4 ms·

The US's antiquated and ossified political system with its focus on minoritarianism and gridlock-as-a-design-objective are a major cause. As long as it's possi

by paulmd 6y ago

The US's antiquated and ossified political system with its focus on minoritarianism and gridlock-as-a-design-objective are a major cause. As long as it's possible for ~30% of the country to drag everything to a halt, not a lot is going to get done. The push to restrict voting rights only amplifies that, but the real problem is that the US system is not built to produce a "mandate to lead", it is designed with an excessive focus on "checks and balances" that require supermajority control of all branches of government to accomplish the most basic of functions. Checks and balances and minority representation are good concepts in general but taken to too much of an extreme you end up with a government that cannot react to obviously changing circumstances, which is where we are now. That's the thing that's functionally going to put the US into decline, our government is simply so gridlocked that it cannot accomplish even its most basic functions, and it's a result of how the government is structured that allows and encourages this. If China and Russia don't do it alone, climate change and other problems certainly will. It's analogous to the liberum veto in the Polism sejm - the system "promoted bipartisanship" by allowing the current legislation under debate and all previous legislation passed in that session to be vetoed at any time by a single member. That's good, right? You have to pass things that only everyone agrees with! But it was exploited by bad actors both internally and foreign powers who wanted to weaken and disrupt the government, to the point the polish state collapsed into a state of anarchy and provincial rule. Sound familiar? Ultimately it is better to have a system of government that produces an administration that is capable of accomplishing its policy objectives, even if that means that your political opponents can also do things that you don't like. You can then structure the rest of the government around making sure that the administration remains representative of the population. But having a government that is routinely unable to do anything at all is a design flaw with the system, not something to be cheered, and that's the primary reason the US is in decline. It's better for somebody to be at the helm, than everybody arguing over which way to go and nobody driving. On top of that the US tends to conceptualize "unlimited rights" to a much greater degree than virtually any country. That makes it far more susceptible to misinformation campaigns. The internet is the Atom Bomb of the information age - it makes misinformation far more deadly than it ever was before, because now you can take misinformation straight to the idiots themselves on a micro-targeted level. Certainly misinformation was a problem before, particularly with radio (eg Father Coughlin) but that was eventually curbed with broadcast regulations. As those regulations have eroded the problem got worse again, and now that we have private infrastructure that is totally unregulated it is becoming vastly worse again. Even worse than before in fact, because now you can micro-target the lies each person is most susceptible too. It's just a completely different ballgame than it was 30 years ago, and the regulatory scheme hasn't adapted to the idea that pretty much anybody can wield this potent weapon. The whole western world with its liberal (in the rights-based sense) philosophies are struggling with this but the US takes the most extremist positions in this area and is impacted the worst. The lack of regulatory response to the rise of weaponized, micro-targeted misinformation campaigns is certainly amplified by the gridlock caused by minoritarian control at the government level, of course, these are all inter-related problems.

ceilingcorner 6y ago
There are a ton of issues with your thesis. - The US is a impregnable continent with oceans on both sides. Poland is a flat plain surrounded by historical enemies. Congress isn't the Sejm and a single veto doesn't halt legislation. No one is going to invade the US and significant legislation still gets passed regularly. Poland also didn't have the entire apolitical infrastructure of the CIA, FBI, NSA, state governments, etc. - Misinformation has always existed. The idea that somehow everything was true and honest back when we only had 3 TV stations is naive at best. The media has lost control of the narrative and they no longer have the power they once did to control information. It's as simple as that. - You are assuming that the problem here is government and not culture.
- paulmd 6y ago
  - The physical isolation of the US is one of the reasons it's endured as long as it has, yes. We would be in a lot more trouble if we were physically accessible to enemies, of course. However, not all problems are man-made, climate change is an example of a problem that the US cannot dodge simply because it's geographically isolated. The healthcare crisis, COVID, worsening inequality, etc are all internal problems that the US is unable to address because of its ossified political system. We're not going to be able to ignore those problems forever just because we live on our own continent, we need a functioning government regardless. Moreover, it is of course trivially true that no two historical circumstances are ever exactly the same. That doesn't mean we discard all historical parallels and lessons from history. That's a very trivial and shortsighted view to the lessons of history. Obviously the US is not Poland circa 1500. But it demonstrates the problems that can be created from systems with extreme amounts of checks-and-balances. From there we can ask the question "are the US's systems of checks and balances extreme enough that they're causing problems?" and I think the answer is clearly "yes". - Misinformation has always existed, just like bombs existed before the atom bomb. That doesn't mean the battlefield hasn't significantly changed from 30 years ago. Thanks to the work of Facebook, Google, and others, it is now possible to directly target individuals with the forms of misinformation they are most susceptible to. Just as that has revolutionized advertising, it has revolutionized information warfare, and the regulatory framework has not adapted to deal with that (partially because of liberal absolutism, and partially because of the generally ossified nature of the political system which prevents anything from getting done). Moreover, back when the government was more functional, misinformation was recognized as a problem and addressed. Truth in broadcasting laws being an example. And as those regulations have been eroded (both legally and structurally with the transition to unregulated forms of broadcast over privately owned carriers) the problems have gotten worse. So yes, it's always been a problem, to the extent that we recognized that and deployed solutions to fix it, and as those solutions have been eroded the problem has come back and gotten worse. - "Culture" is another trite excuse for systemic problems. It is not the overall cause of the problems. If your system of government and rights framework requires humans to be angels then it is not a good one - this is the same argument as "communism would work if we only found perfect humans". Well, humans aren't perfect, if the US government can't function with imperfect humans then that's a design problem. But yes, generally the US does have a cultural problem with selfishness and lack of community outlook that doesn't help any of this. People refusing to get the COVID shot while they go around society and (stochastically) kill others and breed new mutations of the virus is just the most recent example, generally you have things like the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" and the focus on employers being able to use their religion to impinge on their employees' lives that are fairly uniquely american. We would be much better off with some community-oriented ideals to balance out that individualism. The overall problem is structural, but the cultural problems certainly don't help.

