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Yeah, I also miss the mid-80s. But they're not coming back. We haven't had anything even faintly resembling "rational and informed discussion" in decades. The
by jfengel 3y ago
Yeah, I also miss the mid-80s. But they're not coming back. We haven't had anything even faintly resembling "rational and informed discussion" in decades.
The thing with Machiavellianism is that it works. The anti-Machiavellians are welcome to discourse with each other all day. But they'll take orders from those who manipulated the rules to get more rules passed. It has never been about who's right; it's about who wins.
- trealira 3y agoPublic trust in government has been declining since the 1960s[1]. There's a book called Congress and the Decline of Public Trust, published in 1999, which talks about this trend[2]. You can borrow it hourly on archive.org. There's a paper from 1983 called The Decline of Confidence in American Institutions which discusses this as well[3]. People already knew about it during the mid 80s. [1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/11/23/1-trust-in-government-1958-2015/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/11/23/1-trust-in-g... [2]: https://archive.org/details/congressdeclineo0000unse/page/n5/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/congressdeclineo0000unse/page/n5... [3]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2150494?seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2150494?seq=1