I suspect that this anti- politics is a direct result of people feeling betrayed by their political leaders. It would have been interesting if a “betrayal “ question or two were being asked over the last few decades. Betrayal generates a lot more negative emotion than many other things. How the financial crisis was handled in 2008 is a good example but there are many other incidents on both sides. I also suspect that the rise of the internet intensified this feeling of betrayal by letting like minded people understand they were not alone.
"Betrayal" is another facile evasion of the real issues. In the global financial crisis, huge difficulties were overcome; huge expenditures were made in the process of preventing what could have been a much worse crisis. Claiming "betrayal" effectively covers up the reasons for the crisis (largely earlier deregulation, failures of risk management, and lax supervision of financial institutions and markets in my view) and transfers "blame" to the (heroic) efforts made by the central banks and some governments to prevent a true melt down. There were lots of errors and missteps along the way, of course, but the problems were much more in the run-up to the crisis, not in its "handling". See Adam Tooze's Crashed, which I don't agree with 100%, but which provides a good and realistic introduction to the actual crisis, as opposed to the cartoon version thereof.
You could be very correct in that the management after the crisis was handled heroically and the issues were in the run up. But there was little to no visible accountability for what led up to this and to the average person it appeared that no leaders were held accountable and all the pain happened to the middle class. I know when this happened I was not outraged by the actions that pulled us out, I was relieved. However I was outraged that there was very little leadership accountability for what put us there. One of the opposites of betrayal is “trustworthiness”. I think there is plenty of data to show trustworthiness has gone done across almost all institutions and generic leadership. It’s not too much of a stretch to hypothesize that the feeling of being betrayed is underneath a lot of this.
This is interesting and you have a point; however, two further observations: a) the Dodd-Frank Act (difficult as it was to negotiate in Congress) did to some degree represent accountability for the previous inadequacies of regulation but of course it was very complex and has been and is now being walked back; and b) although you can't put people in jail for bad business decisions, some of the worst actors such as Fuld and Mozillo were subjected to serious civil fines and restrictive penalties by the SEC, which was perhaps not emotionally satisfying but probably represented the limits of what was legally feasible. Again, hard to explain in quick soundbites, so it is not surprising if people felt "betrayed", but the problem lay in the law as it was (and is, and as Trump is remaking it) more than in the decisions taken by those in charge at the time.
The two biggest impediments to dealing with our problems:
(1) A large majority of voters doesn't want to pay for the public services and benefits they receive. They favor cuts to other people's pet programs, but not their own. They don't want overall spending reductions if their personal benefits are affected at all. They also favor tax cuts for themselves and tax increases for others. Exceptions of course, but this is the rule.
(2) The American structure of divided government (including the Senate filibuster) makes it hard to accomplish anything and it greatly reduces accountability. When Congress and the President are from different parties or neither party has 60 Senators, they spend most of their time pointing fingers at each other, and voters don't know whom to blame for what. Politicians everywhere serve their personal interests first, which means they will do almost anything to get elected and then to stay in office or move to higher office. They will always want the other party to fail because failure increases the odds of their party coming to power at the next election. A two party parliamentary system would not bring perfect results - no system would - but at least everyone would know which party had the power and could be held accountable.
We're doomed to suffer a fiscal crisis sometime because few politicians will even hint at realistic solutions - the public wants free stuff, all gain and no pain in the form of higher taxes or meaningful spending reductions.
One - the sides compete, and the media reports the details without any conflicts of interest and with balance and lack of significant political bias. The voters are calmed with logic and pragmatic considerations.
Two - the sides compete within the media where the different media entities take sides and run like a partisan campaign operation... managing their content so that it favors their favored party and attacks and denigrates the opposing party. The voters are whipped up into emotive frenzy and politics becomes a competition completely void of logic and calm pragmatic considerations.
The former is why the founders included so much press freedom protection in our governing documents.
The risk of the latter is why the founder thought they should include so much press freedom protection in our founding documents.
What the founders did not consider was that Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street... three massive Wall Street firms that mange the assets of the globalist billionaires, would take controlling interest of 80% of the global media... and direct all the media entities to behave as #2 (pun intended)... and because the Democrat party is their globalist corporatocracy supporter home, that is the favored party and their opposition is the GOP.
I am not sure that making "politics " the exclusive possession of the Establishment is a great idea. That's how we got to where we are given their serial failure. Europe's Establishment is currently fiercely defending their monopoly using tactics like canceling elections, arresting opponents, banning main opposition parties, sabotage of referenda and firewalls. This is not remotely democratic and will eventually lead to an explosion. Remember JFK's warning about making peaceful revolution impossible.
I suppose that the approach in this article seems a convenient way to reclaim the Democratic Party for the moderates and oppose Trump at the same time but it won't work. A better way is to embrace populist ideas from left and right and fuse them into a governance system.
