# Americans: what gives you faith in the system? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [October 10, 2017, 9:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-what-gives-you-faith-in-the-system/798454 "2017-10-10T09:20:53Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 16\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Leaper](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/4bbf92/32.png) [@Leaper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leaper)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2017, 12:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-what-gives-you-faith-in-the-system/798454/21 "2017-10-11T00:56:25Z")
> [@guestchaz](#): > > I’m not Shodan, but this grabbed me by the eyebrows… > > No, no it does not. I identify as a conservative, but I have zero faith in the system. It is my opinion that our government is thoroughly corrupt and has been since at least the late 90s. This has only worsened until it has finally reached its current nadir in the Obama presidency and while the faces have changed we are still wallowing at or near the bottom of the abyss. > > I don’t mean to pick on you specifically Leaper, (I get that no offense was intended and was meant to be humorous)but what you said is…well, a just not well thought out thing I’ve heard more than once (mostly not in these forums) that really bugs me about political debate these days. So you don’t feel that resistance to change from the status quo is an important component of conservatism? That it’s more of a philosophy all on its own than its strict dictionary definition implies? ---
**Author:** ![SamuelA](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c77e96/32.png) [@SamuelA](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SamuelA)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2017, 1:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-what-gives-you-faith-in-the-system/798454/22 "2017-10-11T01:24:36Z")
> [@Leaper](#): > > So you don’t feel that resistance to change from the status quo is an important component of conservatism? That it’s more of a philosophy all on its own than its strict dictionary definition implies? Here’s how the poster above probably reconciles his views. It is a historically accepted fact that America is one of the richest countries in the world, with one of the best standards of living. In the past, say from the 1950s to the 1990s, the relative advantage of America was even higher\*. Most of the problems with America have been festering for a long time, but have only now gotten really bad. So long as you were a member of the majority race and religion, life was especially good. So it’s a _logical_ conclusion to say “what worked in the past (at least for my parents) must be the right way to do things”. So conservative philosophy is generally going to be for those things that modern conservatives think were a big deal in the past. All guestchaz is saying is that he’s not happy with _today’s_ conservative politicians. He possibly wants them to act like they did in the 1980s or earlier. I personally am of the opinion that certain parameters have changed since the days when conservative policy was effective. The system is different, so the right thing to do is different. It is indisputable that things have changed, massively. To name a few things that have changed : a. Minorities are a far larger percentage of the population, so policies that discriminate against them are not just morally wrong, they are also too inefficient to be feasible. b. A lot of American lifestyle from the ‘golden’ era was based on profligate wastage of fossil fuels. Turns out, that stuff can’t be dumped into the atmosphere by the gigaton without some negative side effects. c. “Pay your own way” with healthcare has stopped even being theoretically possible, as medical prices have inflated to the point that basic care is exorbitantly expensive d. “Pay your own way” with education has also stopped being even theoretically possible for similar inflationary reasons e. “Buy a house to call your own” has also become increasingly unaffordable, because f. “Get a good job to enjoy the good life” is not as easy as before because wages have not increased in 30 years, and g. “Graduate college and you’re all set” - degrees have been massively devalued and now the only college degrees worth a damn are a small fraction of the total issued. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2017, 1:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-what-gives-you-faith-in-the-system/798454/23 "2017-10-11T01:25:49Z")
Power is still divided against itself. The three big branches – and the bureaucracy, both entrenched and rotating – are all at odds with each other. No one entity is going to take total control, because all the other entities want it for themselves, and won’t let anyone else have it. As long as they’re fighting with each other, we’re still free. ---
**Author:** ![SamuelA](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c77e96/32.png) [@SamuelA](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SamuelA)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2017, 1:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-what-gives-you-faith-in-the-system/798454/24 "2017-10-11T01:32:34Z")
> [@Trinopus](#): > > As long as they’re fighting with each other, we’re still free. Umm, none of the infighting protects you from hundreds of thousands of pages of federal, state, and local laws that you are subject to at all times. All that stuff got passed somehow. I wouldn’t be so hasty in declaring freedom. ---
