years later and by almost a completely different set of people.
The original text of the Constitution was written by people tired of the failings of a weak government and wanting to replace it with a much stronger one. The bill of rights, including the 2nd Amendment, was written to mitigate the fears of a significant but somewhat less prominent faction that feared that without the express boundaries it provided, a stronger central government would become too strong.
1) Enumerating the powers of the executive. There will be no King George in America!
2) Designing the checks & balances system such that (in theory) no one of legislative, executive, judicial could become too powerful to override the other two.
3) As you mentioned, the inclusion of the second amendment (and third, fourth, eighth) were all designed to prevent repeating problems the colonists faced before the war.
4) Tenth amendment was added to further strip the federal government of its non-enumerated powers.
The framers wanted something stronger than AoC, but they were very clear in their desire to limit the power of the federal government. They wanted a weak executive, and the legislative, particularly the Senate, was designed to be the main "doer of things".
The executive was initially quite powerless on purpose. When Jefferson tried to do the Louisiana Purchase, people challenged whether the executive had this power. Andrew Jackson then came along and began the journey of expanding the powers of the executive, followed by Lincoln suspending habeus corpus, and more modern figures such as FDR with the internment camps and New Deal all continuing to expand these powers. While this is obviously only a partial list of expansion, it contains several notable examples.
And, there's a deep distrust of centralized authority in American history. Up until the closing I'd the western frontier (1890s), that distrust could be mollified by moving to 'unsettled' land. Then the USA had a almost a century of increasing government size and action, and then the Reagan reaction I mention above.
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2012/03/per...
I don't think you speak on behalf on all non-Americans. As an Eastern European, I can perfectly understand mistrust of government and police (and I think people from many other countries can share these feelings).
No. They're one of the youngest. The English empire had a parliamentary system when the US left, that's where the whole "taxation without representation" thing comes from, they didn't get a representative in the English parliament.
In fact the US governmental system is largely influenced by the English government system (with several changes made due to lack of monarch, and a need to elect 100% of their government as a policy).
PS - Before you argue that "if people are appointed it isn't a democracy!" you may want to think that position though, the two houses and the president are elected, but most other positions remain appointed in the US (e.g. supreme court for just one example).
PPS - I'd also argue that any FPTP system is only "barely" a democratic system since by design a vast majority of people feel they have no one who really represents their interests in either house. Instead of minority voices getting one seat, they get none, see the Nordic countries for how it should work in a democracy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_%28United_Sta...
The people of Bangladesh fairly elected Sheikh Mujib but for some reason the government didnt want a bengali as the president and that was a good reason to overthrow the government.
If Obama won the election by a decisive victory and someone said "hey! that was joke - we are putting Mitt Romney in power". That would be a good cause to rebel against the government don't you think ?
My concern is that the american people are able to elect their representative and the same time seem to have a deep mistrust towards them. That is what I am brining up.
Having distrust towards your government is healthy - but just like everything, taking that ideology too far can be problematic as things needs to get done. Roads cannot be built if people think the government is up to something nefarious. I remember a paul graham article where he talks about "putting checks in a system" , it reminds of software systems that have validation set up. Do you think any software system can run with having validation every-time you pass an value to a function ? We put validation only in cases where the cost of putting it ( time-efficiency , memory ) is lower than the cost of security.
I hope that analogy makes sense.
But I don't know why you cite Obama's election favorably. He ran on a platform opposing an individual mandate and then personally pulled the "hey! that was a joke - Obamacare time." Before him, Bush ran on a platform of humble foreign policy and limited government and then pulled "hey! that was a joke".
I'm not sure why "hey! that was a joke" is horrible when applied to a person, but acceptable when applied to policies. But then again I don't really go for identity politics - e.g., I don't care if the president is a Bengali or not, I care what actions he takes. (I'm also not pro-democracy.)