Trump, for all his character flaws, finds a considerable Republican pedigree with his political goals, and especially the modern-day Reagan wing of the Party. What, by contrast, does the self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders bring to the Democratic Party's goal of future electability?
Not all divergence from a party's status quo is bad, and without some directed, dynamic divergence we are left with what growing numbers of Americans dislike about politics.
It's why we have elections, and why Trump has been twice elected and Bernie Sanders or AOC will never be nationally elected.
I wouldn't be so sure about AOC. It is a 50-50 country. AOC's faction is dominant in the Democratic Party, no matter how much people here deplore that. Electoral math hangs on a few votes in a few swing states. Perhaps that changes but in this century only Obama won convincingly.
I will concede that she might be able to win the Democratic nomination, which is more an indictment of the Party's leftward drift than the strength of her candidacy. In a general election, AOC would probably fare worse than than Kamala Harris did.
Americans don’t reject representative democracy. They reject a system that has grown profoundly undemocratic and a political class that doesn’t represent them as it should under our constitution.
More than anything else, astronomically expensive election campaigns funded entirely with private donations - both features make us unique in international comparison - have hollowed out the substance of our democracy. Americans want government by the people and neither party can deliver that under the present campaign finance regime.
I think it is time to evaluate democracy as a from of government.
It has been said that democracy requires "shared values," and I see that as correct. As I reach my 83rd year, I have watched society's shared values of my youth steadily dissolve into differing interest groups, with the concurrent downward spiral of our country's decency and capability.
Our human egos prevent us from fully evaluating our human nature, and without an understanding of ourselves, we make poor stewards of democracy. What makes me think we cannot look at our behavior critically? I have come across three quotes in my lifetime that deserve serious, critical thought:
1. “We cannot afford to forget that public order, personal security, economic and social progress, and prosperity are not the natural order of things.”
Lee Kuan Yew, "From the Third World to the First"
2. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the governance of any other.” Note: I am not religious.
John Adams to the officers of the first brigade of the third division of the militia of Massachusetts in "The Works of John Adams"
3. "The difference between Liberals and Conservatives is that Liberals believe that human beings, if left to themselves, will generally do the right thing, while Conservatives are under no such illusion,"
Dorothy Rabinowitz writing in the Wall Street Journal
Please forgive possible paraphrasing, as I am not a scholar. I consider these to be the Three Commandments for an operating democracy. Have you ever seen these before? The fact that this type of thinking is ignored in democracies seals our fate.
Bernie & AOC: Their supporters are all in on the myth that if 3.5% of the US population is in the 'Resistance' - a revolution will follow, like night follows day. Some have speculated that the Bernie & AOC rallies plus the Tesla protests, etc., are garnering 1% of the population - paving the way to 3.5%.
At apox 340 million population, at 1% that would mean 3.4 million people are participating in protests right now. To get to 3.5% that would involve 12 million people. Assuming Bernie & AOC average 5k per rally, they would have to do 680 rallies just to acheive that 1%.
Reality: Good candidates, plus registering voters, plus an intensive get out the vote effort leads to victory.
Interesting analysis. "Anti-politics" is like "bullying": bullying is something the other side does (Israelis or Palestinians, or take your pick from any pair of opponents); it's never something you or your side does. "Politics" or "Washington politics" or "betrayal" or (or pick your slur) is something the others do. This effectively avoids having to discuss real policy issues or the trade-offs that a complex society and economy inevitably require or the sacrifices that you (or they) may have to make. It is an evasion of reality, of complexity, of difficulty: it is sand in your own eyes, and an attempt at sand in the eyes of your opponents.
I loved the description of Trump's agenda in the I think fifth paragraph.
"his own whims, lifelong obsessions, demands for fealty, and attacks on anyone or anything that gets in his way."
I have to admit to being more amused than fearful. It might well be true but at least the fellow gets some things done.
Sanders' has morphed into being anti oligarch as too many of his supporters were of the 1%. His supporters are sick of having to wait for someone to die in order to inherit.
I'd give both sides credit for legitimately having something to complain about, issues that have very broad support never pass as they run contrary to the wishes of Wall Street.
Trump like Biden is learning a hard political lesson. When voters are concerned about their cost of living, the promise of more manufacturing jobs in the future is not an effective response to the reality of higher prices.
Accelerationist outcomes also come in right- and left-wing flavors, coincidentally.
*If* the populist flavor continues to stay en vogue, I am going to at least be amused to watch the next Democratic president thrust National Healthcare into existence via executive order, and dare the courts to stop him. The can of worms strongmen like Trump open up do runneth over.