**Author:** ![DorkVader](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/73ab20/32.png) [@DorkVader](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DorkVader)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2017, 3:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-what-gives-you-faith-in-the-system/798454/25 "2017-10-11T03:14:17Z")
> [@SamuelA](#): > > Here’s how the poster above probably reconciles his views. > > It is a historically accepted fact that America is one of the richest countries in the world, with one of the best standards of living. In the past, say from the 1950s to the 1990s, the relative advantage of America was even higher\*. Most of the problems with America have been festering for a long time, but have only now gotten really bad. > > So long as you were a member of the majority race and religion, life was especially good. > > So it’s a _logical_ conclusion to say “what worked in the past (at least for my parents) must be the right way to do things”. So conservative philosophy is generally going to be for those things that modern conservatives think were a big deal in the past. > > All guestchaz is saying is that he’s not happy with _today’s_ conservative politicians. He possibly wants them to act like they did in the 1980s or earlier. > > I personally am of the opinion that certain parameters have changed since the days when conservative policy was effective. The system is different, so the right thing to do is different. It is indisputable that things have changed, massively. To name a few things that have changed : > > a. Minorities are a far larger percentage of the population, so policies that discriminate against them are not just morally wrong, they are also too inefficient to be feasible. > b. A lot of American lifestyle from the ‘golden’ era was based on profligate wastage of fossil fuels. Turns out, that stuff can’t be dumped into the atmosphere by the gigaton without some negative side effects. > c. “Pay your own way” with healthcare has stopped even being theoretically possible, as medical prices have inflated to the point that basic care is exorbitantly expensive > d. “Pay your own way” with education has also stopped being even theoretically possible for similar inflationary reasons > e. “Buy a house to call your own” has also become increasingly unaffordable, because > f. “Get a good job to enjoy the good life” is not as easy as before because wages have not increased in 30 years, and > g. “Graduate college and you’re all set” - degrees have been massively devalued and now the only college degrees worth a damn are a small fraction of the total issued. The part I highlighted in red is mostly true about me. I can’t say much about how politicians acted in the 80s or earlier. I became politically aware in 1975/76 with the election of Jimmy Carter (I was six, and in my family Jimmy wasn’t good choice for president and yes that has colored my politics) and only started maturing in political thought in the 80s. I suspect that as I gain in years, I will gain other perspective as demonstrated elsewhere in this thread. No Leaper, resistance to change is NOT an important component to conservatism. At least not in the gestalt I have of the world today, resistance to change is a characteristic of those in power, either real or imagined. As Sam said, things are not the same as they were even 10 years ago. In some ways it seems that as a whole the people of the US are better off, but the way this was achieved leaves me feeling that while a very small percent of the people got real true benefit, mostly, its hollow, surface bettering of the population. ---
**Author:** ![octopus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/octopus/32/3716_2.png) [@octopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/octopus)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2017, 3:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-what-gives-you-faith-in-the-system/798454/26 "2017-10-11T03:18:30Z")
> [@Leaper](#): > > In regard to a hot button topic, whether Nazis deserve freedom of speech, in my experience, at least on social media, those who say no have lost faith in the basic power structures of modern American society. They see it as corrupt, oligarchic, and racist/sexist/homophobic - basically, the worst stereotypical conservative beliefs. They look at stuff like police shootings and their lack of consequences, the Standing Rock protest, Trump in office, the health care debate, and so on and see everything from the local police department to the White House being run by Christian whites who don’t care about anyone nonwhite or under the highest tax bracket, who unthinkingly run over the poor and minorities in the single minded goal of adding another few million to the billions held by themselves and their corporate masters. > > Unsurprisingly, those people tend to be minorities themselves, and are at least socialist, if not further left. > > I think this makes a lot of sense, at least to me; I sort of compare it to the Second Amendment and gun control debates. However, I don’t think we’re yet at the point where this is a majority view. Why not? What gives you faith that either the government and basic power structures in this country do generally serve the common good, or that the public still has power to change things when they don’t? (Those who I’m talking about would answer for you: apathy and blindness, but I’d like to hear what you think.) What people forget about the “system” to a degree is that efficiency is not the goal. Competing power structures is. As long as we have several power structures that cannot collude too much society is working as well as one could hope, withing a certain margin. When people lose faith in the system, quite often it’s frustration that they aren’t the beneficiaries of a power system to the degree or at the pace they’d like. ---
