Comment by Teever | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Teever | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

It's easy to place the blame on political parties or the wealthy but at the end of the day the problems that America faces are the result of a series of choices made by the electorate over decades despite the feedback from each of these decisions as they were made.

At then end of the day the way things are in America is a reflection of what the American people want their country to be.

People like to make the argument that Americans would stand up and sort this problem out, but the country is just so big, and the average American just doesn't have enough money to do something, and people are spread far and wide and that there's just no way for the to come together to decisively end these problems but it's just excuses. People by and large are content with the status quo. This is just what they want.

Precarious state of health care access and incomprehensibly opaque costs? That's a choice.

An ever escalating police state that has reached new peaks of immigration police and pulling random people off the street and a national guard perpetually patrolling cities? That's a choice.

Forever wars with no discernible objective or end point in the Middle East? That's a choice.

consolidation of media and economic control into a smaller and smaller group of people? That's a choice.

All of this is a choice that Americans collectively continue to make. And my prediction is that they'll continue to keep making these (imho) poor choices.

It's not so much choices that Americans collectively make. Almost every major policy decision since 2010 has been unpopular with the American public. The actual elected officials just thumbs up or thumbs down something based which party introduced it, and then if they ignore that they decide on the very poorly organized skim notes an aide might be able to badger them into reading. Many members of our House Of Representatives didn't even read what was in the 2018 fiscal budget bill (P.L. 115-123) or the omnibus bill of 2025 (P.L. 119-21) that destroyed regulatory authority. Mitch McConnell ruined the ability of Congress to actually function by making it a warring states situation instead of organized compromise. Ever since then it's been grab what you can get and get, because you won't get any long term work done.

The American people don't actually want this. They don't vote for any of these policies. They actively vote and protest against them. But there's no true mechanism available to the public for ousting elected or appointed officials outside of scheduled times. Recalls have no enforcement. Impeachments have no enforcement! When you know you've got a protected period to wreak havoc in, you do it without worry. Especially if you're doing that in service of people who have broken the systems so they cannot be pried out of their positions, and who will pay you handsomely for bloodying your hands during that two or six year stint.

The public just has to hope whoever they're voting for isn't lying to them, because if that representative is then there's nothing the public can do to punish them in time.

So if the American people don't actually want this -- What are they collectively going to do about it?

If the answer to that question is simply "the same thing they've done for the past few decades" then the reasonable conclusion to draw is again -- that the American people are collectively fine with the state of their country and the growing inequality and shrinking democratic power that the individual American has.

There are a myriad of responses that the American people could have to this growing problem, that range from legal to illegal, from scrupulous to unscrupulous but the American people collectively choose the path of least resistance, they choose the status quo.

America looked at Jan 6th and collectively decided that doing nothing was the best course of action. No further response was needed. Just clean the riff-raff out of the capitol and get back to business as usual.

If you're an American look around and remember that what you see as good as it gets, and that it's all downhill from here because that's what everyone wants.

Americans have been convinced that doing anything disruptive will get them killed or get the people they care about killed. And for the most vulnerable in our society that's likely true, as the existing safety nets are already extremely brittle and hold far more weight than they're supposed to. The public's too scared of losing what little they have to actually do anything extreme, and so they have that little stripped away slowly instead. Along with their basic humanity. Inculcation and indoctrination from the moment you can understand language can do irreparable harm to someone's psychology. It takes a more extreme harm to create a new worldview, and that new worldview is often unpredictable. The thinktanks that have crafted corporate and government policy since the 1960s know that and take advantage of it. The gradual stable decay is harder to panic about because it's not an immediate threat. It's all been designed this way ever since the 1970s as a backlash against all the societal progress made in the 1960s and again in the 1990s.

Most of the government's positions since the 1960s have been a result of those thinktanks crafting policy designed to make the public feel disconnected from the protests of the past. Schools don't teach about the socialist groundswell of the 1930s, or of things like the Battle Of Blair Mountain or the Little Steel Strike. They teach about the World War II production lines and how Nazi Germany came to be instead. Martin Luther King Jr. Day was created to defang the man's own political teachings from the later 1960s in favour of his inoffensive "I have a dream" speech that was made before he learned of how the CIA had been targeting the black power movement. Juneteenth was an absolutely blatant placation attempt following the Black Lives Matter protests, and one that nobody it was supposed to be for accepted. But all of these token gestures create an illusion that progress is being made. It makes people think the government is solely responsible for solving problems, rather than the government being responsible for codifying the solutions that people themselves come up with. Many people born after 1980 have been trained to think this way their entire lives by small groups that require a stable environment for capital rather than a healthy environment for the public. To realize it is wrong and destroy one of the foundations of your understanding of the world is a difficult thing to do. And more importantly it's an expensive thing to do. Americans are convinced that everything has to have monetary value and that the destruction of monetary value is the destruction of public good. It's another one of those foundations.

