I think you’re being a bit facile here… certainly it’s possible to have a society which is a democracy, but a democracy that is not functioning particularly well. To what extent the USA fits that description right now is debatable, but it’s certain not ridiculous to assert that the ability to “vote the bums out” exists, but is restricted or constrained.
“Right” is not an objectively definable attribute here. First, I think Americans would say it is the more desirable way, rather than the “right way”, but again that is a subjective evaluation.
I wasn’t the one who claimed that “a ruling oligarchy controls the heart and minds of the voters”. Except for the fact that NK-ns are not “voters”, that describes that nation fairly well. It does not describe the US.
No, I don’t dispute that. I do dispute that Americans think “they live in the best of all possible worlds, where there’s no such thing as ‘poor’ but only ‘rich’ and ‘soon to be rich’”. And I dispute the ability of the “oligarchs” to make people believe they are doing great when they are struggling or, worse, falling far behind. Remember, the larger point being disputed here is that revolution over income inequality is just one or two generations away. If the people aren’t in armed revolt, it’s not because “the oligarchs” have lulled them into complacency. When things are really bad, they will know it, regardless of how great “the oligarchs” tell them they have it.
Which reminds me that I forgot to add this link to the others I posted:
Princeton Study: U.S. No Longer An Actual Democracy
As you say, the extent to which this is true may be debatable, but there is certainly no debate about the tremendous influence that the oligarchy has over public opinion. The Princeton study really just corroborates what Wendell Potter talks about in the book I cited – and there are many other such exposés.
ETA: to avoid confusion, that was a reply to MaxTheVool in #61
But I don’t think opportunity is a zero sum game. Compare two possibilities:
(a) Your child gets a super-fantastic education through high school, all of his/her peers get decent educations
(b) Your child and all his/her peers get fantastic educations through high school
In which of those is your child actually better off? You might think the first because then your child is more likely to be the one getting into the good colleges, etc. But in the second one, your child will be living in a society going forward in which there are lots of people going out there and inventing things and founding companies and generally engaging effectively in commerce, rather than being proverbial leeches on the proverbial welfare state.
To draw a somewhat strained analogy, suppose you are raising your child in a town in which there is one and only one good job… one person from your child’s generation will end up being the manager of the only factory in town, and everyone else will be workers at that factory. If you view the world like that, then I suppose it makes cynical sense to want your child’s education to be WAY better than everyone else’s, because your child will definitely want every advantage to win the competition of life. But society doesn’t really work like that. If all of your child’s peers have great educations then maybe one of them will get the job of factory manager instead of your child, but maybe another one will invent a new process which helps that factory expand to 10 times its previous profitability, bringing a new wave of profitability to the town, so your child will have a sufficient customer base to open up the comic book store that was always really his dream, and he’ll have a happy and rewarding life because there’s sufficient money floating around the town being generated by all the well educated people to enable his dream to be practical.
Seriously? None at all? Not just in a “well, it would be nice if… but it’s not economically feasible” sense, but literally you don’t think there’s any moral, ethical or practical value to trying to provide more equality of opportunity for everyone?
Part of the American dream is that anyone can succeed if they work hard… and implied in that (to me, at least) is that it applies as equally as possible. This isn’t Harrison Bergeron, where whenever someone is doing well we throw weights on them to drag them down. This is the ideal enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, this is what separates us from the hated British with their aristocracy.
The practical consideration that, as a country, we lose out on the potential Facebooks and Googles and Apples that aren’t being founded and built because the kids with the brains and the drive to found them end up devoting that ambition to taking over drug gangs and so forth, because that was all they were exposed to due to their terrible schools.
I think the above part of the conversation is the most interesting, so I’m going to ignore all the rest, let me know if there’s something you particularly want a response to.
You are assuming here that everyone connects good public education for their kids with later success. But look at the right-wing meme that all public schools are failures and kids can’t read or write, and that the public schools should be more or less destroyed to be replaced by private schools or home-school.
Those who did crappy in school and consider themselves to be successful are less likely to care about school quality. These people aren’t bums or ditch diggers, some make reasonable money.
The neighborhood I live in now is like this (though hardly conservative.) I was on a focus group when our high school was looking for a new principal. Most of the parents were very concerned about support for the sports program. I mentioned that perhaps the principal should be chiefly concerned about academics, and they looked at me like I was nuts.