I suspect that this anti- politics is a direct result of people feeling betrayed by their political leaders. It would have been interesting if a “betrayal “ question or two were being asked over the last few decades. Betrayal generates a lot more negative emotion than many other things. How the financial crisis was handled in 2008 is a good example but there are many other incidents on both sides. I also suspect that the rise of the internet intensified this feeling of betrayal by letting like minded people understand they were not alone.
"Betrayal" is another facile evasion of the real issues. In the global financial crisis, huge difficulties were overcome; huge expenditures were made in the process of preventing what could have been a much worse crisis. Claiming "betrayal" effectively covers up the reasons for the crisis (largely earlier deregulation, failures of risk management, and lax supervision of financial institutions and markets in my view) and transfers "blame" to the (heroic) efforts made by the central banks and some governments to prevent a true melt down. There were lots of errors and missteps along the way, of course, but the problems were much more in the run-up to the crisis, not in its "handling". See Adam Tooze's Crashed, which I don't agree with 100%, but which provides a good and realistic introduction to the actual crisis, as opposed to the cartoon version thereof.
You could be very correct in that the management after the crisis was handled heroically and the issues were in the run up. But there was little to no visible accountability for what led up to this and to the average person it appeared that no leaders were held accountable and all the pain happened to the middle class. I know when this happened I was not outraged by the actions that pulled us out, I was relieved. However I was outraged that there was very little leadership accountability for what put us there. One of the opposites of betrayal is “trustworthiness”. I think there is plenty of data to show trustworthiness has gone done across almost all institutions and generic leadership. It’s not too much of a stretch to hypothesize that the feeling of being betrayed is underneath a lot of this.
This is interesting and you have a point; however, two further observations: a) the Dodd-Frank Act (difficult as it was to negotiate in Congress) did to some degree represent accountability for the previous inadequacies of regulation but of course it was very complex and has been and is now being walked back; and b) although you can't put people in jail for bad business decisions, some of the worst actors such as Fuld and Mozillo were subjected to serious civil fines and restrictive penalties by the SEC, which was perhaps not emotionally satisfying but probably represented the limits of what was legally feasible. Again, hard to explain in quick soundbites, so it is not surprising if people felt "betrayed", but the problem lay in the law as it was (and is, and as Trump is remaking it) more than in the decisions taken by those in charge at the time.
The two biggest impediments to dealing with our problems:
(1) A large majority of voters doesn't want to pay for the public services and benefits they receive. They favor cuts to other people's pet programs, but not their own. They don't want overall spending reductions if their personal benefits are affected at all. They also favor tax cuts for themselves and tax increases for others. Exceptions of course, but this is the rule.
(2) The American structure of divided government (including the Senate filibuster) makes it hard to accomplish anything and it greatly reduces accountability. When Congress and the President are from different parties or neither party has 60 Senators, they spend most of their time pointing fingers at each other, and voters don't know whom to blame for what. Politicians everywhere serve their personal interests first, which means they will do almost anything to get elected and then to stay in office or move to higher office. They will always want the other party to fail because failure increases the odds of their party coming to power at the next election. A two party parliamentary system would not bring perfect results - no system would - but at least everyone would know which party had the power and could be held accountable.
We're doomed to suffer a fiscal crisis sometime because few politicians will even hint at realistic solutions - the public wants free stuff, all gain and no pain in the form of higher taxes or meaningful spending reductions.
Except for the filibuster, that was by design by the Founders. But they didn't imagine the frozen partisanship of today.
There are two versions of American politics.
One - the sides compete, and the media reports the details without any conflicts of interest and with balance and lack of significant political bias. The voters are calmed with logic and pragmatic considerations.
Two - the sides compete within the media where the different media entities take sides and run like a partisan campaign operation... managing their content so that it favors their favored party and attacks and denigrates the opposing party. The voters are whipped up into emotive frenzy and politics becomes a competition completely void of logic and calm pragmatic considerations.
The former is why the founders included so much press freedom protection in our governing documents.
The risk of the latter is why the founder thought they should include so much press freedom protection in our founding documents.
What the founders did not consider was that Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street... three massive Wall Street firms that mange the assets of the globalist billionaires, would take controlling interest of 80% of the global media... and direct all the media entities to behave as #2 (pun intended)... and because the Democrat party is their globalist corporatocracy supporter home, that is the favored party and their opposition is the GOP.
I am not sure that making "politics " the exclusive possession of the Establishment is a great idea. That's how we got to where we are given their serial failure. Europe's Establishment is currently fiercely defending their monopoly using tactics like canceling elections, arresting opponents, banning main opposition parties, sabotage of referenda and firewalls. This is not remotely democratic and will eventually lead to an explosion. Remember JFK's warning about making peaceful revolution impossible.
I suppose that the approach in this article seems a convenient way to reclaim the Democratic Party for the moderates and oppose Trump at the same time but it won't work. A better way is to embrace populist ideas from left and right and fuse them into a governance system.