I tell people all the time to actually do things. I do things in front of them. Their immediate response is always "You'll get arrested! What about your family?!" They don't understand the reasoning behind choosing minor immediate risk over guaranteed eventual harm. And with the rampant surveillance systems and government overreach happening, they're being convinced that the minor immediate risk is a major immediate guarantee of harm. The only other response is "What's the point?" They've been so beaten down by automated systems destroying their sense of agency that they feel nothing they do matters. You can't argue with voice mailbox. It has nothing to do with them wanting it or disregarding it, and it has everything to do with the psychology of fear. Fear of loss, fear of harm, fear of authority. None of it's rational. None of it's true personal choice. All of it is systemic. When you're convinced only you have agency you find it too monumental a task to create a system of your own to fight back.

It sucks. I hate it here.

Voters aren't given meaningful choices. It's just subjective "lesser of two evils" in a race to the bottom (except for elites, who win no matter which fake party is in power).

Democracy is illusory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniparty

I wouldn't say democracy I'd illusory. I'd say it has to be fought for repeatedly to keep it, and we've done a poor job of fighting for it at least in my lifetime.

There's nothing an actively-aiming-to-harm-others-for-their-own-gain person loves more than someone else deciding to stop trying because it's 'rigged.' The assholes are internally motivated to continue to being assholes. That takes continual active resistance.

Health access, for instance, improved as a result of one set of votes. Lifetime maxes are gone. There is improved access to non-employee plans.

It didn't stop inflation of health plan costs or medical treatment in general. One might think that means its worth voting for people pledging to make further large-scale changes to address those things.

And meanwhile, the assholes have been campaigning on the opposite for more than a decade: try to make the access worse again by trying rhetorical tricks to say that the one caused vs failed to fix the other. That'll let some rich people get even richer.

That's a real difference for many millions of people.

Neither party is perfect. Welcome to adulthood. Shitty compromises are generally all you get.

By all means, work on structural things to encourage more parties to exist and flourish.

Just also pay attention to the active battles.

> someone else deciding to stop trying because it's 'rigged.'

Nobody here is suggesting this.

The 'both sides are the same' actually is though. They never encourage 'take this behavior, vote this person' just 'both sides are the same' 'it's pointless' 'voting doesn't matter' 'voters have no impact'.

Claiming that both parties have more in common than they're given credit for is very different from throwing ones hands in the air and giving up on voting.

I personally see our two parties today and fighting for the same principles while landing on different specific policies. That doesn't mean I don't vote.

> The 'both sides are the same'

Nowhere in my comments or link does it say that. You're attempting a strawman and failing.

I don't think you can seriously say that there are no meaningful differences between the two major parties. Just compare Biden and Trump 2. You might not like either choice, but their policy platforms are in fact very different, and both are popular among large segments of the population. That's democracy in action.

In my opinion, we don't have a democracy problem, we have an education problem. Too many voters support policies that sound nice on paper but are disastrous when put into practice.

The two parties, including the most recent presidents, have disagreed on specific policy but not on direction. Both partied want more federal powers and authority. Both want to spend more than they make. Both believe in authoritarian type rule with "experts" at the top deciding what is best for all of us.

> Both believe in authoritarian type rule with "experts" at the top deciding what is best for all of us.

Nobody wants "experts" at any level of government.

The question that reveals your actual politics: where do want experts? I want them on staff or retainer, quickly accessible to representatives at every level of government.

Both parties absolutely want experts in charge and for the public to generally fall in line and not ask questions.

Did you not see how the entire pandemic response played out? There are still YouTube videos of a huge swath of politicians and media outlets telling people not to do their own research and to just listen to those in charge of the relevant federal agencies.

The pandemic is an excellent example of both parties prioritizing capital interests over human interests:

https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-co...

Lots of blood on their hands.

I agree that both parties like executive power, but that's because voters like it when it benefits "their side". If classical liberal ideas like fiscal responsibility and limited government were popular enough, the parties would scramble to nominate candidates who supported those policies. They care about winning elections.

It'd a bit of a vicious circle. Voters don't tend to pay much attention or understand, they hear sound bites that land well for them and their cheer for "their team."

I don't think many people even know what liberalism means today. It gets treated like a synonym for progressivism, which itself is poorly defined and used as a synonym for a DNC voter.

We also have a liars problem. Too many politicians feel free to tell blatant lies about what they have done, and what they intend to do. The voters don't punish politicians enough for lies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com