THIS POST IS BY MANDOS, NOT IAN
The fundamental unit of representative democracy in the vertically-stacked, hierarchical systems of governance of most modern states that claim to be democratic is the political career of the individual representative, not, as it might seem on the surface to some, the vote. This is necessarily the case, because during the term of representation, the representative is only bound at best indirectly to the will of the voters, and in formal terms, principally through the risk of being rewarded or punished at the next election through the ballot box. The reward of cushy post-office positions and honours, effectively post hoc bribery, is not “formally” a part of the system in the way that losing office definitely is.
The representative is therefore an independent agent, subject to incentives and disincentives, even under the condition of the best intentions and personal incorruptibility. The purest-intentioned elected representative must thus weigh the good that can be done now in terms of their official powers against the risk of losing office — thereby losing the ability to do future good at a critical juncture, and worse, potentially losing the position to someone who will use the power to actively do evil/harm, from the perspective of the current representative or candidate. This means that this hypothetical “best-intentioned representative” is constantly faced with the possibility that foregoing good or accepting an evil may extend their term of office to do greater good and that doing good or rejecting evil may end their term of office and usher in a greater evil.
In our large-population, modern states with elaborate political hierarchies (municipal, county, state/provincial, national/federal, with multiple branches, etc.), it takes considerable resources to operate a candidacy, because one is usually competing against other candidates for the attention of a large number of voters. Such systems vary across countries, but this fact is the same in all cases under conditions of formal electoral freedom. Even under ideal conditions of equitable campaign financing and media access, election campaigns will still differ in resources relative to the effectiveness of their message and numerous, difficult-to-control conditions relating to the number of activists and volunteers that can be mustered to raise awareness, bring voters to the polls, and so on. Furthermore, because the system is hierarchical, again, with other conditions being hypothetically equal, very few (personally ideal) candidates can be successful trying to start at the “top” of the system (e.g., president, prime minister), but instead must fight the electoral battle upstream, if they have the ambition of doing good at a larger scale.
All of this necessarily becomes part of the incentive calculation for our hypothetically best-intentioned candidate. Simply put, such a candidate must factor in the ability to maintain a stable support base to pursue a political career not only to implement one good policy or piece of legislation, but over time, and upwards in the hierarchy. (Indeed, not at least appearing to strive for status-improvement in the hierarchy in the future may weaken a representative’s ability to enact policy in the present, by causing their colleagues to filter out their future influence on said colleagues’ own political careers.)
What does this mean for the role of ideology and material benefit in the political system? Quite simply, both are effectively marginal/tangential to the system as a whole. The main currency of representative democracy is politics itself, whereby good or at least ideologically-consistent policy is a by-product created by interactions among representatives who must necessarily balance all decisions against the benefit of continuing their political careers. This, I must emphasize once again, is under the hypothetical conditions of maximum honesty and good intentions among such representatives, conditions that of course we do not obtain in the real world.
Anyone, inside or outside the formal houses of representative democracy, who is principally interested in an ideological or material aim that they believe must be achieved through legislature or state orders, is therefore also constrained to consider the incentive structure of representative democracy in terms of the political career of the representatives. This means, even given ideal circumstances of personal probity and ideological alignment which do not hold in the real world, that they must provide a stable basis upon which a significant number of representatives can resolve the choice between doing good now and doing good later at the minimal total “goodness cost” overall. Ideological movements that are not able to supply an close-to-optimal resolution between these choices will, one way or another, not be able to obtain the cooperation of sufficient representatives as to implement policy.
Then, factor in the reality that we do not live in an ideal world of equal financial resources, media time, personal probity, ideological commitment, and so on…
Herman
I don’t have a problem with compromise or even some degree of lesser-evilism in politics. Heck I even think that we should bring pork back in order to get things done. LBJ got the 1964 civil rights bill passed in part by promising House Republican leader Charles Halleck of Indiana a NASA research grant for his district. The cost of pork was always exaggerated and a lot of it was probably beneficial to the people in their respective districts.
Contrary to what many people think the problem today IS too much ideology and not enough politics, or at least the sausage-making kind of politics. American politics is heavily influenced by ideologues who dominate the ranks of party activists, provide the foot soldiers for campaigns and the money for candidates. When the American primary system was opened up and power taken away from party bosses in the 1970s it was supposed to lead to a flourishing of democracy but what the reformers failed to note was that most people are not very interested in politics so you end up with the most extreme activists running everything almost by default. That is why culture war issues like abortion continue to be so important to both parties even though poll after poll shows that most Americans don’t rank abortion highly as an important issue and mostly hold a moderate position (sometimes legal, sometimes not depending on the circumstances) compared to the more extreme absolutist stances taken by the two parties.
On the other hand, pro-poor, pro-worker economics has been downplayed because most activist types are affluent so they are not terribly interested in economics unless it is right-wing economics. This explains why the Democrats are a center-right party on economics and a left-wing party on social and cultural issues. The activists who dominate the modern Democratic Party are just not very interested in left-wing economics but they are very interested in culture war issues and identity politics.
I have to disagree with the contention that ideology only has a marginal role in our political system. I think ideology is very important among the political elite which includes activists. These people dominate the political system. They dominate the primary process because few people vote in primaries. They are the main reason why we are stuck fighting the same culture war battles from the 1960s while life for ordinary Americans keeps getting worse. In retrospect we were much better off with a less ideological and more material-oriented form of politics even if it was less democratic and more prone to corruption.
Mandos
Ideology is important to the elite, in that they have gone to great lengths to understand how to maximize (and pay to control, simply put) ideological output in a system that is not formally steered ideologically, except insofar as the system itself was constructed by ideologues.
bruce wilder
“the choice between doing good now and doing good later”
perhaps you meant to write, “. . . doing well later”?
bruce wilder
I like this analysis a lot.
The strategic freedom of the politician-in-office as a representative legislator is a property of the system, even if her talents and other capacities may be properties of the person. Whatever the nominal authority of the politician-in-office, the possession of actual political power should be understood to be a matter of strategic freedom of action vis a vis other actors, especially actors who are in a position to provide the resources for building and maintaining a platform of candidacy.
Politics is inevitably a clash of conflicting interests, in which a powerful official is one, who has the strategic freedom to act as arbiter of the conflict, to play off one interest against another in artful compromise or another kind of resolution.
A spokesmodel politician, on the other hand, can make a career out of representing a global and dominant interest, which has eliminated organized opposition capable of offering a politician significant resources.
The politics of eliminating organized opposition is a pre-eminently ideological task.
