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Call me when people have higher standards. Everyone likes to complain about the government but when have they actually voted against an incumbent politician?

Call me when people have higher standards. Everyone likes to complain about the government but when have they actually voted against an incumbent politician? The failure of state governments and the Federal government to meet basic standards of competence and deliver expected outcomes is not going to change until the voters start punishing politicians for it. This situation wouldn't fly in a lot of other countries -- if, say, the electrical grid or the public transit or the level of safety in the streets in the UK or France or Germany was as bad as it was in the USA, politicians there would fear for their jobs. In the USA they still do not fear for their jobs, and everyone seems to assume that incompetent government is the natural and only conceivable order of things. That is what needs to change. Until I see incumbent politicians lose their jobs, I won't believe that change is coming.

nathanaldensr 4y ago
The United States has gone back and forth between the two dominant parties for almost its entire history. Can we definitively say things have gotten objectively better? If not, then what does voting actually do? If I could run for representative and have a decent chance at winning, maybe I would run. Unfortunately, I wouldn't stand a chance against better-funded, entrenched interests with unlimited money. Why should I bother, so I and my family can be destroyed publicly for the sake of winning?
- JasonFruit 4y ago
  There's a solution I like: ratify the original First Amendment, which would have greatly reduced the number of constituents per representative, which would a) have made representatives more responsive to their constituents, and b) made it harder for wealthy special-interest groups to capture every election for the House of Representatives. It was originally understood as correcting an inaccurate wording in the Constitution. Here's the text: > After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one Representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred; after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons. For reference, right now each representative is supposed somehow to act on behalf of almost two thirds of a million people! How can one person vote on behalf of so many, who are inevitably drawn from a mix of rural, urban, poor, wealthy, and every other varied circumstance of life? How much can any one person feel represented, or hope to influence who represents them or how?
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    How would having that amendment change a single thing today? Don't we currently happen to be compliant with it even though it isn't in force? In particular, note that it ends with "nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons", not "less than" like the preceding clauses did.
    - JasonFruit 4y ago
      No, it puts the minimum number of representatives at about 6000, one per 50,000 people, where right now there are 435, one per about 650,000. That would be a significant change, in my eyes.
      - josephcsible 4y ago
        No, it puts the maximum number at about 6000.
        JasonFruit 4y ago
        I see that now. Interesting. Well, I'm wrong on that text — but I still think the idea, as I had previously understood it, is a good one, and we have the technology to make a 6000-person House of Representatives workable.
flashgordon 4y ago
This. I was surprised that the concept of punishment itself came as a surprise to most folks I had spoken to. The argument overwhelmingly was "well what is the other guy going to do?". I'd have thought fear of loss is a huge motivator on its own.
- ruined 4y ago
  if you are at all concerned with outcomes, "what is the other guy going to do?" is an entirely reasonable question to ask, and often the answer is miserable you could say that the solution is to then move attention to the primaries, and this is happening to some extent, but attempts there have been repeatedly stymied by abrupt rule changes and blatant ratfucks (see: the entire history of Bernie Sanders) we, arguably, got an answer on the right when Trump was elected, and pretty much everybody agrees that's been a disaster, from the establishment that fears him and the countermovement against him, to the base disappointed by his term and snubbed by his eventual removal.
softcactus 4y ago
People have high standards, but you're assuming that everyone has a decent level of information/education. Most people don't have a clue what's going on. I mean just look at this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGjaNXNXm-Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGjaNXNXm-Y How many people in drug-ridden rural communities will take this at face value? Who can blame them when their entire circle of acquaintances thinks the same and the TV and radio says the same thing? Accountability is important but our media is incredible at misdirecting our attention. Compare the media attention given to the Panama Papers vs the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial. The gatekeeping of information is by design, if people knew how badly they were getting screwed over, there would be riots in the streets.
- rayiner 4y ago
  That assertion doesn’t pass the smell test. Americans are among the most highly educated people in the world. And significantly more educated than folks in most European countries, and significantly more educated than Americans of previous generations. I’ve got an engineering undergraduate degree and a law degree, and when I saw that ad, I remembered the 2020 Democratic debate where nearly everyone raised their hand to decriminalizing border crossings and free healthcare for illegal aliens. You can split hairs and say that Biden didn’t raise his hand, and he’s the President, not Elizabeth Warren. But the ad doesn’t depend on folks being “uneducated.” It merely requires them to make some uncharitable inferences about how much influence the supporters of those other candidates have over Biden. In my opinion it’s a legal tackle. As to people being “screwed over” they’re not. Noah Smith, a liberal, has done quite a good job showing how most Americans are better off than their European counterparts, except folks at the very bottom: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/americans-are-generally-richer-than https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/americans-are-generally-ri... > but again this is just one more data point showing that the typical American enjoys a higher material standard of living than the typical European. > A person at the cutoff of the bottom 10% in the U.S. takes home only $11,287 per year, while their counterpart in Denmark takes home $15,607. Instead of assuming that people are just uneducated and irrational, maybe educate yourself and understand what dynamics are really at play. The median American is choosing greater consumption capacity at the expense of safety nets for those at the bottom. That’s arguably selfish, but not irrational.
