[karajorma]

I think you're very, very wrong there. Many wars of independence have been followed by civil wars precisely because the the simple goal of independence was then immediately followed by dispute over the complex issue of what to do with it.

Most large political change has come about precisely because of people coming together for a common cause.

[Scotty]

I think that civil wars are the kinds of vehicles for political change that are the least optimal way to accomplish the objective.  They're "effective", not "efficient" or even "a good thing".

[karajorma]

So have the revolution but don't have the civil war then.

[General Battuta]

I think you're very, very wrong there. Many wars of independence have been followed by civil wars precisely because the the simple goal of independence was then immediately followed by dispute over the complex issue of what to do with it.

Most large political change has come about precisely because of people coming together for a common cause.

The problem is that when you get bipolar agreement on an issue in American politics (and you get this agreement on most issues - the parties, as well as the American electorate, have the same policy preferences in most domains) then that issue gets handled in a new president's first term or a new legislature's first session.

The really hard problems (like the role of money in politics) stick around because there's a structural disincentive to deal with them even in the face of apparent bipartisan consensus. We just had a huge popular groundswell in part about getting money out of politics, and, well, it didn't make much headway at all, even though major figures in both parties have been putting effort into this topic for years. And when progress is made - like when my home state recently put mandatory caps on campaign spending - it's often defeated by institutionalized features of the American political landscape: in this case, the Supreme Court struck the law down as unconstitutional.

(Interestingly, the real players in terms of political money aren't corporations but individual donors. The efficacy of political donations in altering campaign outcomes is a whole separate analytical problem on top of that..)

A bipartisan grassroots movement to get big money out of politics is a lovely idea in theory. It's the praxis that always trips these things up.

To be clear, if progress here is made I think it'll occur through a constitutional amendment. But make no mistake, the American electorate is already essentially unanimous on this topic - you can get Tea Party and Occupy members to agree on the problem of corporate spending in elections. This is now a matter of structural incentives for the electorate vs. the powerholders.

[Hellzed]

@General Battuta :
You are mostly speaking about getting money out of the election process. What about other parts of the political decision process ?

I don't know much about American politics, but, the EU for example relies a lot on semi independent advisers (coming from the corporate world, national administrations, and some NGOs) to prepare its directives and regulations.
In 2001, the EU Commission (a board responsible for proposing new directives and regulations and applying them, after they are approved by both the Council of the EU and the European Parliament)  published a White Paper, a set of guidelines, regarding how to participate in the decision process.
This White Paper is designed for use by what they call "Civil Society", but it turns out the only way to "participate" efficiently, according to this WP, is to publish high grade studies about highly technical topics. The only groups of people who can afford (time, money, HRs) to do this work are big corporations, and a few NGOs...

I can't say it's really good for the public interest. Everybody in the EU "work groups" think what they are doing is something technical (free market regulations, food or water safety...), but in the end it's still politics... If they want to be on par with companies, trade unions and NGOs have to pay their social scientists and lawyers on the same level as corporate lawyers, so they pick their battles. The EU tries to encourage transparency by registering private interest representatives, publishing their sources of income, but it's not enough yet.

Once you know that big chunks (if not all) of economic sovereignty (including free market, taxes, commercial law, money) of 28 countries making together the first GDP in this world have been transferred to the EU and its post-democratic shared beliefs, it gets somehow scary.

I don't know how it's evolving in Washington, but it has to be somehow similar. So, to me, big money in the election process is only one issue among many others in our political systems...

[karajorma]

But make no mistake, the American electorate is already essentially unanimous on this topic - you can get Tea Party and Occupy members to agree on the problem of corporate spending in elections.

Unanimous in complaining about it. But no one is willing to do anything beyond hoping that the policy makers actually do something about it.

Let me ask you this question. What percentage of people do you believe have personally done anything to change this issue? Even something as simple as writing a letter? Hell, how many of the people reading this thread have personally done anything about it?

[Mongoose]

Do you really think writing a letter would do jack ****?  You'll most likely get a lovely form response from a congressional staffer, and that's about it.