It is the “why go Harvard when you can go to community college for two years for less money” mentality.
Many do. That’s essentially the Republican message. It was certainly Mitt Romney’s message when he stood in Papa John’s mansion and said “everybody should live like this”.
And what about when things are not really and truly rock-bottom bad? What if the middle class just have a really hard time getting ahead, the poor get their food stamps cut, and the rich quietly – very quietly – continue to get richer than ever and the gap between the 1% and everybody else grows (quietly) wider and wider?
Health care is a good example of this complacent attitude to mediocrity, to the almost but-not-quite broken. If there are, say, some 40 million uninsured, then there must be some 300 million or so that are insured, at least to some extent. If health care costs are more than twice the OECD average and gouging by providers is routine, people are used to it, have nothing to directly compare it against, and rationalize it as the price of quality. If health care costs are the leading cause of personal bankruptcies, so what … most people don’t go bankrupt. And so on. As someone recently pointed out to me, I can quote all the statistics I like about the horrendous inefficiencies and waste and exorbitant costs and the tragedy of the uninsured, but it’s a system that trundles along and more or less kind of works for most people. If they don’t have direct personal experience with other countries, they’ll accept it until and unless they are personally hit with a real tragedy, especially if they’re convinced by all the PR spin that other countries’ systems are grossly inferior.
Americans think they live in the best country on earth. American exceptionalism and all that. Few think there is NOTHING that could be improved. Obviously Romney (and many Americans) think the US would be better off without Obamacare and with lower taxes, just to name the obvious ones.
Well, what about it? Do you predict violent revolution or a change in voting patterns? I think you’re losing sight of the objection that some of us have been raising-- that the US is on the verge of violent revolution. How and when policies might change in the US is anyone’s guess, and depends on the particular policies one might favor.
How soon we forget Joe the Plumber, who proves your point. Here was a guy who wasn’t even a plumber yet, but whose politics revolved around his fantasy of getting rich some day and his desire to not be taxed or regulated much when this happened. If it was just one nut that would be one thing, but though he was enabled by the right wing media this message resonated by itself.
Really, Romney? The guy who invented Obamacare? You got it on taxes, and Romney definitely acts upon the desire to have lower ones, it seems.
But saying people think this in no way justifies it. If we were talking about creationism, would you accept an argument that there must be something to it because people think it is true?
I think that’s somewhat orthogonal. If someone thinks that homeschooling is super awesome, then we could have the same equal-opportunity debate and discuss whether social structures should be enacted to encourage and enable low-income parents to homeschool. The same ambition-for-your-child and fairness-of-opportunity arguments would still apply.
You jumped into the middle of a discussion and are challenging me on a stand I have never taken. I was correcting the statement that “[American] voters have been persuaded that they live in the best of all possible worlds”. I don’t believe that is true. I’m not even sure why anyone would say that, since I don’t know anyone of any political persuasion who is arguing that things are exactly perfect right now and we should not change a thing.
It is true that many (most?) Americans think we live the best country in the world. But that’s not because we’ve been brainwashed by “the oligarchs”. It’s been part of our ethos almost since the beginning of the country.
First of all, I think the problem is wealth inequality, not income inequality, although they are obviously related. And I’ll explain why…
The problem with wealth inequality is that it creates exactly that. You are raising your child in a town where one family (or a small class of families) controls the factories in town. They set the wages with little to no competition. They are the ones who issue loans to any potential new small businesses. They own a lot of the real estate as well. They also have a disproportionate influence on the local government as well. Which is why the access roads used by the factory are always perfect but your street is full of pot-holes.
That’s great that you want to educate your kids. But good luck affording the fancy schools where the factory executives send their kids.
The point is that when all the wealth is concentrated within a small percentage of the population, it tends to be used to serve the interests of that small group as opposed to society at large.
Now some, like Ayn Rand, would argue that wealthy individuals are wealthy because their efforts have created the most wealth. But I have a hard time believing that CEOs and investment bankers and celebrities are directly responsible for 99% of the wealth created in this country.
I think there’s a middle and a sideways that your example is missing. Granted I don’t necessarily want to fight the analogy, but this just doesn’t work for me. For this to be apropos, your initial question as applied to this scenario has to posit an option where all the child’s peers get fantastic educations, and there is some advantage able to be had even over those individuals. So if you are asking even if scenario B is true then would I still want my child to have an advantage over those people then the answer remains the same. Hell yes.