rayiner 4y ago
> This situation wouldn't fly in a lot of other countries Yet it’s very common in other countries deeply divided by ethnicity or religion. In a democracy, the main way to hold politicians accountable is by voting for someone else. But in a society with deep sectarian divides, voting against your party can be tantamount to voting against your racial/ethnic/identity bloc. So people don’t do it, and incompetent incumbents can always blame their failures on “the other side.”
jnovek 4y ago
“…voted against an incumbent…” I did every year — even the odd years — during the decade I lived in Texas. None of my candidates ever won! …Of course my district was so heavily gerrymandered that it looked like some weird, vestigial organ among a bunch of nice, rectangular districts. And every year we had to register a little earlier if we wanted to vote. Oh, and, you can’t register online in Texas. And it always seemed like there were fewer polling places and the lines were a bit longer each year. What’s crazy is that, where I live in Minnesota these days, I don’t deal with ANY of these problems. (Well, I’m sure my district is probably somehow gerrymandered, aren’t they all?) It’s almost like in Texas they didn’t want me to vote at all. EDIT: To be clear, I don’t think it’s about standards. I think it’s that all the options are horrendous and the game is rigged like a carnival, anyway.
resonious 4y ago
I think I more or less agree with this. One thing I've noticed (casually, anecdotally) is that voters seem to know next to nothing about who or what they're voting for. They only go out to vote because of the EVERYONE MUST VOTE and then they just pick the options that are most familiar to them. That or they have a very ideological "good vs evil" mindset and they pick the options that are colored good. For my own sake, I also kind of wish I knew more when going out to vote. The problem is, I feel like there's no reliable and efficient way for me to read up on what politicians are actually saying and doing. Perhaps the press is supposed to be my source for that but publications are always biased. I can read multiple publications from different perspectives but then they just kind of contradict each other, and I'm left with nothing. Not to mention it's time consuming and not very fun to read the same thing with a slightly different spin multiple times!
mark_l_watson 4y ago
I agree with you, but I would like to add: try not directly supporting the democrats and republicans. Start with registering as an independent. If 90% or the voters registered as independent (or Libertarian or Green if that is what they like) then it would be more difficult for Wall Street and the Defense industry to easily control both democratic and republicans parties.
jorblumesea 4y ago
Identity politics. People vote for those who ban gender neutral restrooms over boring things like infrastructure.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Izkata 4y ago
Agree for the ones we can vote out, but most of the "institutions" in that list aren't ones we have a say in.
everforward 4y ago
This is a natural outcome having 2 political parties (and FPTP elections) combined with voters that refuse to compromise on key issues. E.g. 1 in 4 US voters will only vote for pro-life candidates. It's about the same on gun control (combined for and against). Those people basically only have 1 person they'd think of voting for. Change would be more likely if these people had more options, so they could express the importance of their issue alongside their other views, but they can't. Being pro-gun ropes them into voting for anti-abortion candidates. Being pro-immigration ropes them into being pro-single-payer healthcare. There's no room to say "I'm pro-gun and pro-immigration"; FPTP ensures that trying to vote along those ideas goes nowhere. Politicians don't fear for their jobs because they know that as bad as they are, people aren't going to vote against their cemented principles just to express discontent.
- twblalock 4y ago
  I don’t buy that. Other countries with FPTP elections do better.
  - coderaptor 4y ago
    Would you give a couple examples?
- jfengel 4y ago
  It's not entirely accurate to describe US elections as FPTP, because we hold elections in two stages. Primary elections are often multi-candidate, and it's exactly when they get the opportunity to say things like "I'm pro-gun and pro-immigration and anti-abortion". In the end, there is only one winner of the general election, and if anti-abortion is the most important thing to them, they'll have to compromise with other people who agree on that. During the primary they have the opportunity to make the strongest case they can for their other agenda items, but once they and their fellow party members have picked a candidate for the general, their choice is clear to them. So it's not true that they have no options. They have options, during the part of the process that gets less attention. They may be constrained after that, but any election by any rules has the fundamental constraint that there is exactly one winner.
listless 4y ago
I think you’re over indexing on federal government. Here in the USA, our federal government is largely ground zero for a profoundly stupid culture war. It is grossly obese and rediculously wasteful. State government is a totally different animal. It is largely efficient and where actual governing and policy happens. Where I live we have a balanced budget as just an example of the stark difference. I do agree with your point on incumbents. We have people who have never had actual jobs outside of elected office. That is offensive on principal.