[karajorma]

I don't think one person writing a letter would do anything. I think everybody writing a letter would. But this basically highlights my entire point. Everyone knows the system is broken. Everyone spends an enormous amount of time *****ing about how the system is broken. No one does anything to fix it.

It's quite hilarious actually. Even despite proof that when people actually do something the system is fixed (e.g when the entire internet rose up to complain about SOPA) everyone is so convinced that nothing can be done that they do nothing.

[Luis Dias]

That is why Battuta's diagnosis irks me so much. Not that it isn't true, it might well be and I believe he can make a very complete case about it, but that it is especially true if everyone believes in it (or in a simple variation of it). It's absolutely self-defeating and that kind of tone makes my blood boil. A bit.

What percentage of people do you believe have personally done anything to change this issue? Even something as simple as writing a letter? Hell, how many of the people reading this thread have personally done anything about it?

Hey that's not fair! I'm not an american! I have my own country to deal with.

[Nuke]

im stockpiling ammo.

[karajorma]

That is why Battuta's diagnosis irks me so much. Not that it isn't true, it might well be and I believe he can make a very complete case about it, but that it is especially true if everyone believes in it (or in a simple variation of it). It's absolutely self-defeating and that kind of tone makes my blood boil. A bit

Hell, I'll go further and say that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

[General Battuta]

You guys are hilarious. 'Here's a structural and empirical analysis of the gridlock in American politics.' 'If you just WORKED HARDER it wouldn't be an issue!' It's the libertarian fallacy - no amount of bootstraps political activism is going to fix this problem. It's no more a self-fulfilling prophecy than that homeless schizophrenic man's failure to find work: there are externalities in the way.

I've worked full-time as a political operative in the past and I still get involved pretty regularly...in addition to my past professional work doing data analysis for political scientists, of course, which is the position I'm coming from when I talk about these issues. Step it up!  Believe me when I say that American politics has a lot of analogs with a homeless schizophrenic guy.

Rocket scientists aren't falling victim to a self-fulfilling prophecy when they write delta-V budgets for their missions. Mental health patients aren't hampered by self-fulfilling prophecy when they recite the symptoms of clinical depression. The American electorate's struggles with a structurally recalcitrant system that cannot, in many cases be repaired by anything short of a constitutional amendment - an insanely difficult process that people are, nonetheless, campaigning for right now  - is not a case of self-fulfilling prophecy.

There's a push for a campaign finance reform constitutional amendment going on right now. Its success is probably going to be predicated on the incentives available to the powerholding elite, so I'm not super optimistic.

[General Battuta]

To make a tacit point more explicit, I guess - getting involved in politics at even a basic level is an expense. Even realistically myopic agents can calculate the payoff for that expense. The payoff is particularly low in the American system, since we use first-past-the-post and we have very unstructured campaigns that are often easily gamed, and on top of that we have an awful social safety net. This means that an individual agent in the system has to dedicate more resources to short-term survival than to long-term low-payoff investments like, say, working a phone bank for a grassroots organization...which of course, makes it harder to fix the long term problems.

I worked door to door and as an organizer for Obama, but, tellingly, the only reason my candidate made it past the primaries was because his political operatives were able to game the primary elections in several key states to outmaneuver Hillary. If it hadn't been for that maneuver, I'd have been working for her.

In general it seems like there's some concern that this understanding is paralytic, that it prevents mass collective action. I'm not too worried about that. I don't think the problem would go away even if we didn't understand it and I was, instead, posting about the value of Calling Your Congressman. Broadly speaking I think we should prefer understanding systemic issues to not understanding them.

[Hellzed]

Broadly speaking I think we should prefer understanding systemic issues to not understanding them.

Except if you consider understanding these issues should not be considered a decent job, which is an alarmingly spreading opinion these days.

[MP-Ryan]

Batts, I have a pretty nuanced understanding of American politics, and what you're missing is what you mentioned in the Constitutional amendment process.

In 2012, there were 211,000,000 people in the voting age population in the United States.  Of that, 121,000,000 voted; a turnout of 57.5%.

Yet, if I walked down an average street in an average American town and asked each and every person over 18 their top 3 "political" problems in the United States, I would get a remarkable consensus.  However, if I polled them on if they voted or not, at least 1/3 of them statistically had not.

