Of course it’d be very nice to have a voting system which selects more competent politicians, but we should keep in mind that the main benefit of democracy is to protect us from tyranny—and we should appreciate that it’s doing a pretty good job.
Obama claimed for himself the powers of a tyrant of being able to kill citizens of his country without due process.
If you prefer to look beyond right to impacts on average personal freedom maybe incaration rates are a better metric. While incaration rates did fall a bit under Obama’s reign in 2017 the US was still the country with the second highest incaration rates overall.
US police takes more money in legalized robbery than burglars do in the US.
When James Clapper can commit the felony of lying to congress about not surveilling Americans without prosecuted, it’s also pretty clear that the rule of law currently doesn’t fully apply to all members of the US elite.
In fact, in the modern context corruption of democracy may be the most important issue for conflict theorists. So I think that a more charitable interpretation is conflict theory as “constant vigilance”. There is no system which does not develop cracks and flaws eventually.
In think there’s a lot wrong with the sentiment in that paragraph. There’s no golden past where politics was completely uncorrupted and was as idealistic as they tell you in school. The internment of the Japanese during WWII would be a very graphic example of how democracy can’t prevent tyrany that’s a bit older.
Constant viligence gets you to fight for a repeal of Citizens United, when what’s actually needed is public financing of elections because money is an universial currency that always finds a way to be used. If you can’t buy ads in a newspaper you can buy the newspaper or give the politicans kids high paying jobs.
On the other hand, public financing of elections would make more candidates viable who don’t want to bend to corporate donors. All the evidence that we have also points in the direction of huge spending for political campaigns having an effect that’s much smaller than commonly believed.
There’s a lot of harm done by presenting political advertising as more effective than it actually is. Because of the belief in the effectivness of political advertising candidates who can’t get much money get discouraged from running and politicians feel pressured to spent so much time with fundraising.
Political consultants make a lot of money by pretending that political advertising has a larger effect than it has. Reformers who want to fight “money in politics” but who are bad at mistake theory don’t understand that they might make the problem worse by increasing polticians belief that the amount of money they raise matters so much.
The systems of political power are opague enough that it not easy to challenge them without understanding them.
Obama claimed for himself the powers of a tyrant of being able to kill citizens of his country without due process.
If you prefer to look beyond right to impacts on average personal freedom maybe incaration rates are a better metric. While incaration rates did fall a bit under Obama’s reign in 2017 the US was still the country with the second highest incaration rates overall.
US police takes more money in legalized robbery than burglars do in the US.
When James Clapper can commit the felony of lying to congress about not surveilling Americans without prosecuted, it’s also pretty clear that the rule of law currently doesn’t fully apply to all members of the US elite.
In think there’s a lot wrong with the sentiment in that paragraph. There’s no golden past where politics was completely uncorrupted and was as idealistic as they tell you in school. The internment of the Japanese during WWII would be a very graphic example of how democracy can’t prevent tyrany that’s a bit older.
Constant viligence gets you to fight for a repeal of Citizens United, when what’s actually needed is public financing of elections because money is an universial currency that always finds a way to be used. If you can’t buy ads in a newspaper you can buy the newspaper or give the politicans kids high paying jobs.
On the other hand, public financing of elections would make more candidates viable who don’t want to bend to corporate donors. All the evidence that we have also points in the direction of huge spending for political campaigns having an effect that’s much smaller than commonly believed.
There’s a lot of harm done by presenting political advertising as more effective than it actually is. Because of the belief in the effectivness of political advertising candidates who can’t get much money get discouraged from running and politicians feel pressured to spent so much time with fundraising.
Political consultants make a lot of money by pretending that political advertising has a larger effect than it has. Reformers who want to fight “money in politics” but who are bad at mistake theory don’t understand that they might make the problem worse by increasing polticians belief that the amount of money they raise matters so much.
The systems of political power are opague enough that it not easy to challenge them without understanding them.