I would actually suggest this is symptomatic of the real problem: money in politics.
Elected officials (and some appointed, like SCOTUS) keep changing laws and precedents to allow more and more money in politics. They can't quit all that dark money - without a lot of funding, you don't get elected. Usually the best funded candidate wins.
There was an anonymous oped from a congressman some years back which bemoaned the reality - that 60% of their time was dedicated to meeting with donors for reelection campaigns instead of working on real problems.
Part of the reason money has such a big influence on elections is that first-past-the-post election system you have over there in the US. When voters have to make a binary choice between two participants, low-information campaigns like hit-pieces are able to make a big difference and are cheap to communicate en-masse. When voters have a actual choice between four parties on the left and four parties on the right, hit-pieces will only make a voter switch from, say, one left-wing party to another. So since the return-on-investment on political advertising is much lower, much less money will be spent on it and there will be less of it. And what will be there will be of higher quality.
If any of what you just said was true in practice, Australia would be a gleaming example of how democracies with strong civil society organisations can be run.
Instead, Australia is best described as pigs at the slops trough.
A nation that seems to only want to vote for leaders who have a public humiliation kink.
Yes yes yes. Dark money. Nepotism. Corrupt courts. Gerrymandering .... anything to deflect from the fact that so many voters still put thier mark beside the biggest idiot. And i mean that literally. American voters like tall people.
They're all problems and they all contribute to the reality of our government being unable to actually do anything beyond tax cuts.
* People elect morons because we have been slowly destroying our education system since the 50's and we can barely turn out anyone who can think worth a shit. That's by design, as local elections overwhelmingly swing Republican, and Republicans on balance gain from an ignorant electorate.
* Additionally, we are now bombarded with "information" from wake to sleep every single day, and beyond the actual problems which are already stressful enough, we also have a whole bunch of made up culture war nonsense that mainstream and alternative media loves to discuss, both to fill airtime and because researching and covering nonsense is far less work, less legally actionable, and garners more attention overall. Information overload affects people too and makes them more likely to choose easy/quick things.
* Dark money is also a HUGE issue because it permits capital to influence elections like never before. It's no coincidence all of this shit got turbocharged after Citizens United.
* Gerrymandering is also a huge, huge issue wherein Democrat votes are simply disregarded or packed into single districts, which helps local elections shift further right constantly.
* The courts are also hideously corrupt. The Supreme Court is utterly failing to reign in the Trump administration on everything short of wiping their asses with the constitution, and that's not shocking considering how many of them were appointed by Trump and confirmed by the inept Congress.
And then any time Democrats do manage to acquire something resembling power, they have so many fires to put out that they can barely get us back to an even keel before another "outsider" dumbass comes in and starts screwing it up again.
People aren’t electing “morons” out of ignorance. They are electing people that hate the same people they hate. You are blaming ignorance where it is active malice.
Again you call it ignorance instead of malevolence.
How is electing Trump any different than George Wallace having a slogan of “Segregation Now! Segregation Tomorrow! Segregation Forever!”?
There was no ignorance. Everyone knows that the government has a “monopoly on [legalized] violence”. If they can elect people who will turn that violence against people they don’t like, they are doing it with full knowledge.
Ignorance is a type of action, malevolence is a motivation. You can be ignorant out of malevolence and your ignorance can result in your actions being malicious.
Voting based on who the (to be) elected hate instead of on actual policy is ignorant towards the serious matter of the art of leading a state (politics). Being malevolent regarding politics would be to sabotage elections or trying to dissolve state organs.
American government was actually perfectly able to "Do things" right up until 2008. Republicans and Democrats quite literally worked together in Congress in broad cliques that normally crossed party boundaries, and did this all the time. When Clinton's admin was trying to save money on the budget, the fights in Congress frequently crossed party lines and were outright bipartisan, about actual merits (claimed or real) of the programs they were cutting or vouching for. You had Republicans rightly blasting certain Democrats for saying stupid things about the SSC shoulder to shoulder with other democrats.
Then in 2008 Mitch McConnel said, literally to reporters, "I will make Obama a one term president" and declared their job was to not let the government do anything.
And just like that, it became Republican Party Doctrine that you do not cross the party line or else you get fired. This was absolutely supported and highly praised by their constituents! As Democrat politicians continued to work their assess off crossing the aisle, finding any way to keep the country functioning as half of the government declared strike (the irony).
But for some reason we aren't allowed to say this. Republicans directly say their plan and strategy and malice to the camera and we get punished for showing their voters exactly what they vote for.
Democrats are still trying to make deals, because half of them are literally just republicans with a (D), but if you ever ever ever ever cross the aisle as a Republican, even to fix a problem your base has spent decades screaming about, you get primaried.
Republican voters have done this. The republican party has chosen to do this. They own this.
Politics is an arm's race. This is going to be an unpopular opinion, but Democrats do all the same things Republicans do. Arguably they differ in how they do it, and how much. Democrats gerrymander, and as well traffic in conspiracy theories for example (the latter they do less than Republicans, but they still do it).
When one party will violate every norm and law to the greatest extent that they can get away with it, it's pretty much impossible to compete with them. I want good things for people. I can't compete with fascists because they will cheat and lie and employ violence. My positive intent is almost impossible to out thwart their dirty deeds if they are willing to break laws / change laws and I won't.
Well we can’t recall the voters, so there is no point in addressing them. They are a problem because in the US there used to be an FCC rule that said “if you call yourself a news program, you must tell the truth,” and that was overridden by the Supreme Court during Reagan’s term.