Hugh
“the representative is only bound at best indirectly to the will of the voters”
Not bound at all. In the US, House gerrymandered districts, meant to thwart the will of the people, are the rule. The Senate is a dreadfully unrepresentative institution where the majority of the US population is represented by only 18 Senators. The President is elected not by the people but by an electoral college. So the anti-democratic spectacle of Hillary Clinton, horrible person that she is, getting 3.5 million more votes than Trump and still losing. I would add that even having an evil non-choice like Clinton or Trump shows how the least thing those running the two parties care about is the will of the people.
“The reward of cushy post-office positions and honours, effectively post hoc bribery, is not “formally” a part of the system”
Disagree. It is the heart and soul of the system. The Establishment welfare system is based on “play ball with us now, we’ll take care of you later: lobbying gig, no work consultancies, “charities” like the Clinton Foundation, ditto think tank or pliable university positions. You don’t even have to be that effective. You’ll get something if only to encourager les autres.
“a candidate must factor in the ability to maintain a stable support base to pursue a political career not only to implement one good policy”
The result of this we see every day. The Democrats stand for nothing, and the Republicans stand for even less.
“the incentive structure of representative democracy”
That is who has the bucks to pay them off. Hint: not you or me.
“the choice between doing good now and doing good later”
Come on. Let’s be real. This isn’t about goods. It’s about competing evils. The lesser evil is still evil. It’s just easier to sell to us rubes. Problem is we still all end up in hell and again as current reality illustrates, it might even be getting us there faster.
StewartM
Herman
Contrary to what many people think the problem today IS too much ideology and not enough politics, or at least the sausage-making kind of politics.
Really? Since Reagan, or McGovern, when did an ideologue win either party’s presidential nomination? (Trump was definitely NOT the choice of Republican ideologues). Neither was Clinton. Seems to me that the party establishment of the Dim Party at least is fervently anti-ideology (at least the type of left-wing ideology that you call ‘extreme’ but was in fact the bread-and-butter of New Deal liberalism back when, you know, Dems actually routinely won elections). Hence their frantic attempts to press the thumb on the scale during the primaries for Clinton and against Sanders.
And, I note, the last two Dem presidencies went heavily on ‘sausage-making’ and compromise and light on ideology and vision, and the result was after mere two years they lost large Congressional majorities (and bye-bye, sausage-making after that, save the rightwing version). Reagan, by contrast, bent heavily towards ideology even though he had only the Senate and thus was forced to compromise at times, and yet was transformational. Indeed, the Republican majorities today trace their lineage back to Goldwater and his fervent ideology. Seems to me you’re advocating the Dems keep the same strategy that made them an almost-irrelevant party.
bruce wilder
Is the identitarian neoliberalism of a Clintonista, an ideology?
I think it is.
In some important ways, it functions as the anti-ideology ideology for our inverted totalitarianism.
It advertises itself as practical, pragmatic, as opposed to the fools who would like to end perpetual war or prosecute banksters or institute single-payer medicare-for-all. So in terms of an idealistic pursuit of an abstract good, maybe not, but in terms of enabling a socio-economic class to pursue its class interest without the embarrassment of plainly exposed selfish motives and reckless irresponsibility, it seems to be spot-on ideology.
Daize
This post seems a little bit to me like poly-sci 101, but it is a good reminder.The only real conclusion to be drawn from Mandos’s observations is that the most important thing to control in democratic politics are a politician’s resources, which I am pretty sure [i]everybody knows[/i](Leonard Cohen). American politics is essentially dead and non-representative because Americans chose the laissez-faire route when it comes to campaign finance. Unfortunately, what is done in the US is still often copied around the world 🙁
Herman
@StewartM,
I agree with @bruce wilder above. The Clinton wing of the party does have an ideology. Identitarian neoliberalism is an ideology. I used to think that the Clintonite Democrats were just corrupt ultra-pragmatists but after reading Thomas Frank’s book “Listen, Liberal” and Walter Benn Michaels’ “The Trouble with Diversity” I am now convinced that the Clinton wing of the party does have a distinct ideology. Basically their ideology is multicultural meritocracy. This ideology states that gross inequality is fine as long as it is not due to discrimination based on race, gender, sexual orientation or some other essential quality of a protected class. They see the neoliberal system as basically just except for lingering “-isms” that damage an individual’s ability to take advantage of equality of opportunity.
That is all well and good but the other side of this ideology is the belief that if you are poor and not a member of a protected class you have nobody to blame but yourself, hence their disdain for the white working-class that is supposedly privileged. Of course this ideology has the added benefit of matching the material interests of the professional/managerial class but it is still an ideology nonetheless and not just a cover for naked class interests. Many partisan Democrats fervently believe in this ideology.
As for the Republicans, you are right that Trump was a departure from movement conservatism, at least to the extent that his views on immigration and free trade departed from conservative orthodoxy. But most Republicans are still well within the world of classical Buckleyite fusionism that combines right-wing economics with social conservatism and Trump is still giving movement conservatives plenty of what they want when it comes to tax cuts and judicial nominees, just to name two examples.
Finally, New Deal liberalism was much less ideological than is usually thought. The New Deal coalition itself was a hodgepodge of farmers, white Southerners, northern workers, Catholic ethnics and African-Americans (where they could vote). New Deal ideology was pragmatic and lacked the European Left’s old commitment to eventually fundamentally changing the system enough to move away from capitalism. Cracks in the New Deal coalition were evident as early as the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 where Southern Democrats were crucial in passing the bill over Truman’s veto. Eventually the New Deal coalition would fall apart over numerous issues including civil rights for African-Americans which caused many Southern whites to switch to the Republicans.
That being said, the mid-20th century saw a good deal of progress on many fronts and both major parties were arguably to the left of where they are now, at least on economic issues. There were even some liberal Republicans like Jacob Javits. And this was in an era dominated by party bosses and sausage-making, pork-barrel politics. Opening up the system to activists was supposed to produce more people power but instead we got two neoliberal parties that only really differ strongly on social and cultural issues. The current system promotes polarization because it caters to the polarized elites and promotes “rile up the base” strategies. We would be better off with a system that forced parties to compete for more votes outside of their hardcore followers. I am not sure how we can do that but ending gerrymandering would be one good idea.
Mandos
Bruce:
For some reason, we don’t communicate well, so I don’t know if you are making an sarcastic joke here. I was referring to the best-case scenario, i.e., the representative who wants to do something good for the world either now or later, assuming that there may be a conflict between doing good things now or later as described in the post.
Mandos
Bruce:
Agreed. However, I do want to emphasize the agency of the organized opposition in this case — ie, whether in the first place it knows what it means to offer a politician significant resources or even that it should do so, etc, etc. This in my experience is far from a given.