First - you were talking about kids as students, not everyone. I do think everyone in general is better served if each individual maximizes their own utility. How they do that varies. I think equality of opportunity is logistically impossible - efforts to achieve this are catastrophically problematic. I think minimum opportunity is more reasonable. This is a practical consideration, moral or ethical concerns aren’t really relevant here. So yes, I don’t necessarily want a level playing field when it comes to kids.
The US seems to be doing just fine at the moment.
I’m mildly interested in the CEO part but if you want to drop it it’s fine with me.
The “best of all possible worlds” mindset doesn’t imply perfection – it implies what you just said: American exceptionalism, and that though things aren’t perfect, the way that things are being done overall – particularly the empowerment of free enterprise and the distrust of government – represents the correct way to do things, as opposed to those commie socialists over in Europe. 
Notice how this just happens to mesh perfectly with the objectives of the wealthy plutocracy. But I’m sure that’s just coincidence!
I’m not losing sight of it, I agree with your objection to that. I was responding to your statement that “When things are really bad, they will know it, regardless of how great ‘the oligarchs’ tell them they have it”. I’m agreeing with you that there’s no imminent prospect of any kind of revolution and the whole idea is silly. I also think it’s inconceivable in the present circumstances that there could be any kind of sea change in voter sentiment as you suggest there would be if people were dissatisfied with the status quo. Of course they’re “satisfied” – the oligarchy owns the hearts and minds of the majority – Lord knows I’ve given you enough cites to back that up.
As Voyager just pointed out, for instance, Joe the Plumber is “satisfied” – he may just be a plumber but gosh darn it, he knows he’s soon going to be rich! This is the mantra of classic old-school Republican conservatism. As long as the economy more or less lurches along, regardless of how increasingly unequal the wealth distribution, this majority will continue to believe what the oligarchy wants them to believe, particularly that unfettered free enterprise is the answer for everything and the government should drop dead, and income inequality and wealth inequality will continue to increase.
I removed the revolution part, I should have removed the first sentence as well. I agree with you that no one or almost no one thinks we live in the best of all possible worlds - too much government, for one thing. But just saying they think this (which they do) is different from justifying it. Or even giving their justifications. Is Romney against Obamacare because he things the country would be better off without it, or because it is Obamacare? The reason I brought up creationism is that if someone in the heat of the moment said that lots of people think that science is perfect, you can refute this through the constant reevaluation of findings which shows that scientists don’t think science is perfect, or through creationists who clearly don’t. Treating these two classes as having equally valid points seems wrong to me.
Give me some reasonable conservative positions, like regulations should be revisited or that the tax code is way too complex, and then you’ve got something more justifiable.
I’m certainly not trying to convince you that you should not read to your child and should not take your child to museums, because doing so would give your child an “unfair advantage” over other children, or any such nonsense. And I said earlier, it’s hard to imagine any non-dystopian society in which parenting decisions didn’t have any impact on a child’s likely level of success.
But the fact that as a society we can not, and SHOULD not, try to prevent you from reading to your kids (or pass a law forcing everyone else to read to their kids) doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be concerned about the vast disparity between the educational opportunities available to children born to parents of different socio-economic statuses.
Why are moral and ethical concerns not really relevant here? I think a society in which people’s lot in life is determined by who their parents were is WRONG and EVIL. And while the USA certainly isn’t that, it’s gotten more than way recently as social mobility has decreased.
It’s a tricky issue because I think we would both agree that a law which said “if your parent is a janitor, then you can’t be anything but a janitor” would be wrong and totally antithetical to the American dream. But it’s certainly possible for society to move towards a situation in which the practical result is that janitors’ children overwhelmingly end up as janitors even without a law enforcing that. I feel like we should be disturbed by that and, as a society, struggle against it; not just say “well, there’s not a LAW that says that, and there are still SOME examples of people working hard and getting rich, so we can’t interfere because we’re not communists” or something like that.
That seems like a pretty meaningless response. The US is currently surviving and doing generally OK I guess. It could be doing better. It could be doing worse. But you could respond to any proposed change by saying “The US seems to be doing just fine at the moment”. But it’s just as valid to say “hey, the US is doing fine… but just think about how much BETTER we’d be doing if we had another 5 million well educated, healthy, civic-minded young citizens in each generation”.