No there was never a rule about “telling the truth” the rule was “equal time”. So if one party said “vaccines keep people from dying” and the other party said “vaccines would cause you to grow extra limbs” you had to allow them both on.
Second, it had nothing to do with the Supreme Court. The theory was that the airwaves belong to the public and the FCC has jurisdiction. It never applied to cable channels like FoxNews
Third, the current FCC is going after broadcast networks for not being fair under the rule
It does already. Section 230 in the US isn't an unlimited get out of jail free card. Other countries have varying amount of policing, with differing levels of success and corruption. Spain, the UK, and China all come to mind here.
That's the problem. People don't want to blame the voters because there's no solution. We are grasping for something that is possible to fix that isn't just "Somehow americans are especially bad at doing very basic things for no reason"
Well, I personally am making the “Ben Kenobi” choice. I’m hoping to leave the US and retire and die and make it the next generation’s problem.
I’ve done my part, I have voted for “progressive”/safety net policies and the US has gone in the opposite direction. This isn’t some shrill unthought out plan.
I’m actually in the country now I plan to retire to for six weeks and I’m coming back for a month in the summer, part of the ex-pat community and meeting people, my wife and I have been learning Spanish and I speak it okay and I know the processes for establishing residency here
I’m over dealing with the American people. As a minority, I find the entire attitude outside of the US refreshing even as the only Black couple in our expat group. For reference, my still living parents grew up in the segregated South.
The large citizenries that later (19th century) forced administrations into constitutions and participation in policy started out with state mandated education and a class consciousness that is based on being knowledged and sophisticated. You need to make the next generation as smart as possible as you can, optimally also on topics concerning the society and economics.
The late 19th century was also when “Separate but Equal” was enshrined as the law of the land by the Supreme Court and a few decades later there were Japanese internment camps…
That's just an unreal characterization that plays into the hands of the "red" team. One side has put up presidents and congressional leadership that worked (mostly, I'm not saying they're perfect) within the traditional framework of the system. The other has put up a president who literally does not understand the meaning of the word "no," expects that everyone will let him do pretty much anything he wants, and a congress that agrees with him. Notably, that side was different in 2000, 1988, 1980, etc. -- not perfect by any stretch, but not this.
Do you want another authoritarian, corrupt, cult of personality leader like Trump? Proclaiming "both sides" and ignoring nuance like you're doing is how no one gets held accountable for the real harms that are taking place. Please stop holding water for the MAGAs/GOP.
America has had even more corrupt/authoritarian/cult of personality leaders than Trump. They were younger and their brains still worked so they did way more damage than trump too. Most Americans just don't learn much history so can't compare.
Assuming you're from the USA, your two main parties are exactly like that. The appearances have changed, but Obama drone-assassinating random children on the other side of the world was not much better than what Trump is doing.
Not defending Trump, to be clear, just saying US imperialism and fascism has much deeper roots and that removing Trump is not going to fix any issues the rest of the world has with the USA.
USA government is corrupt, true. Current admin is balls-out corrupt in ways that have a French legislator calling out that impeachment would have happened there. It's shockingly out in the open corrupt, and that's saying a lot because most of the people ripping us off want to be somewhat quiet about it and not draw attention.
I didn't hear about this french legislator, but that's funny given the level of rampant corruption in french government. Nothing new (see also Pasqua, Foccart, etc), but in the past decades the information was not widely available so it was at least possible to pretend not to know.
Much of the government including Macron himself are involved in corruption scandals. Others are involved in rape scandals. Others in fiscal fraud. But you're correct they're not as open about it as Trump is.
Unfortunately, i don't know of a complete reference resource. I'd be interested if you found one. A quick research later i found this CFR resource [1] which probably underestimates the number of civilians killed.
I remember reports at the time on the Intercept and other media about the entire kill chain. If i remember correctly, the policy was to count anyone who was not proved to be a civilian as an active enemy in the body count. There was this DOD/CIA press conference announcing they made a targeted killing and that their target assessment was mostly based on the individual's height.
Then there's of course Obama famously and publicly joking about his children's lovers suggesting they should behave or would get killed by « predator drones ». [2] Let me know if you dig interesting links on the topic!
> famously and publicly joking
...at the white house correspondents dinner. I think that context matters.
I also think drone strikes exacerbate public outrage much the way mass shootings do: if we want to decrease gun deaths, limiting AR-15s isn't the way to do it because the vast majority of gun deaths are handguns. But mass shootings upset people, so we outlaw the guns that upset them. Similarly with drones, people don't get as upset about tens of thousands killed in a broader war, they're put off by the smaller number of casualties caused by drones.
You would think that if the policy was as flawed as you describe it would be easier to find evidence of it now?
It was not better, it was less. US imperialism has deep roots, yes, but a large chunk of the world who would tolerate a moderate level of it, don't tolerate this level.
I hear rumblings about foreign companies disconnecting from American services and products. You don't turn large ships on a dime, but they are turning.
I don't think it was less, though only future historians will come up with actual numbers. It was less public, though.
Most of the world never tolerated it. Even when western governments tolerated it, the population did not; see also the huge worldwide demonstrations against the Iraq war.
I think the difference in perception is because the european oligarchy is now being effectively treated as was previously the rest of the world, so they're now taking a stance because they feel threatened, whereas they previously saw themselves as aligned with the US government no matter what.
Elected officials (and some appointed, like SCOTUS) keep changing laws and precedents to allow more and more money in politics. They can't quit all that dark money - without a lot of funding, you don't get elected. Usually the best funded candidate wins.
There was an anonymous oped from a congressman some years back which bemoaned the reality - that 60% of their time was dedicated to meeting with donors for reelection campaigns instead of working on real problems.