Mandos
Hugh:
You are missing the forest for the trees here. In no representative system, including the US one, the British one, the Danish one, the Bangladeshi one, the Maltese one, etc, etc, is there a strong connection between the will of the voter and the actions of the representative. That is the point of representative democracy. It may be more obvious and pernicious in the US case than some others, but the USA is not even the worst case scenario…
No, it is not formally a part of the system, in that there is no Office of After-Office Status Incentives in any parliament that I know of. It may be widespread if not universal, but it is an informal by-product of the incentives in the system and the incentives in the world at large.
The people who designed the original modern representative democratic systems did not explicitly consider this issue. Representative democracy was intended such that all the representatives were members of the privileged class. Everyone was already “made” and the incentives that could be offered were not ones that were necessary to divert a representative’s class interest.
We have this problem now because representative democracy is supposed to mediate a governance structure that is supposed to be for the benefit of a much broadened (in all dimensions, economic class, race, gender) constituency. Representatives who want to work for “made” classes can now be bribed with the possibility of a major status upgrade for implicit compliance.
May be so. This post was not about a specific situation, but rather understanding representative democracy (and the scope of action under representative democracy) in the limit — where all intentions are good and good-now vs. good-later is a real choice, as well as the acceptance or postponement of evil. It is necessary to understand the parameters of the system in the limit so that one can at least distinguish between political attitudes/actions that have no possibility of being implemented successfully and those that have little probability of being implemented successfully.
Mandos
I agree that this post has a bit of (intentional) “101” flavour to it. However, while “everybody knows” that control over political finances is extremely important, that is not the only point of my post. Judging by what I have heard people say in these discussions over the years, it appears that many people have misconceived the purpose and nature of the actual process of representative democracy. Policy outcomes and policy preferences (based in ideological/moral preference) are not the main “product” of the system — rather, the politicians themselves are the object and product of the system. Until one understands that material outcomes are, in a sense, the “effluent” of the system, one will continue to labour under a host of illusions not only about what has happened so far, but how to interact with the system in the future.
Robotpliers
I’d just point out that the connection between the will of the voter and the actions of the representative waxes and wanes over time. In the US at least, constitutional crises lead to a more direct link, with increasing popular pressure leading to more responsive politicians, until the crisis has passed.
Willy
Be easier to just say that representatives (of any system) might come for the fight, but stay for the perks, and the trick for representees is knowing which representatives are most resistant to such baseness.
Hugh
I think Mandos you are having trouble recognizing woodland. “Representative” government isn’t representative at all. It is wildly and intentionally unrepresentative. I am looking at reality. You are looking at formalisms. If the powers that be, the rich and elites, say “representative”, then we are supposed to act like there is some reality attached to it. If they don’t formally explain to us, surprise, surprise, how their system of nonbribery bribery works, we are supposed to act like it doesn’t really exist or exists less than every other part of their system.
The lesser evil is not about postponing evil. It is about enabling it. Enabling seems the major theme of this post.
bruce wilder
For some reason, we don’t communicate well . . .
Yes, well we have both made that observation before. For me, it adds interest to the conversation to have such misunderstandings, which can subsequently be clarified by my possibly learning something.
We are each of us idealists, I think, but with different notions of how to reconcile our thinking with the reality of ignorance, apathy and evil. You think it useful to explore as a limiting case “the incentive calculation for our hypothetically best-intentioned candidate”. I think that is nuts. (So apparently does Hugh.) To me, it undercuts your analysis to posit even a hypothetical purity of motive or intent. People always act from mixed motives and with such an imperfect understanding of consequences that intent, per se, is . . . problematic.
Your basic insight — that representative democracy (formally liberal in its constitutional arrangements, but with informal careerism as its modus operandi) — creates the political actor as entrepreneur speaks to political actors, who act from mixed motives and ambiguous intent. You write about the pure intending to do good (as if what the good is would not be always in political dispute). Doing good in the hope of doing well seemed to me the more appropriate epigram, to summarize the implication of an informal constitution that institutes a career path, a course of honor as laid out in the small-c constitution of the Roman Republic.
In fact, the politician seeking office (understanding that is not the only type of political actor or career) may seek to do someone else’s good or what some large group esteems (for ideological !) reasons as good. In my personal experience, actual politicians have fewer personal opinions in the sense of convictions and hard commitment than the typical activist or even news junkie — they cannot afford them; they have to keep themselves open to persuasion and coalition in order to remain “in play” and thus within smelling distance of the shifting winds of power. Many ordinary people despise politicians for the waffling that goes on, and think the whole fluid dynamic process of power makes the Representative unrepresentative. (That seems part of Hugh’s problem.) But, I think you have it got it basically right: it is about being able to make a career: as an office-holding politician (elected or perhaps otherwise), as a journalist or pundit or policy entrepreneur or political operative, as a staffer or lobbyist, and so on.
These things may assume a kind of dynamic stability for a time, as a basic pattern is reproduced, but degeneracy and crisis are practically built in. The Iron Law of Institutions applies.
bruce wilder
I know you are trying to keep the argument abstract and general, but I think the example set by Tony Blair in reconstituting the PLP around a remarkably clear and standardized career path might illustrate how powerful this approach can be.
I certainly agree that people on the left are too often naive or clueless. Any number of perennial reform proposals seem to be premised on trying to deny the politico any career at all, which seems to me altogether wrong-headed. Populists can be riled up by even modest salaries paid to politicians. Or, mere formalisms are touted – abolishing the American Electoral College in favor of a simple numerical plurality in the total national vote because it is formally more democratic in principle seems to me to be a particularly demented form of liberal ideology. Or people take Rachel Maddow seriously. Or Sean Hannity.
If you are not paying for your politics or media, someone else will give it to you free, . . . but the people you elect or read or watch work for some one else in such a case and know that, even if you don’t.
Hugh
The way I look at it the US and virtually every other country on the planet are facing existential-level crises. Against such a backdrop, I do not see political careerism as an option. Any politician who is not willing to leave their blood, literally and figuratively, on the floor I have no use for.
Tom
All this talk reminds me of earlier articles of why transferring experience to the Younger Generation is so damn difficult if not impossible.
Absolute Monarchies work when you have a competent king who can cut through the red tape and is an active worker. Problem is, he is mortal, doomed to die, and his successor turns out far too often to not be his equal and falls on his/her face.
No one has yet figured out how to transfer the knowledge to younger generations and partial successes too often get abandoned:
For example, the Praetorian Guard didn’t just protect the Roman Emperors, they also knew when to kill the insane ones or tyrants when they got out of hand. When they were disbanded, things really went south for the Roman Government. The Five-Good Emperors ideal of adopting the best and brightest as an heir worked well till Marcus Aurellius made his son Commodus co-Emperor despite his unsuitability. Had Marcus Aurellius disowned his son or adopted another better son, and Emperors continued that policy, things could have turned out differently for the Roman Empire.