**Author:** ![SamuelA](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c77e96/32.png) [@SamuelA](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SamuelA)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2017, 3:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-what-gives-you-faith-in-the-system/798454/27 "2017-10-11T03:20:01Z")
> [@guestchaz](#): > > No Leaper, resistance to change is NOT an important component to conservatism. At least not in the gestalt I have of the world today, resistance to change is a characteristic of those in power, either real or imagined. Yes, it is. If you are not resistant to change - if you don’t want to go back to previous policies that worked in the past, you aren’t a conservative. You’re a progressive. Welcome to the club, liberal, and stop voting for the dudes with an R on their jersey, they do not represent your interests. ---
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2017, 12:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-what-gives-you-faith-in-the-system/798454/28 "2017-10-11T12:43:31Z")
> [@Leaper](#): > > No offense, Shodan, but doesn’t being a conservative inherently mean that you believe in the current system, the status quo? 🙂 No offense taken, of course. And to some degree conservatism implies not abandoning current practices without good evidence that change is an improvement. But it is more than that. Conservatism AIUI means a belief in things like limited government, free markets, individual rights, and personal responsibility. To the extent that current government has moved away from those principles, a conservative favors change, when such change moves back to limited government or freer markets, etc. It isn’t necessarily the case that there was an ideal Golden Age in America’s past where conservatism was ideally implemented, nor is it the case that the status quo is always better than any change. Should we change things so that Nazis don’t have the right to protest? Not in my conservative view. And this is not because of a reflexive feeling that the status quo, where Nazis can protest just like anyone else, but because I believe in principle in the First Amendment, where everybody gets to petition government for redress of grievances. Should we change things so that police don’t shoot black people and routinely suffer no consequence? Again, not in my conservative view - not because the status quo where police shoot black people casually is acceptable, but because that isn’t the status quo. Police don’t shoot black people out of casual racism. You don’t improve the system by solving problems that don’t exist. If that’s being hide-bound, so be it, I’m hide-bound. Certainly some marginalized groups will tell me they feel they are being oppressed. As (I think) Ben Shapiro is known to remark - > [@](#): > > Facts don’t care about your feelings. Maybe some OWS type feels oppressed because she majored in Womyn’s Studies and can’t pay off her student loans. Maybe somebody else who is scraping by on $35K a year feels oppressed because I make more money than he does. Maybe Colin Kaepernick feels oppressed because some criminal got his head cracked resisting arrest. Tough shit - get back to me when you got a real problem. Regards, Shodan ---
**Author:** ![Machine\_Elf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/82dd89/32.png) [@Machine\_Elf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Machine_Elf)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2017, 1:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-what-gives-you-faith-in-the-system/798454/29 "2017-10-11T13:13:13Z")
> [@octopus](#): > > What people forget about the “system” to a degree is that efficiency is not the goal. Competing power structures is. As long as we have several power structures that cannot collude too much society is working as well as one could hope, withing a certain margin. > > When people lose faith in the system, quite often it’s frustration that they aren’t the beneficiaries of a power system to the degree or at the pace they’d like. This. Gridlock is a feature, not a bug. “Be thankful we’re not getting all the government we’re paying for.” - Will Rogers ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2017, 11:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-what-gives-you-faith-in-the-system/798454/30 "2017-10-11T23:43:26Z")