This is the problem plaguing democracies generally - everyone can tell you what the major problems in any political system are; only 1/2 to 2/3 are motivated enough to get off their asses and vote - nevermind get more involved than that.  Yes, there are structural reasons why it makes more sense to focus on bare survival than lofty political concepts, but there is also a point to be made that the problems people talk about are the things that affect their very survival.

This was my point back on page 1:  HLP membership are reasonably well-educated, articulate, and clearly not just focusing on survival-level social issues - so why are so many people set to contently gripe about political problems and do nothing about it?

Moreover, while Canada does not have the structural gridlock feature built into the US system, we do have quite a series of our own democratic problems (and a first-past-the-post electoral system), yet many relatively large changes are still possible when people get involved.  For the first time, we have progressed beyond merely talking about reforming part of our system; a query has been referred to the Supreme Court to ask how we can structurally go about doing it (whether we'll be able to is an open question).

While Canadians are becoming more politically cynical, one big difference between the way we manage things and the way the US manages things is that people of all socioeconomic stripes still get personally invested in the political process when an issue becomes important enough.  This happens in the US too, but with an increasingly alarming lack of frequency.

Apathetic defeatism, even in the face of huge structural problems, is a sure way to get nothing done.

[General Battuta]

Sure, but in this case I think it is the rational response from the ground-level perspective. Americans aren't cynical, undereducated, ignorant, and passive for completely acausal reasons: we have a system that pushes them that way. You're absolutely right to say that we can't fix the system without overcoming these issues - but that's exactly the catch-22 I'm trying to point out.

I could start Positive Posting about Americans in politics right now and it would not change the underlying problems, even if it'd probably end this thread. I could say that I think getting American HLPlites involved in politics would make a difference, but I don't think that's true either, and I don't think altering that belief will alter any outcomes.

People make rules for games, and then they learn to play the games. Badly designed games fall into degenerate strategies: thus the collapse of the global economy after the rules changes of the late 90s/early noughts. American politics may well be one of those games too. Like it or not, I think that if a rules change does come, it will be conducted like most other power transactions right back to the founding of American government: by a self-interested elite, not amoral, but wary of divesting themselves of their influence.

[redsniper]

Sure, but in this case I think it is the rational response from the ground-level perspective. Americans aren't cynical, undereducated, ignorant, and passive for completely acausal reasons: we have a system that pushes them that way.

This forever. The state of things is by design. We're brainwashed by the news, given a worthless compulsory education, encouraged to accrue obscene debt to get an actual education (and even that's dubious at best for most), then told to work work work! consume consume consume! Told that not having money is morally wrong and that getting rich is the only way to have some kind of security in your life. Everyone is kept distracted so that being able to wake up and see the bigger picture is pretty damn hard, and even if you, do trying to win anyone else over is usually futile. Too many easier excuses and scapegoats out there.

Having said all of that, I did vote in '08 and '12 in districts where I had no chance of making a difference just to "scream into the storm," and I donate a few bucks here and there to causes that interest me. I just don't think it will matter.

[karajorma]

Where you're wrong Battuta is in assuming that people need to keep playing the game. History is full of examples of cases where people decided not to.

But in the end people do. Cause they prefer to complain then to actually get off their arses and do something about it. If everyone who complains about politics actually spent the same amount of time trying to change things that they do arguing on forums about changing things, then things would have to change.

[General Battuta]

I agree that the potential for change is still there. I don't agree that the problem with America is that Hard Light Productions members complain on forums about America's political problems. I'm well above the median American in terms of political involvement and I don't think I've made a whit of difference.

People's behavior is the product of causal factors. The poor aren't unemployed and impoverished because they're lazy. Americans aren't cynical, undereducated and politically disengaged because they just lack that political go-getter revolutionary je ne sais quo. Systems need to be disentangled, variables altered.

[karajorma]

I think you miss my point. I'm not complaining about individual behaviour. I'm not saying that people on HLP could make a difference. But as a country, it's another matter.

If everyone on every forum did something at the same time stuff would change. So it's hilarious to watch everyone complain simultaneously about something and then give up cause they can't change anything. Even though the numbers are quite clearly there to do so.