Ultimately a Government’s true success is whether it can prepare the next generation to succeed it, fully able to build on their successes and not throw them away.
Willy
Public and parochial schools do try to transfer general knowledge and past group experience via all kinds of classes. But ‘the winners’ usually tend to write history. And what was glaringly absent from all those curriculums (public and parochial) was life wisdom. I suspect the winners like it that way.
Mandos
That’s a very clear statement of position, I suppose, but it doesn’t actually deal with the issue at hand…which in this case means that you are not going to have any use for any politicians at all, because the once who would leave their blood on the floor may never make it to any point in the political system where they would have the opportunity to do so in a way that matters.
Willy
I’ve known high integrity fighters, and I’ve known low integrity grifters. I like the former better. Maybe we need to reward them better than we allow the grifters to be?
…lest we get the government we deserve, yet again?
Mojave Wolf
I’m going to agree w/both Mandos & Hugh at the same time in their present disagreement.
Re: the original post: again, both agree & disagree w/Mandos.
These things are related.
As far as how politics is currently constructed, and a description of the system as it is, and how at least most of the people involved view it, absolutely.
And do many normal, uninvolved people seem to lack a reasonable degree of sympathy for the crap anyone who chooses to do this is going to have to put up with if they DO want to accomplish something? Yes.* & **
Do things have to be this way, though? Hell no. I’m actually shocked by the level of complacency here. I mean, if the world was basically okay, the kind of people who are fine with this system, as long as they are basically competent and not idiots, could still manage things, since even the people they are working to curry favor from (including each other) SHOULD usually recognize that the world works better for everyone, including the very well off, if certain basic levels of functionality are maintained, and you don’t have people so desperate they want to kill/kidnap rich people, cities don’t needlessly flood, bombs are falling on people for no reason, the world doesn’t hurtle toward a possible Venus effect, etc. And for things to work okay, you also have to assume a basic level of decency and imagination (i.e. things will be “fine” but 50% of species will go extinct, or things will be “fine” here but that fine is funded by promoting death and misery over there; the people who think this way are invariably going to cause problems for everyone not part of their specific in-group, see the “neoliberal ideology” discussed by others above, or most Republican pols for my entire adult life; hell, Nixon was vastly better than these people, tho awful enough that no, I’m not defending him; also, not in my adult life)
Since I’ve had people accuse me of naivety and not understanding how the system works, a wee bit of long ago-background info–I could have very easily had a career in poli, at least behind-the-scenes. The opportunities kept falling into my lap and I kept fleeing because, well, it really does work kinda the way Mandos said, or House of Cards shows.
Again, unlike some people, I’m not saying this is inevitable or necessary; I’m with Hugh, there’s no point in doing this unless you’re going to commit to making things better for people, esp w/the state of the world now; otherwise you’re a despicable, evil scumbag fraud and a monster who’s helping kill the world. Back in the day, I had no such sense of urgency and was a lot more live and let live, and was just “omg these people are not only boring they give me the horrors get me the fuck away from here and into something less soul-killing!”
Cause I’m lazy, I’m just going to copy and paste an edited version of a recount of those days which cause a political consultant friend I used to converse w/online to quit talking to me, when I wrote it to her (I clearly missed the implied insult):
I flirted with that sort of thing myself–waaaaaay back, I did some work starting in high school for a local state legislator (I worked at his law firm,, started summarizing depositions when I was 16) and then for (someone else) when he succeeded him, and then for our local house of representatives guy, who was on the (important) Committee. None of this was hard or impressive.
The one bit of campaign work I did that I was proud of was in college politics–not because I think that it mattered, or that I normally would have cared, but one of my friends cared, and asked me to help him on his campaign for something or another and his friend’s campaign for SGA president. I did, and sometime in the mid 80’s he became the first non-Machine (Machine = Greek system candidates) to win SGA president since the 1800’s. The next year, my friend ran himself, and we looked certain to go from a nailbiter win the year before to an easy win, then they blackmailed him out of the race a few weeks before the election (for reasons that were really stupid and he shoulda fought rather than flee, imo, coz this made him look good rather than bad). We (he and his team, who were sort of invested by this point, even those like me who didn’t really care beyond “helping friend”) found a replacement candidate who had previously been running for treasurer, and we thought we still had a chance to win with her–she came off really well and everyone who met her liked her. Then she fell down the stairs, broke I forget which bone, and dropped out. I am not making this up. She swore no one did anything to her and there were no threats, she just didn’t want to run with her broken whatever. Which makes no sense, but there ya go. Anyway, I was proud of helping the first guy elected against massive odds, and woulda been in the second instance had both candidates not bailed.
I later went to law school in DC, so knew a lot of people who were into politics, and got invited to work on a campaign in an actual meaningful position, and I DO think it’s important but (1) These people bore me to death and I don’t actually like being around them & (2) the actual way most politics gets done gives me the horrors. My most distinctive, stereotypical, telling memory is at some idiot get-together my friend I used to work for was having w/the house (committee) guy, that they invited me to. Two things stand out–when former presidential candidate (deleted) came in, apparently for no purpose whatsoever except for a photo-op. Everyone was super-friendly best-buds. The second he left everyone began talking about how much they disliked him and why did he have to show up there. And second–some lobbyist wanted to give me a card and explain something to me. I told her I was just a friend of so and so’s who was in law school locally and I might be helping him on his campaign but I didn’t really plan on staying in DC or participating in politics long term. Ye gods! Turned out half the room were lobbyists, and they all had super hearing and this was their signal to descend upon me and give me cards and/or try to convince me I might want to work with them in the future. I didn’t even really want to be a lawyer, I hate wearing suits, and I don’t like most of the people in DC, but apparently they thought my disinterest was a ploy or god knows what. Found the conversations tedious at best, all the sleaze with none of the glamour at worst. Never went to one of those things again.
In retrospect, I kinda wish I’d gone into politics because someone decent shoulda, and feel irresponsible for never having been interested, but good God I had no idea they would screw things up so badly.
So yeah, I’m cynical, even tho VERY happy to get behind the few people actually committed to doing good works as opposed to getting better seats at the cocktail parties. ”
So in sum, my own take back in much younger days was like Mandos’ now–that’s just how it is, and my views are too different to matter, let’s find somewhere I like better. Now, older & hopefully wiser, I’m more like, this is not just a public service, but, like journalism, at least SHOULD be a sacred trust and it should be obvious by this point that when you screw it up you’re screwing up the world. So we need to work to get in people who can effectively make it more of a real body politic trying to save the world, or, if you don’t think it needs saving (and you’re delusional in that case, but okay) then who at least realize it’s getting worse and want to work to make it better, and who will be arguing over how best to do this, instead of electing a bunch of ladder climbers who basically want the resume stuffing, and do have preferences and may be nice people in their private lives but have no willingness to fight their various sugar daddies for anything at the expense of their ladder climbing.