Do you think any software system can run with having validation every-time you pass an value to a function ? We put validation only in cases where the cost of putting it ( time-efficiency , memory ) is lower than the cost of security.
I believe the future of computing will be in dependently typed languages (e.g. Idris) which do exactly this sort of thing at compile time.
Let me quote Bret Stephens' take on the matter, writing in the (Republican-leaning) Wall Street Journal --
"Sometime in the 1990s I began to understand the Clinton way of lying, and why it was so successful. To you and me, the Clinton lies were statements demonstrably at variance with the truth, and therefore wrong and shameful. But to the initiated they were an invitation to an intoxicating secret knowledge.
What was this knowledge? That the lying was for the greater good, usually to fend off some form of Republican malevolence. What was so intoxicating? That the initiated were smart enough to see through it all. Why be scandalized when they could be amused? Why moralize when they could collude?"
-- http://www.wsj.com/articles/hillary-and-the-liberal-way-of-l...
Disclaimer. No representation is made in this comment as to the exclusivity or generality of this manner of lying to any particular political parties, politicians, or nations -- that is left as an exercise to the reader.
The US became a democracy in no small part because there was so much distrust towards the government, police and military right there at the get-go... and the distrust of the system that is built into the system (the whole three-branch, checks-and-balances system) is one of the reasons it has never veered off into a deranged dictatorship like, say, ancient Rome.
(I mean, the power and longevity of the FDR administration was pretty insane -- probably the closest we got to that -- but nothing like Julius Caesar).
No. Not by about 2500 years in ancient Greece.
http://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,,-80426,0...
(at least, I tend to think that the modern concept of democracy is bound up with self determination, something that ancient Greece sort of did not have, nor did the US when it was founded)
NSA revelations, "I'm going to close GITMO", "weapons of mass destruction", "I did not have sexual relations with that women"... This list goes on and on.
Trust is out of the question at this point for many people. The word gullible comes to mind.
For the record, I don't mistrust the government. I think most of it is low level bureaucracy that somewhat functions, (albeit a bit inefficiently), and basically keeps things running. But it is run by people. And historically most people have been lazy, a bit stupid, and corruptible. But there isn't necessarily a pernicious conspiracy. And I would let the government prepare my taxes. As long as they have good software and it isn't a politician doing it.
Well, for one thing because certain factions (heavily represented, oddly enough, in government, including the police and military) actively promote that distrust to get more power for themselves. This doesn't seem like it would work, but it has more than one would think.
> Isn't the US the oldest democracy ?
US politicians, especially recently, have taken to claiming that a lot, but you'd probably have to construct a very special definition of democracy for that to be even arguably true.
What's happened to actual Americans is nothing compared to what the Pakistani Government did to East Pakistan in 1971... but it happens over and over again, the global consequences have been huge and terrible, and the wealth and political power of most Americans have been systematically eroded by it. Even small betrayals accumulate to significant mistrust.
Maybe I'm kinda scared since it's the most powerful country in the world, so the whole world might be influenced by how crappy those politics are. Capitalism is everywhere, tax dodging is rampant, and it all seems to seed from american capitalism.
I'm not anti american, I love so many things about the US, but there are particular aspects that are just so senseless.
My guess is that relatively few people, of those who currently prepare their own returns, would invest as much time and effort into verifying an IRS-prepared return as they do in preparing one. I would also guess that a majority of swing voters prepare their own returns (I know, that's a fair amount of supposition on my part...)
I think the the emotional impact is important: preparing a return is still burdensome, even if not as bad as it could be, and that adds to and reinforces the pile of negative emotions associated with taxation.
I've tried telling people to save even just $50/mo. until they've built up a three month cushion, and they insist they can't afford that. You wanna try convincing them to also set aside a few hundred bucks a month for taxes?
> Society is built on trust
Well in US there are like 2 levels of government, the state gvt and the federal one. Some people think the federal gvt is despotic and abuses the powers granted by the constitution.