nathanaldensr 4y ago

The United States has gone back and forth between the two dominant parties for almost its entire history. Can we definitively say things have gotten objectively better? If not, then what does voting actually do? If I could run for representative and have a decent chance at winning, maybe I would run. Unfortunately, I wouldn't stand a chance against better-funded, entrenched interests with unlimited money. Why should I bother, so I and my family can be destroyed publicly for the sake of winning?

JasonFruit 4y ago
There's a solution I like: ratify the original First Amendment, which would have greatly reduced the number of constituents per representative, which would a) have made representatives more responsive to their constituents, and b) made it harder for wealthy special-interest groups to capture every election for the House of Representatives. It was originally understood as correcting an inaccurate wording in the Constitution. Here's the text: > After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one Representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred; after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons. For reference, right now each representative is supposed somehow to act on behalf of almost two thirds of a million people! How can one person vote on behalf of so many, who are inevitably drawn from a mix of rural, urban, poor, wealthy, and every other varied circumstance of life? How much can any one person feel represented, or hope to influence who represents them or how?
- josephcsible 4y ago
  How would having that amendment change a single thing today? Don't we currently happen to be compliant with it even though it isn't in force? In particular, note that it ends with "nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons", not "less than" like the preceding clauses did.
  - JasonFruit 4y ago
    No, it puts the minimum number of representatives at about 6000, one per 50,000 people, where right now there are 435, one per about 650,000. That would be a significant change, in my eyes.
    - josephcsible 4y ago
      No, it puts the maximum number at about 6000.
      - JasonFruit 4y ago
        I see that now. Interesting. Well, I'm wrong on that text — but I still think the idea, as I had previously understood it, is a good one, and we have the technology to make a 6000-person House of Representatives workable.

flashgordon 4y ago

This. I was surprised that the concept of punishment itself came as a surprise to most folks I had spoken to. The argument overwhelmingly was "well what is the other guy going to do?". I'd have thought fear of loss is a huge motivator on its own.

ruined 4y ago
if you are at all concerned with outcomes, "what is the other guy going to do?" is an entirely reasonable question to ask, and often the answer is miserable you could say that the solution is to then move attention to the primaries, and this is happening to some extent, but attempts there have been repeatedly stymied by abrupt rule changes and blatant ratfucks (see: the entire history of Bernie Sanders) we, arguably, got an answer on the right when Trump was elected, and pretty much everybody agrees that's been a disaster, from the establishment that fears him and the countermovement against him, to the base disappointed by his term and snubbed by his eventual removal.

softcactus 4y ago

People have high standards, but you're assuming that everyone has a decent level of information/education. Most people don't have a clue what's going on. I mean just look at this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGjaNXNXm-Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGjaNXNXm-Y How many people in drug-ridden rural communities will take this at face value? Who can blame them when their entire circle of acquaintances thinks the same and the TV and radio says the same thing? Accountability is important but our media is incredible at misdirecting our attention. Compare the media attention given to the Panama Papers vs the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial. The gatekeeping of information is by design, if people knew how badly they were getting screwed over, there would be riots in the streets.

rayiner 4y ago
That assertion doesn’t pass the smell test. Americans are among the most highly educated people in the world. And significantly more educated than folks in most European countries, and significantly more educated than Americans of previous generations. I’ve got an engineering undergraduate degree and a law degree, and when I saw that ad, I remembered the 2020 Democratic debate where nearly everyone raised their hand to decriminalizing border crossings and free healthcare for illegal aliens. You can split hairs and say that Biden didn’t raise his hand, and he’s the President, not Elizabeth Warren. But the ad doesn’t depend on folks being “uneducated.” It merely requires them to make some uncharitable inferences about how much influence the supporters of those other candidates have over Biden. In my opinion it’s a legal tackle. As to people being “screwed over” they’re not. Noah Smith, a liberal, has done quite a good job showing how most Americans are better off than their European counterparts, except folks at the very bottom: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/americans-are-generally-richer-than https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/americans-are-generally-ri... > but again this is just one more data point showing that the typical American enjoys a higher material standard of living than the typical European. > A person at the cutoff of the bottom 10% in the U.S. takes home only $11,287 per year, while their counterpart in Denmark takes home $15,607. Instead of assuming that people are just uneducated and irrational, maybe educate yourself and understand what dynamics are really at play. The median American is choosing greater consumption capacity at the expense of safety nets for those at the bottom. That’s arguably selfish, but not irrational.