So, basically, I’m with Hugh. On this subject, at least.
With the caveat that if any of the ladder climbers are willing to work with you, hell yes, then you have a use for them, work with them. Maybe they even want to redeem themselves. Let them. Or maybe you hate them and they’re intrinsically evil and your interests just happen to momentarily overlap. Roll with it, work with them while keeping an eye on your back. If Ted Cruz suddenly wanted to help fight global warming or species extinction, work with him, even if he keeps talking about the evil of gayness and promiscuity. You can fight him on that while working with him on the other. If you’re holding a fund raiser and Hillary happens to like the cause and give you a million bucks from the Clinton foundation, take it even if you still mostly hate her and don’t trust her and think the Clinton foundation is deeply problematic. I don’t think this should be hard but apparently it is no longer a common perspective.
*Hell, let’s face it, as Bruce said, plenty of people refuse to understand basic reality, and would be upset at a pol if, to pass legislation that is the only possible hope for saving the world in an instant crisis, gave some random idiot a pass on property taxes for the next fiscal year, even if failing to do it meant legislation & world both died.
** That’s not even including the professional complainers, who are going to find something to say “this guy/gal sux” even if they love 99% of what that person is doing, and a few of those will say that 1% of difference is enough to invalidate any goodness that person is doing and refuse to support them, even if the next closest person they only agree w/on 15% of things. I’m not sure how much overlap between these two groups of people, but in general, the first hypothetical person I’m calling sincere but hopelessly stupid; the professional complainers I frequently question the sincerity of.
Mojave Wolf
I apologize for inadvertantly using the f-word in my long comment. I was not insulting anyone with it.
If there’s no other way to get it out of moderation, let me know, and I’ll copy & paste w/that word deleted.
Willy
You wanna piece of me, fucker?
Willy
Well I guess that settles that. The auto-moderator is broken
Mojave Wolf
Okay, I got no idea why I’m in moderation. I was not remotely insulting to anyone here (and no, I’m not offended by Willy, hi Willy! ::waves:: please leave his comment up, it’s funny, and we are not mad at each other, at least I don’t think so)
I thought about taking out all the possibly objectionable words and reposting but didn’t coz I was worried it would still go into moderation. Glad I listened to my lazier self that time.
Mojave Wolf
The mod system doesn’t like long comments? It let me post a short one in another thread on an Ian post too.
I did use asterisks.
nutshell in case someone sees this who never comes back — brief recounting of my long ago very brief kinda sorta working w/pols (2 actual jobs which were meaningless, one recounting of a attending a fund-raiser which explains, at least to me, both why I ran far and fast from pursuing this as a career and why Mandos is right about the way it works now–tho I agree w/Hugh on how it could/should be & do not think the current sitch is inevitable or necessary) along w/criticism, admittedly strong in some instances, of various types of people & thinking. Also, I occasionally sprinkle in mild profanity because that’s how I talk .
Mojave Wolf
I’ve known high integrity fighters, and I’ve known low integrity grifters. I like the former better. Maybe we need to reward them better than we allow the grifters to be?
Yes.
Also yes to Hugh, on the kind of people we need, and yes to Mandos, on the kind of people/system we have (and my hidden post explains w/out explaining why I have so much respect for people like Bernie who see the system as it is, chose to go into it back when the need was not so obvious and people like me took one look at the environment we’d be in and said “NO!” and ran far and fast, and who being in this system for decades still manage to be themselves and continue trying to fight the good fight; yeah he’s not perfect and I could wish for more of a firebrand but hey, he’s there and he’s trying and he hasn’t been warped by being immersed in this culture for 50 years, which I think would be really, really difficult, so kudos to him for that; let’s hope what he’s begun succeeds in changing the entire culture, tho said culture is fighting back as hard as it can).
Hopefully things shall improve.
Willy
In my times here I’ve left two detailed reply comments to Mojave Wolf which were eaten alive by the auto-moderator, never to be seen again. I hope this won’t be the third.
Maybe it gets testy with certain moniker-names? I know it didn’t like “Peter” for a while.
Mandos
Apologies to those who got down-moderated. I hadn’t logged in to check, was busy yesterday. I have approved what comments showed up. I don’t know if any got truly lost due to a glitch. If you are auto-moderated, know that it is not personal but rather an artifact of the system, and if you are a regular, most likely Ian or myself (for posts under my name) will get around to approving your comment.
Willy
https://campaignlegal.org/update/emergency-south-dakota-state-legislature-about-overrule-voters-demands-clean-and-ethical
Mandos
So I will try to give a single summary response to some of the comments above, which I think head in a similar direction overall in reaction to my post.
I have argued on this blog and elsewhere with many commenters and fellow contributors on the actual relationship of progressive ideologies to the real existing political system and the reason why, indeed, regress rather than progress has been the order of the day for decades. A lot of the reasons typically given, I agree with. It’s a process with multiple factors. But a major one of these seems to be identified as the lack of probity or ideological commitment on the part of the actual representives in representative democracy who are supposed to implement that policy.
We see the logical conclusion of this in Hugh’s “any politician who is not willing to leave their blood…” ie, the reaction to an impending catastrophe brought about in large part, if not entirely, by lack of political action is to double down on the idea that one must only accept representatives who are more committed to the idea of correct action.
This is what I mean by missing the forest for the trees. That there may be, oh, a world-ending crisis or three in progress or on the horizon does not change the fact one iota that one is trying to act through a political system. You may think that the forest is the world-ending crisis, and the trees are just the trivial details of whatever imperfect system we use to act collectively, but this is exactly backwards — insofar as you really believe that it is even worth interacting with that system to create change (which is challenging to reject insofar as that very system controls immense resources and the formal monopoly of violence).
This is exactly the contradiction that I have seen over many years and prompted ultimately the writing of this post — an interest in working within the system, but then a refusal to engage with it in terms of its hegemonic logic. Consequently, deciding that you have no use for politicians who are not willing to “leave their blood on the floor” reflects a deeper misunderstanding of the overall predicament.
I wrote this post specifically to point out that even if you *have* your ideal politician, there in time for the impending catastrophe, you are *still* going to have to act within a series of complex incentives that act upon individual legislators, which will itself feed back into your ability to develop “ideal politicians”, and back again, and so on. Now, if it matters to you how you achieve better policy, you might say to yourself, “I don’t want to participate in a system that requires that kind of incentive management. Let the world burn.” I respect that — in another comment thread, I revealed my own “red line” of this nature.
But if you’re not rigidly attached to means, then you might consider how progressives and so on may have squandered a lot of effect in a manner that actually strengthened the opposing side — for reasons entirely the reverse of what is normally lamented around these parts.