by paulmd 6y ago

ceilingcorner 6y ago

There are a ton of issues with your thesis. - The US is a impregnable continent with oceans on both sides. Poland is a flat plain surrounded by historical enemies. Congress isn't the Sejm and a single veto doesn't halt legislation. No one is going to invade the US and significant legislation still gets passed regularly. Poland also didn't have the entire apolitical infrastructure of the CIA, FBI, NSA, state governments, etc. - Misinformation has always existed. The idea that somehow everything was true and honest back when we only had 3 TV stations is naive at best. The media has lost control of the narrative and they no longer have the power they once did to control information. It's as simple as that. - You are assuming that the problem here is government and not culture.

paulmd 6y ago
- The physical isolation of the US is one of the reasons it's endured as long as it has, yes. We would be in a lot more trouble if we were physically accessible to enemies, of course. However, not all problems are man-made, climate change is an example of a problem that the US cannot dodge simply because it's geographically isolated. The healthcare crisis, COVID, worsening inequality, etc are all internal problems that the US is unable to address because of its ossified political system. We're not going to be able to ignore those problems forever just because we live on our own continent, we need a functioning government regardless. Moreover, it is of course trivially true that no two historical circumstances are ever exactly the same. That doesn't mean we discard all historical parallels and lessons from history. That's a very trivial and shortsighted view to the lessons of history. Obviously the US is not Poland circa 1500. But it demonstrates the problems that can be created from systems with extreme amounts of checks-and-balances. From there we can ask the question "are the US's systems of checks and balances extreme enough that they're causing problems?" and I think the answer is clearly "yes". - Misinformation has always existed, just like bombs existed before the atom bomb. That doesn't mean the battlefield hasn't significantly changed from 30 years ago. Thanks to the work of Facebook, Google, and others, it is now possible to directly target individuals with the forms of misinformation they are most susceptible to. Just as that has revolutionized advertising, it has revolutionized information warfare, and the regulatory framework has not adapted to deal with that (partially because of liberal absolutism, and partially because of the generally ossified nature of the political system which prevents anything from getting done). Moreover, back when the government was more functional, misinformation was recognized as a problem and addressed. Truth in broadcasting laws being an example. And as those regulations have been eroded (both legally and structurally with the transition to unregulated forms of broadcast over privately owned carriers) the problems have gotten worse. So yes, it's always been a problem, to the extent that we recognized that and deployed solutions to fix it, and as those solutions have been eroded the problem has come back and gotten worse. - "Culture" is another trite excuse for systemic problems. It is not the overall cause of the problems. If your system of government and rights framework requires humans to be angels then it is not a good one - this is the same argument as "communism would work if we only found perfect humans". Well, humans aren't perfect, if the US government can't function with imperfect humans then that's a design problem. But yes, generally the US does have a cultural problem with selfishness and lack of community outlook that doesn't help any of this. People refusing to get the COVID shot while they go around society and (stochastically) kill others and breed new mutations of the virus is just the most recent example, generally you have things like the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" and the focus on employers being able to use their religion to impinge on their employees' lives that are fairly uniquely american. We would be much better off with some community-oriented ideals to balance out that individualism. The overall problem is structural, but the cultural problems certainly don't help.