91–100 of 176 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Example?
War on drugs.
There was alignment both at the elite level and the popular level in support of those policies for a long time. It functioned because the minorities it target were politically weak.
I’ll remind everyone of the Princeton study that proved our democracy is a sham. Policy outcomes are almost exclusively the product of the preferences of economic elites, not of the People. If you do get a legislative outcome you wanted it’s a coincidence that some big power’s agenda accidentally aligned with your own.
The CORRECT ISSUE and primary issue we need to be focused on is conflict of interest.
It makes no sense to try to get a group of people such as congress that have conflict of interest to fix the problems they created and are benefiting from , hence the result of the Princeton study.
The sad part is that BOTH individual republicans and democrats should want to reduce conflict of interest as it benefits both sides and everyone in general. However BOTH party are too successful in keeping them fighting with each other , blaming each other, and chasing their tails trying to fix the issues with the people that created them.
I’ll remind everyone of the Princeton study that proved our democracy is a sham. Policy outcomes are almost exclusively the product of the preferences of economic elites, not of the People. If you do get a legislative outcome you wanted it’s a coincidence that some big power’s agenda accidentally aligned with your own.
The Princeton study actually showed that when it comes to advancing policies, it was pretty much a wash. Their difference came in when looking at getting policies blocked . If a policy was unpopular with economic elites, they were effective at getting it shut down. It’s an important distinction, because there’s a clear way to see what causes this behavior. There are a myriad of ways that our systems make it easy to b…
The push for Federalism is a good example of this. If you hear a politician claiming "states' rights", this might just be why. One material example of this is the NRA funding lawsuits against the Brady Bill, despite the gun control measures being popular with non elites.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We can blame HN for providing social engineering tools to make this status permanent, even in a society in decline?
We can, but it does not seem like a useful thing to do. Do we blame hammer makers for making better hammers?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
She [1] [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Hochul
I downvoted this comment. The person you’re replying to seems to be using gender-neutral pronouns in good faith, and I don’t think this comment contributes to the discussion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The alternative to majority rule is tyranny of the minority That's one alternative, but not the only one. Another alternative is for the government to not have the power to tyrannize in the first place. As the saying goes, the problem is not that politicians can be bought but that they have something valuable to sell. > the majority of the country wants universal healthcare and legalized cannabis I don't think this…
https://news.gallup.com/poll/323582/support-legal-marijuana-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The authors of that study started by filtering down a giant list of survey responses to those where there's a significant difference in responses between the "donor class" and everyone else. I forget exactly how often that happened, but it's a small number. So, just in the premise the study, by needing to throw away almost all the survey responses where everyone agrees and get the policies what they want, actually go…
> The authors of that study started by filtering down a giant list of survey responses to those where there's a significant difference in responses between the "donor class" and everyone else. I forget exactly how often that happened, but it's a small number. > So, just in the premise the study, by needing to throw away almost all the survey responses where everyone agrees and get the policies what they want, actuall…
That's how I read it too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean it’s really about identifying rules that are anti majoritarian. On the federal level, the filibuster is an obvious example of a an anti majoritarian rule that creates perverse incentives. Going deeper, the way that the individual houses are structured gives significant power to committee chairs who gain power through seniority and fundraising for their parties, which creates centralized points of leverage for…
The structure of the U.S. government was explicitly designed to be anti majoritarian. For many people, in fact probably the majority of the population this is a feature.
As for some of the over the top bloviating in this thread, that kind of nonsense just makes opposition useless because it's just not persuasive. "Democracy is a sham" whether or not you believe it in whole or in part or not at all won't help you get anything done and I'm willing to bet that the person saying that doesn't even know how to find what bills are pending in their state, let alone care except when a news headline makes them outraged. If you care that much do something, don't write revolutionary fan fiction.
Most laws don't affect you. If they do, support the people who vote how you want. It's not that hard and I'd be willing to bet that for the majority of people here the system is working out just fine for you.