XFR
That’s the pose but I’ve never really bought it. It seems to me that what has really happened is that beginning in the early ’90s a fracture developed within the ranks of the white racists, with some (mostly wealthy or middle class) predominantly feeling threatened by the success of Asian immigrants, while the ire of others (mostly poor or working class) remained mostly directed at the (like them predominantly working class) more established black and latino minorities.
“Affirmative action” as it is normally practiced it the U.S. tends to increase the representation of the latter in higher-income positions beyond what it would otherwise be, but it decreases the representation of Asians, to a degree that slants the hiring system in favour of whites. Note that while this is normally glossed over as being somehow an unfortunate side-effect of an otherwise well-intentioned system, it could be trivially rectified by (reasonably in my opinion) simply disregarding over-representation of non-white groups, and in Canada, as far as I know, it generally did work this way at least until the early 2000s (though Canada did tend to discriminate against Asian immigrants–but not their children–in more insidious ways.).
Criticism of this obvious flaw tends to generate a blizzard of sophistries in response (my favorite being the transparently counterfactual “but Asians aren’t subject to systematic discrimination!”) thus I am very strongly inclined to believe that this is regarded in many quarters as a feature and not a bug. (It’s also very telling that expressions of overt anti-Asian sentiment rarely seem to excite the same sort of ardor in response that one might expect from those targetted at other groups.) While the more established minorities may also very marginally benefit from discrimination against Asians in the short run, it seems to me it would be quite foolish to play along with what is essentially a last-ditch effort to preserve white privilege within the middle class.
Mojave Wolf
@Mandos — Okay, I too am now just not getting what you’re saying, and as far as I can tell you’re either not getting what I’m saying. Or, alternatively, our views of the world and what is happening in it are just so different that it’s going to be impossible to have meaningful conversation.
But . . . ONE . . . LAST . . . TRY!!!!
(never let it be said that I don’t believe in last ditch efforts when all hope is seemingly lost!)
You are, as far as I can tell, saying the system is the way it is because of the structure, and things are done the way they are done because of the structure, and will continue to be done the same way even if everyone in the system is a committed do-gooder (keeping in mind that everyone from corporatist centrists to people wearing antifa t-shirts to people saying we need to need to live by the Old Testament might–nay, probably would–all coexist w/in such a system).
I am saying this is simply not true. The US system has proven capable of mobilizing and accomplishing great sweeping changes at many times in the past, including within the last 100 years, from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Act to the amazing mobilization of the World War II effort (you may or may not approve of this, but you can’t deny it was an impressive and swift retooling of the economy for a desired end, not purely from a profit motive). Germany’s system is different from us but not THAT different (we even had a lot to do with creating their system, and Japan’s, both of which have done quite well in rebuilding destroyed countries), and they accomplished an impressive retooling of their energy system very quickly, in a far less advantageous position to do so than the US. As I believe Ian has pointed out, South Korea managed to ignore typical WTO prescriptions and neoliberal advice, and rebuilt their economy. Hell, even a bunch of people in the US and elsewhere w/no affinity for environmental issues whatsoever managed to enact the EPA and stop the rivers from catching on fire and stop the destruction of the ozone layer back in the 70’s simply because they weren’t idiots and understood something had to be done and were reasonably competent when they set their mind to it.
In short: Good works are not impossible. Even in the system(s) we have now. They have been done before. Within the system(s) you are talking about. And it’s been done by people seeing a problem and setting out to remedy it, not everyone worrying primarily about how to get better jobs upon leaving office or better chairs at the cocktail parties by kissing the right people’s asses.
The reason people are upset now is because there are equally easy to identify problems, but most of the people in office are worrying about what you are talking about. They are going to have to change or be outnumbered or feel in fear for their futures before much is going to get done. Those latter two outcomes seem more likely than the former. As far as I can tell, you are saying only “feel in fear for their future” will have any impact, as better people will inevitably act the same way, past instances notwithstanding, and I’m unclear whether you think even that will have an impact, since you don’t seem to be proposing any way of instilling such fear.
Most of the people I know who went into politics or wanted to go into politics but bailed (I knew plenty of both) were primarily motivated by a desire to one day be president. Yes, they wanted to do good, as they saw it. Yes, they expected to do good. Yes, they thought they would be better than the alternative should they not be in whatever office it was. But was that their primary reason for going into politics? Not really. Office first, details later, in fact if not in words they would ever say or probably even admit to themselves, however glaringly obvious it was.
The one exception? This guy who was a solid B student in high school, the younger brother of someone I went to school with. Very nice guy, had zero interest in politics growing up. But got all inflamed by the right wing anti-Clinton crazy and then the post 9/11 hysteria. And ran and beat the lawyer/lifelong pol aspiration guy I used to work for not cause of what Mandos is talking about, but because he was representing a position his constituency agreed with, and doing it with sincerity and passion. I don’t agree w/hardly any of his politics, vehemently disagree w/most of it, and I doubt we could have a conversation about it now that would end well, but he’s a nice guy who means well, and people like him have succeeded in enacting a fair amount of their awful agenda. Not cause of incentives but because of actual beliefs.
I will point out also that Bush w/arguably never a majority accomplished massive changes, albeit all for the bad. Trump is accomplishing a lot, it’s just stuff we don’t like. Reagan accomplished a lot, it just wasn’t good. Why is it only left/Dem types, since Carter at least, who can never enact anything meaningful that they actually want (at least in the US; again, Germany South Korea and other places in Europe and Central/South America managed, Venezuela managed for a while, and unlike Venezuela the US has a diverse economic base and is too big for annoyed multinationals to easily crush; etc etc)?
Just because the only people getting stuff done lately IN THE US have been doing bad things for either selfish (the greedmongers) or wrongheaded (the conservative religious idealogues) reasons, doesn’t mean other people can’t do good things for good reasons. They have before and they can again. The one is as easy as the other, if you have sufficient amount of desire and committment relative to your opposition.
What are most of us in this thread saying that is getting in the way of this being done?
Mojave Wolf
Wonderful. Moderation again. I think length is the trigger here, since Willy said a long one of his vanished into the ether. But a brief, additional and possibly crucial area where Mandos and I definitely seem to differ, as far as worldviews:
From where I’m sitting, all my life experience outside of politics and all my knowledge of history back to the beginning of time, seems to indicate that nearly any system of government works well when you have primarily competent people in charge who actually care about something other than personal nest-feathering. Practically any system will work poorly when you have a people in charge who hit the jackpot combo of incompetent and interested only in their personal gratification.
It appears to me as if he is contorting himself in knots making excuses for such people who are currently in power.
To the extent that he prescribing a remedy, based on past posts, it seems to be “work for the agenda of multinational corporations and hope for a different result than they have given us in the past, because they are our best bet.”