> [@SamuelA](#): > > Umm, none of the infighting protects you from hundreds of thousands of pages of federal, state, and local laws that you are subject to at all times. All that stuff got passed somehow. I wouldn’t be so hasty in declaring freedom. Well, that depends on how close to an anarchist you are. I strongly favor most of the laws on the books, and do not consider myself “unfree” because of them. Infighting keeps them from bypassing the legislative function entirely and ruling by the decrees of the Strong Man at the Top. So long as we’re able to vote the bastards out, we’re still free. Them fighting with each other is the best way to assure ourselves that they don’t make themselves immune from being removed. ---
**Author:** ![DorkVader](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/73ab20/32.png) [@DorkVader](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DorkVader)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2017, 1:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-what-gives-you-faith-in-the-system/798454/31 "2017-10-12T01:30:12Z")
> [@SamuelA](#): > > Yes, it is. If you are not resistant to change - if you don’t want to go back to previous policies that worked in the past, you aren’t a conservative. You’re a progressive. Welcome to the club, liberal, and stop voting for the dudes with an R on their jersey, they do not represent your interests. Nonsense, the liberal political leadership in this country only wants change that grows and cements their hold on power, and the conservative political leadership, I’m not quite sure what they want. The last decade or so has been such a shit-show of incompetence I frequently wonder if they are in fact colluding with the other side of the aisle. I don’t want to go back to policies that worked in the past because they wouldn’t work now. The dudes with an R certainly don’t represent my interests and neither does the D team. Like I said, it seems to me we are at a severe low politically, our very rights are in jeopardy from both sides of the aisle and the collective “Nero fiddles while the city burns”. I dunno, maybe with time, things won’t look so dire to me, but somehow I don’t think so. ---
**Author:** ![jz78817](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jz78817/32/1028_2.png) [@jz78817](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jz78817)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2017, 2:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-what-gives-you-faith-in-the-system/798454/32 "2017-10-12T02:30:33Z")
that if one particular election doesn’t go the way I wanted it to, I don’t have to wait very long for the next chance to change things. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2017, 11:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-what-gives-you-faith-in-the-system/798454/33 "2017-10-12T23:50:09Z")
We got through Jefferson/Burr. We got through a massive civil war. We got through Hayes/Tilden. We got through Watergate. In comparison to those, Bush/Gore was a minor kerfluffle. That’s something that gives me a lot of faith: we’ve been through VASTLY WORSE and the Constitution is still alive and kicking. ---
**Author:** ![Procrustus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/procrustus/32/2994_2.png) [@Procrustus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Procrustus)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2017, 11:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-what-gives-you-faith-in-the-system/798454/34 "2017-10-12T23:57:54Z")
> [@Trinopus](#): > > We got through Jefferson/Burr. We got through a massive civil war. We got through Hayes/Tilden. We got through Watergate. In comparison to those, Bush/Gore was a minor kerfluffle. > > That’s something that gives me a lot of faith: we’ve been through VASTLY WORSE and the Constitution is still alive and kicking. I assume we’ll survive Trump, and maybe even end up in a better place as a result of people waking up to what they have wrought. We’ve never, however, had a president elected by so many people who were more than willing to intentionally “blow up” everything the rest of us hold dear because “reasons.” ---
**Author:** ![jz78817](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jz78817/32/1028_2.png) [@jz78817](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jz78817)\ **Post date:** [October 13, 2017, 1:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-what-gives-you-faith-in-the-system/798454/35 "2017-10-13T01:10:32Z")
> [@Procrustus](#): > > I assume we’ll survive Trump, and maybe even end up in a better place as a result of people waking up to what they have wrought. We’ve never, however, had a president elected by so many people who were more than willing to intentionally “blow up” everything the rest of us hold dear because “reasons.” Unless you’re 241 years old, you have no basis on which to say this. ---
**Author:** ![kanicbird](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/5f8ce5/32.png) [@kanicbird](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kanicbird)\ **Post date:** [October 13, 2017, 2:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-what-gives-you-faith-in-the-system/798454/36 "2017-10-13T02:07:16Z")
> [@SamuelA](#): > > Umm, none of the infighting protects you from hundreds of thousands of pages of federal, state, and local laws that you are subject to at all times. All that stuff got passed somehow. I wouldn’t be so hasty in declaring freedom. It does if they negate each other, and try to write it in a way that doesn’t step on other toes which leads to vast loopholes to circumvent the laws/rulings. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-what-gives-you-faith-in-the-system/798454.md?page=1)