Trump, for all his character flaws, finds a considerable Republican pedigree with his political goals, and especially the modern-day Reagan wing of the Party. What, by contrast, does the self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders bring to the Democratic Party's goal of future electability?
Not all divergence from a party's status quo is bad, and without some directed, dynamic divergence we are left with what growing numbers of Americans dislike about politics.
It's why we have elections, and why Trump has been twice elected and Bernie Sanders or AOC will never be nationally elected.
I wouldn't be so sure about AOC. It is a 50-50 country. AOC's faction is dominant in the Democratic Party, no matter how much people here deplore that. Electoral math hangs on a few votes in a few swing states. Perhaps that changes but in this century only Obama won convincingly.
I will concede that she might be able to win the Democratic nomination, which is more an indictment of the Party's leftward drift than the strength of her candidacy. In a general election, AOC would probably fare worse than than Kamala Harris did.
Depends on events during the next 4 years.
True, especially the economy.
Americans don’t reject representative democracy. They reject a system that has grown profoundly undemocratic and a political class that doesn’t represent them as it should under our constitution.
More than anything else, astronomically expensive election campaigns funded entirely with private donations - both features make us unique in international comparison - have hollowed out the substance of our democracy. Americans want government by the people and neither party can deliver that under the present campaign finance regime.
www.savedemocracyinamerica.org
I think it is time to evaluate democracy as a from of government.
It has been said that democracy requires "shared values," and I see that as correct. As I reach my 83rd year, I have watched society's shared values of my youth steadily dissolve into differing interest groups, with the concurrent downward spiral of our country's decency and capability.
Our human egos prevent us from fully evaluating our human nature, and without an understanding of ourselves, we make poor stewards of democracy. What makes me think we cannot look at our behavior critically? I have come across three quotes in my lifetime that deserve serious, critical thought:
1. “We cannot afford to forget that public order, personal security, economic and social progress, and prosperity are not the natural order of things.”
Lee Kuan Yew, "From the Third World to the First"
2. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the governance of any other.” Note: I am not religious.
John Adams to the officers of the first brigade of the third division of the militia of Massachusetts in "The Works of John Adams"
3. "The difference between Liberals and Conservatives is that Liberals believe that human beings, if left to themselves, will generally do the right thing, while Conservatives are under no such illusion,"
Dorothy Rabinowitz writing in the Wall Street Journal
Please forgive possible paraphrasing, as I am not a scholar. I consider these to be the Three Commandments for an operating democracy. Have you ever seen these before? The fact that this type of thinking is ignored in democracies seals our fate.
Bernie & AOC: Their supporters are all in on the myth that if 3.5% of the US population is in the 'Resistance' - a revolution will follow, like night follows day. Some have speculated that the Bernie & AOC rallies plus the Tesla protests, etc., are garnering 1% of the population - paving the way to 3.5%.
At apox 340 million population, at 1% that would mean 3.4 million people are participating in protests right now. To get to 3.5% that would involve 12 million people. Assuming Bernie & AOC average 5k per rally, they would have to do 680 rallies just to acheive that 1%.
Reality: Good candidates, plus registering voters, plus an intensive get out the vote effort leads to victory.
Interesting analysis. "Anti-politics" is like "bullying": bullying is something the other side does (Israelis or Palestinians, or take your pick from any pair of opponents); it's never something you or your side does. "Politics" or "Washington politics" or "betrayal" or (or pick your slur) is something the others do. This effectively avoids having to discuss real policy issues or the trade-offs that a complex society and economy inevitably require or the sacrifices that you (or they) may have to make. It is an evasion of reality, of complexity, of difficulty: it is sand in your own eyes, and an attempt at sand in the eyes of your opponents.
I loved the description of Trump's agenda in the I think fifth paragraph.
"his own whims, lifelong obsessions, demands for fealty, and attacks on anyone or anything that gets in his way."
I have to admit to being more amused than fearful. It might well be true but at least the fellow gets some things done.
Sanders' has morphed into being anti oligarch as too many of his supporters were of the 1%. His supporters are sick of having to wait for someone to die in order to inherit.
I'd give both sides credit for legitimately having something to complain about, issues that have very broad support never pass as they run contrary to the wishes of Wall Street.
Trump like Biden is learning a hard political lesson. When voters are concerned about their cost of living, the promise of more manufacturing jobs in the future is not an effective response to the reality of higher prices.
Accelerationist outcomes also come in right- and left-wing flavors, coincidentally.
*If* the populist flavor continues to stay en vogue, I am going to at least be amused to watch the next Democratic president thrust National Healthcare into existence via executive order, and dare the courts to stop him. The can of worms strongmen like Trump open up do runneth over.