Again, we appear to simply be viewing the world in mutually incompatible ways.
Hugh
So Mandos is telling us that the same class of politicians who created and promoted the mess we are in over the course of decades, and who over all that time have never shown the least inclination to change their ways, is somehow our only hope of getting us out of this mess because like the Borg resistance to them is futile. Well, if this is true, then bend over backwards, kids, and kiss your ass good-bye. Mandos is a sad defender of a failed status quo. So no matter how many times that status quo fails, and not just fails but betrays us, all he has is that we should stick with those who are f*cking us over, not expect too much from them, and hope that, past history and all evidence to the contrary, that everything will somehow work out before it all goes to hell.
Ten Bears
Fascinating, as ever Mandos, thread. Everyone should actually watch that video.
And then read through it again.
Tom W Harris
Scary video – especially if you notice that the lead male singer is a dead ringer for a young Jeff Bezos.
anon y'mouse
ok, so my translation (not an attempt at straw men) of Mandos is this:
this is the system we have. either you work with it, or destroy it. since destroying it is unlikely, at least through our actions, individual or collective, you can work with it, or wait for it to implode from whatever catastrophe is coming (many to choose from).
if you work with it, you need to deal with the reality of the political systems and political people as they are and not as you desire them to be. it’s a fragile, complex, stupid and aggravating system which tends towards negatives rather than positives. politicians are, even if well intentioned, worried about their next dinner or position, and if it looks like you can’t promise them another dinner or position, they won’t go your way. if it looks like they will have to fight for your way to their own detriment in dinners or positions, they won’t go your way. if they manage to do good, it’s almost a fluke.
and yet, if you want to work within the system, this is what is there. and, so the real problem is making sure political people know they have adequate backing within mulitiple layers and directions of power structures. these power structures, that support the politician that *might* do some good for you if you can support him/her, have been utterly neglected and not been built yet.
so, you are asking for Mohandes and Martin to do the work without the people power behind them. and they weren’t even elected politicians! although i do feel that they count as political persons. much less LBJ, and Mountbatten.
so, if you want anything to change, you are going to have to work at it. and work andworkandworkandwork. and the worst part is not all of this, i feel (interjecting). it’s that epistemology has been so deliberately sabotaged, and beliefs/opinions so firmly entrenched, that you will have to fight even people you would think would want all of the things that you want. some of them simply because they are worried about where their next dinner is going to come from if you overthrow the power structure.
and we are ALL a party to the power structure. it doesn’t matter how many alternative lifestyle checklists you check off, how many things you don’t support with your actions or dollars. everyone who goes to work every day is, in some ways propping up this system by allowing it to continue, even in the face of dissent.
my take: it will only change if we are all willing to leave our blood in the streets. and the cops will win. they’ve already got the lockdown on that. so, will you be one of Leonidas’ 300 Spartans, knowing you will die in service to your cause (or be jailed. beaten. lose your good reputation. be professionally blackballed. have your friends call you traitor, etcetcetcetc), or do you tuck yourself into bed after setting the alarm for work tomorrow morning?
not calling out anyone here. i am a sinner too. as miserable as it is, i still want my life to continue and hope for better. but this prospect is that there is no better, only various shades of worse.
in your shields, or on them?
Ché Pasa
US political and governmental systems tend toward deep conservatism, but they are not static. Crisis often produces remarkable change (sometimes positive) which can occur very quickly in the hands of charismatic leaders. Reaction and reversion, however, are guaranteed. It’s baked in to the systems, and unless you change the systems (potentially something under way right now) the pendulum will keep swinging. Long periods of a relatively regressive status quo punctuated by brief moments of more or less progressive change.
Working toward a progressive change moment can be its own reward. But the fact is under our system that work may take decades or generations to reach a positive outcome, and reversion follows relatively quickly. Sisyphus and his rock come to mind.
As I say, a system change is potentially underway right now. I doubt it is what progressives have in mind, but oh well. They aren’t in charge, are they?
Willy
One would think that we already have more than enough history to provide more than enough cause-effect examples for a true political science to have emerged already. But the equations seem to keep getting muddied by the duplicitous influence of the prevailing PTB and their faith-reasoning mantra-chanting minions. And then there’s the part where every generation seems to need to personally experience, the hard way, why things work the way they do like some alcoholic who has to hit bottom before they fully get what their loved ones have long been shouting at them.
Would simple, easily understood terms for all those things help?
Willy
I read somewhere that moneyed players love change because with every change or solution comes more problems which they and theirs get to take advantage of. The powerless 99% then has to cope the best they can – basically that “fool dancing on the strings held by all of those big shots” quote from the Godfather movie.
I’d suggest adding a fourth branch to the US government, a sort of “Scientific Commission”, but good luck with getting the religious wingnuts on board with that one. And of course a “Colossus Computer” branch of government would get all the A.I. Forbin cynics a-booing…
Currently nothing seems to beat getting big money out of politics, for at least trying to restore things back to the way they were 40 years ago.
Mandos
I’ll once again respond in “summary form”. The point is not to say that you shouldn’t work to have better politicians — who would argue otherwise? — or that “resistance is futile” or that you should accept the status quo. I don’t really know how Hugh infers that from my comments. For example, if you have a way of organizing outside the political system that makes a positive contribution, by all means do so. It is logically consistent to decide that you don’t think any progress can be made from within the system, so you need to supercede or supplant it. It is logically consistent to say that, well, the politicians that we have are too far from ideal to do any good, we can improve their quality by working for better politicians.
What is not logically consistent, however, is to think that one can be effective at working within the system without taking into account the design of the system. ie, you can’t have your cake and eat it too. But that is exactly what I see many progessives-or-whatever want. Many of the kinds of debates I have had, including on this very thread, skip over any engagement with the logic of the system, ascribing all failure (effectively) to ideological traitors and weaklings who need to be replaced, and not considering the fine detail of the dynamics of exactly that replacement.
The position I am trying to represent here is somewhere between that of MojaveWolf and anon y’mouse. That is to say, indeed, positive change has happened from within the system, and that a rejectionist stance is not logically entailed by the deficiencies in the system. However, that change didn’t come from thin air or because the politicians making those changes were saints, but because movements both inside and outside of the political system were strategic in operating in a world where representatives in the system have varied ideologies and interests, some of them “sincere” and some not.
I’ve been watching “online” politics for a number of US presidential elections now, and what has struck me is the way in which a lot of progressives-or-whatever suffer from a very strange romanticism about the way politics should function that their opponents of all kinds do not. Hugh’s all-or-nothing reaction, basically that if I reject the idea that we must evaluate the effectiveness of action within the political system in terms of the personal commitment of politicians, is really very symptomatic/emblematic of this one-dimensional romanticism. But not only him, I have observed it over and over again. And it has led me to think that we need to have a lot more “Politics 101” discussions. Hence this post.
