> The fact that we the people continue to vote in our incumbent representatives at rates over 90 percent is a direct measure of the extent to which those representatives are doing what we want them to do.
This is an artifact of the districting system. A given district wants the local military base to stay open, or tax credits for the local industry. Their representative gets them that, so they get reelected. To get them that they screw over the general public in a thousand ways -- mostly by trading other representatives for the things that aren't in the public interest but their districts want -- but none of them are big enough for the people in the district to change their vote, and most of them couldn't have been prevented by a single representative anyway. So the bums fail to get voted out.
Which in no way contradicts what I said. The fact that what the people want (or at least a voting majority of us) actually screws over the general public does not mean the people don't want it. It just means that what the people want is not actually good for all of us in the long run. Welcome to reality.
You implied that the majority of voters want Something To Be Done and so keep reelecting the people who do this. In fact what happens is that the majority of voters don't even know that this issue exists, but some interest group wants it and captures a representative whose district isn't going to notice or care what their representative is doing on this and then trades votes on other issues their district also doesn't care about to get what they want from other representatives.
There are existing laws that couldn't command majority support in any district much less a majority of them but remain on the books because the representatives who support them continue to be reeelected for independent reasons.
The fact that people given a choice between "abortion is illegal" or "poors don't starve to death" choose "abortion is illegal" doesn't mean they want poors to starve to death (although they do want that); it just means they want abortion to be illegal more.
Okay, it was a bad example because those kinds of hardliners do want all the bad things to happen. People given a choice between "close the military base and lose your jobs" and "keep your jobs, but we drop more bombs on brown people" don't necessarily want to drop more bombs on brown people, but they do want to keep their jobs.
> given a choice between "abortion is illegal" or "poors don't starve to death"
What are you talking about? No voter is faced with that choice.
> those kinds of hardliners do want all the bad things to happen
Who are these "hardliners" you speak of?
> People given a choice between "close the military base and lose your jobs" and "keep your jobs, but we drop more bombs on brown people"
No voter is faced with that choice either. Closing the military base in a particular district doesn't mean the military downsizes. It just means the base gets built in some other district whose representatives were better at getting pork for their constituents.
None of these things have anything to do with the basic problem I described.
This is an artifact of the districting system. A given district wants the local military base to stay open, or tax credits for the local industry. Their representative gets them that, so they get reelected. To get them that they screw over the general public in a thousand ways -- mostly by trading other representatives for the things that aren't in the public interest but their districts want -- but none of them are big enough for the people in the district to change their vote, and most of them couldn't have been prevented by a single representative anyway. So the bums fail to get voted out.