rayiner 4y ago

> This situation wouldn't fly in a lot of other countries Yet it’s very common in other countries deeply divided by ethnicity or religion. In a democracy, the main way to hold politicians accountable is by voting for someone else. But in a society with deep sectarian divides, voting against your party can be tantamount to voting against your racial/ethnic/identity bloc. So people don’t do it, and incompetent incumbents can always blame their failures on “the other side.”

jnovek 4y ago

“…voted against an incumbent…” I did every year — even the odd years — during the decade I lived in Texas. None of my candidates ever won! …Of course my district was so heavily gerrymandered that it looked like some weird, vestigial organ among a bunch of nice, rectangular districts. And every year we had to register a little earlier if we wanted to vote. Oh, and, you can’t register online in Texas. And it always seemed like there were fewer polling places and the lines were a bit longer each year. What’s crazy is that, where I live in Minnesota these days, I don’t deal with ANY of these problems. (Well, I’m sure my district is probably somehow gerrymandered, aren’t they all?) It’s almost like in Texas they didn’t want me to vote at all. EDIT: To be clear, I don’t think it’s about standards. I think it’s that all the options are horrendous and the game is rigged like a carnival, anyway.

resonious 4y ago

I think I more or less agree with this. One thing I've noticed (casually, anecdotally) is that voters seem to know next to nothing about who or what they're voting for. They only go out to vote because of the EVERYONE MUST VOTE and then they just pick the options that are most familiar to them. That or they have a very ideological "good vs evil" mindset and they pick the options that are colored good. For my own sake, I also kind of wish I knew more when going out to vote. The problem is, I feel like there's no reliable and efficient way for me to read up on what politicians are actually saying and doing. Perhaps the press is supposed to be my source for that but publications are always biased. I can read multiple publications from different perspectives but then they just kind of contradict each other, and I'm left with nothing. Not to mention it's time consuming and not very fun to read the same thing with a slightly different spin multiple times!

mark_l_watson 4y ago

I agree with you, but I would like to add: try not directly supporting the democrats and republicans. Start with registering as an independent. If 90% or the voters registered as independent (or Libertarian or Green if that is what they like) then it would be more difficult for Wall Street and the Defense industry to easily control both democratic and republicans parties.

jorblumesea 4y ago

Identity politics. People vote for those who ban gender neutral restrooms over boring things like infrastructure.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Izkata 4y ago

Agree for the ones we can vote out, but most of the "institutions" in that list aren't ones we have a say in.

everforward 4y ago

This is a natural outcome having 2 political parties (and FPTP elections) combined with voters that refuse to compromise on key issues. E.g. 1 in 4 US voters will only vote for pro-life candidates. It's about the same on gun control (combined for and against). Those people basically only have 1 person they'd think of voting for. Change would be more likely if these people had more options, so they could express the importance of their issue alongside their other views, but they can't. Being pro-gun ropes them into voting for anti-abortion candidates. Being pro-immigration ropes them into being pro-single-payer healthcare. There's no room to say "I'm pro-gun and pro-immigration"; FPTP ensures that trying to vote along those ideas goes nowhere. Politicians don't fear for their jobs because they know that as bad as they are, people aren't going to vote against their cemented principles just to express discontent.

twblalock 4y ago
I don’t buy that. Other countries with FPTP elections do better.
- coderaptor 4y ago
  Would you give a couple examples?
jfengel 4y ago
It's not entirely accurate to describe US elections as FPTP, because we hold elections in two stages. Primary elections are often multi-candidate, and it's exactly when they get the opportunity to say things like "I'm pro-gun and pro-immigration and anti-abortion". In the end, there is only one winner of the general election, and if anti-abortion is the most important thing to them, they'll have to compromise with other people who agree on that. During the primary they have the opportunity to make the strongest case they can for their other agenda items, but once they and their fellow party members have picked a candidate for the general, their choice is clear to them. So it's not true that they have no options. They have options, during the part of the process that gets less attention. They may be constrained after that, but any election by any rules has the fundamental constraint that there is exactly one winner.

listless 4y ago

I think you’re over indexing on federal government. Here in the USA, our federal government is largely ground zero for a profoundly stupid culture war. It is grossly obese and rediculously wasteful. State government is a totally different animal. It is largely efficient and where actual governing and policy happens. Where I live we have a balanced budget as just an example of the stark difference. I do agree with your point on incumbents. We have people who have never had actual jobs outside of elected office. That is offensive on principal.