I think it’s a somewhat tangential issue, and one that is tricky. If there are two authors, and one sells 100 times as many books as the other, the first author will make 100 times as much money (assuming similar contracts etc). That makes sense to us, and most of us would agree that that’s capitalism in action. But if we observe that CEOs make 100 times more now than CEOs did in the 1950s (I just made that number up) it’s much harder to really obviously grok why that is, and that it’s deserved.
That said, most of the articles I’ve read about it suggest that it’s not due to government policy so much as it is a cultural thing among big corporations.
So, I do think that CEOs are “overpaid” these days, in some real but difficult-to-define fashion, and I think that makes the American economy less healthy; but I don’t really have the knowledge to debate the issue in depth.
I don’t know that it’s useful to continue that semantic debate, but I’ll just note that Voyager interprets “best of all possible worlds” the way I do. I think most people posting here would, too. If you wan it to mean “the best country on earth, overall” that’s your choice. But I think it’s a very confusing way to put it.
“In the present circumstances” being the operable phrase. The point I’m trying to make is that even in future, different circumstances, folks are going to vote out “the oligarchs” before they are going to engage in violent revolution.
Emphasis added. What percent of the voting public believes that?
I lived in Cambridge, MA in the very early 1970s, and heard lots of people say revolution was right around the corner - so i agree with you.
Exactly that if you delve deeper? Not many. But remember Reagan is loved by this type of person for saying government is not the solution, it is the problem, so the knee jerk reaction of most Republicans, and almost all tea partiers, would be exactly this.
Now in their next breath they’d also say that government should keep its hands off their Medicare.
Among Dopers, even conservative Dopers, it would be close to 0 because we are more nuanced.
This goes to what I mentioned earlier. I think the focus should be on minimum levels of opportunity - though hard to quantify. Equal opportunity is unrealistic and unattainable.
I avoid moral and ethical frameworks in this discussion because they are not necessary, and each individual would differ. As a practical matter however, I think we are all better served if we all look out for our own self interests. I’m not so sure that social mobility has decreased overall in recent times. Evidence suggests that it hasn’t.
It was rather flippant and in my head I had written more. I think it missed making the final draft. My point was meant to elaborate that on a global scale, the US is still dominant and quite competitive in terms of developing new technologies. Of course there is always room for more and better inventions but it’s a hard sell if you’re proposing (you’re not) some sweeping initiative to reduce income inequality for the promise of potential gains in the area of technological development and advancement. We’re already global leaders so the potential gains are not as persuasive as they would be if we were lagging behind in this area. And if you’re not proposing something to address it, then what’s the point really?
Ultimately complaints about rising income inequality are unpersuasive since that gap alone is not sufficient to draw any conclusions. Consider two people, A and B. A earns 1,000,000 and B earns 20,000 - a gap of 980,000. Then, they both get a 10% raise. Boo yah for them! A now earns 1,100,000 and B earns 22,000. The gap is now 1,078,000, an increase of 98,000. I’d say this is a positive for both people even though income inequality has increased. I think of this whenever I hear the term income inequality. That measure alone is not sufficient to make any judgment so when that measure is used to draw conclusions it’s unpersuasive. I think mobility is a much more important topic myself.
I can drop this then. I don’t think it’s a question of being over or under paid, just being paid what the market will bear.
Actually, we were closer to revolution then than now, even if it was still an exaggeration then. I think it’s “cute” that the youngsters on this MB feel that rioting in the streets is right around the corner. Hell, we actually had rioting in the streets back then (the 60s).
But I really want to delve deeper into wolfpup’s thesis, which is that "the oligarchs’ have brainwashed people into believing things like "there’s no such thing as “‘poor’ but only ‘rich’ and ‘soon to be rich’”. I frankly call absolute BS on claims like that. Even on issues like Climate Change, it’s unclear to me that the vast numbers of deniers in the US got there by being brainwashed by “the Oligarchs” as opposed getting there the same way they got to a non-belief in evolution. And surely “the Oligarchs” aren’t the ones out there pushing anti-evolution views.
Americans are not like Europeans and we never have been. We don’t have the same high level of trust of government. That’s part of the American ethos, and if politicians play to that tune, it’s s tune that is already there-- not one planted by “the Oligarchs”.