Mandos
Willy: alas the number of things that vary in history are too many for there to be an empirical science of politics for the most part, even if you have many examples.
Mojave Wolf
so, if you want anything to change, you are going to have to work at it. and work andworkandworkandwork. and the worst part is not all of this, i feel (interjecting). it’s that epistemology has been so deliberately sabotaged, and beliefs/opinions so firmly entrenched, that you will have to fight even people you would think would want all of the things that you want. some of them simply because they are worried about where their next dinner is going to come from if you overthrow the power structure.
Well, nothing to argue with there. (I started to say “Well ,, yeah, obviously I don’t think anyone will disagree with this” but . . . reality, someone probably will).
I don’t think I’m unrealistic about incentives. But seriously, if y’all are saying that it’s asking too much of human nature that most people, when faced with a choice of “world dies, possibly forever, and many millions or billions suffer needlessly and species go extinct that don’t have to while world is still here, but I continue on in comfort w/out doing much” on one hand, vs “I try to stop world dying, but it will take work and a bunch of scumbuckets will try to destroy me professionally and in the media” on the other, to make the obvious choice, then y’all have a much, much MUCH nastier and more misanthropic view of human nature than I do, and I consider myself a cynical misanthrope. What y’all are saying, IF you are saying that, is that we as a species are an unequivocal and irredeemable mistake. I think there’s still hope for us and that we are not hopelessly evil, fucked up as we are.
This makes me a romantic?
Putting that aside . . .
indeed, positive change has happened from within the system, and that a rejectionist stance is not logically entailed by the deficiencies in the system. However, that change didn’t come from thin air or because the politicians making those changes were saints, but because movements both inside and outside of the political system were strategic in operating in a world where representatives in the system have varied ideologies and interests, some of them “sincere” and some not.
Again, obviously so. Who’s gonna argue w/this?
If that WAS your initial intent in this post, gotta say, for someone so concerned w/messaging, you need to work on the clarity of yours. Coz in the post up top, this part “created by interactions among representatives who must necessarily balance all decisions against the benefit of continuing their political careers” –which I think is, again, obvious and few people would disagree — is clearly subservient to this part:
The main currency of representative democracy is politics itself, whereby good or at least ideologically consistent policy is a by-product which is something A LOT of people will disagree with, at least as something that has to be, tho no argument that’s how a lot of pols and their hangers on see things.
This is the part we are arguing w/you about. If the world wasn’t screwed up and the system was such that it just needed competetent maintainers, and IF the people thinking like this were competent in the sense of recognizing and responding adequately to challenges, okay, this kind of thinking can slide. But, to use language similiar to yours, none of those conditions currently obtain.
AND (very important!) taking this post in context w/your past ones, I don’t see how you’re surprised that people think you are using this framing to set up a situation where we need to be more supportive of, say, Cuomo or Schumer or the kind of people I once knew types, who, in case you haven’t noticed, most of us here loathe, as some sort of “work w/what you got and this is all you got so support them” option. If that is NOT what you are advocating, again, work on the message being clearer. (and if you are trying to convince us of this, hang it up, wrong audience)
Again, I’m not saying “purity or bust”. As Treebeard said, I’m not altogether on anyone’s side, coz no one is altogether on my side. If I insisted on only backing people who agreed w/me on everything, I could back no one. I’ve worked w/people I dislike for common goals plenty of times in the past; it’s a part of life, not just politics. I frequently disagree w/you, Hugh, Che, Willy and all sorts of other people who are disagreeing w/you now, and I’d cheerfully and happily work w/any of you for a common purpose. I suspect all of them would do the same should circumstances ever call for it.
Now, if you’re just attacking the sjw types who wanna call anyone who disagrees w/them on anything a fascist, then I’m with you, but again, not clear from your previous messaging.
Re: solutions– here you understand me perfectly. My preferred option is getting better people in office, who do care about fixing things and not letting the world go to hell. I admit, I barely care whether it’s enlightened self-interest, a sense of honor, I desire to be liked, a desire to be remembered well by history, or actual goodness that motivates them; at this point I’ll settle for anyone who will accurately diagnose the problem and at least make a reasonably competent attempt to fix it.
And yes, refusing to vote for people who aren’t gonna do this, even if the people running against them are even worse, is my idea of giving incentives. Short of violence, not much else to be done.
& I am still somewhat more hopeful than anon’y’mouse of getting things fixed without the violent revolt, in part because, like anon y mouse, I don’t feel particularly confident about the violent revolt producing good results ( for one thing, the people most numerous in wanting a revolt on both sides of the aisle are not people I think will be a noticeable improvement, and might be noticeably worse)(if you are wanting a revolt, I’m not saying you, necessarily, I’m not opposed to the idea in the right conditions) , and even if it does (again, once it happens, if it happens, I shall hope for the best even whilst preparing for the worst, coz what else are you going to do?) the damage will be bad.
Willy
alas the number of things that vary in history are too many for there to be an empirical science of politics for the most part, even if you have many examples.
Probably why we’re all alone in the galaxy. Nobody shows up with any political “science” to share with us because it’s impossible. And thus all technological civilizations destroy themselves early and unfulfilled.
Still, I do see people spending time analyzing the differences between Norway, Venezuela, and the old USSR and coming up with some pretty plausible explanations. So maybe it should be mandated that all Political Science 101 classes must start out explaining that the “science” part is more of a goal than a guideline, but one that may not ever be reached. And if you’re not in this class to get some kind of law degree then you’re a fool.
But I still believe that good people in charge is better than bad people in charge. Maybe there’s a science to determine the degree to which one is good or bad (for everybody else), and under what conditions are they goodest or baddest, so the rest of us are better informed?
Hugh
Mandos can’t accept that his world doesn’t work for most of us, and that no matter what he says things aren’t getting better for us but worse. He finds it romantic, i.e. unserious, to point out that 40 years of doing more of the same, of waiting on his politicians who have no interest in changing to change, has gotten us to where we are now.
Re an all or nothing approach, that’s not me but physical reality in the form of climate change and overpopulation. You don’t finesse Mother Nature with facile arguments. It is as if we are on a bus speeding toward the edge of a thousand foot chasm. We have only moments to act to turn the bus aside or stop it. So what is the Mandos plan? Let’s “incentivize” the bus driver with a few mythical cookies in the hopes that years too late and after we are all dead at the bottom of the cliff he/she will do just enough to avoid a disaster which has already happened. This is what Mandos doesn’t get, refuses to get. Nature is not going to wait for us to get our act together. We either get our act together or Nature will act for us.