That many of our elected representatives are either stupid or very horrible people. Or both.
I’m beginning to wonder if we are doomed.
Of course we’re doomed. We’re all gonna die, and real soon now relatively speaking.
With that out of the way, you’re right, entirely too many of our elected representatives are very stupid. They’ve always been horrible, but the rank stupidity seems new.
In the long run, humans would only be doomed if they were completely wiped out. That was one of the fears about nuclear holocaust.
If you mean specifically the (American) people reading this now, being doomed to live under a government composed of idiotic and horrible people, it’s possible. During prosperity, human beings have leisure to be as stupid and horrible as they like. When the consequences become too dire, eventually the tide seems to turn towards better sense, but each turn is always only temporary. The picture of a seamless glide towards happiness and prosperity for nearly everyone (à la Star Trek TNG) is unlikely to happen without major outside help.
You’re only just now realizing this?
“Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”
-Mark Twain
You just need a lot of people to like you, who feel the same way you do, to vote for you.
Hence, my state of Arkansas has representatives who are a bunch of rural dummies.
Not really. I think I’m discovering how prevalent it is. I suppose I always knew there were wingnuts in congress. But I figured they were relegated to where they couldn’t do much, if any, damage.
I’m finding there are A LOT of wingnuts and they are in leadership. Downright scary.
You remember at what point the South seceded? When Lincoln got elected, because he was in favor of annexing territories as free which would give free States a majority in the Senate. IOW: When slavers realized their defeat wasn’t a question of If but When.
The same thing happened when Obama got elected; It became undeniable that the defeat of white supremacy was no longer a question of If but When.
So now they’re freaking out. They know time isn’t on their side. Very little is on their side except their greater willingness to stoop low.
It’s gotten ugly and will get uglier; Did anyone think that the forces of white supremacy would take a rational assessment at the situation and have the decency to take a bow with dignity? That’s not how fascists and more generally, really messed up people, tend to operate.
Lots of congress people aren’t stupid, but they have to pretend to be because their voters are stupid. Ted Cruz is pretty intelligent, but he has to pretend to be as dumb as his voters.
the real issue is many politicians only care about power, and making powerful enemies (like rich companies) results in losing power. sabotaging the democratic system results in gaining power. it’s a bad incentive system.
This reminds me of a quote (that I think is from C.S.Lewis) that goes something like this:
The problem with trying to appear less intelligent than you is two fold- first, it is very easy to be successful, second, it becomes a self fulfilling prophesy.
The chances of a Congress critter getting re-elected seems to track well above 90%. So on pure Darwinian principles alone being dumb/horrible is a near-guaranteed winning strategy. Which probably tells you more about the electorate or the electoral system than the representatives themselves.
And what does that say about the people who elect them?
People don’t need to be particularly intelligent to vote for people political figures who are constructive. I doubt people in the 1930s were any more intelligent than they are today but they voted for FDR and a congress that was pretty effective, and this was true for much of the post-WWII period.
My barstool hypothesis is that democracy and freedom probably function better when there are certain constraints in place. During the WWII period and for much of the Cold War period, there was greater uniformity. And greater uniformity included certain standards and unwritten rules of conduct that don’t really exist anymore. Something as simple as not having profanity in popular discourse, for instance, but beyond that, there was the understanding that, “It ain’t all about me.” We couldn’t have won WWII or emerged from the Depression with today’s tribalism.
The breakdown of uniformity has been evident through the collapse of mass media and mass employment through industry. Cable television, talk radio, and now social media have divided the country into little tribes that don’t trust each other. There’s a rejection of uniformity and national unity. That whole anti-mask thing was a repudiation of the notion that individuals need to sacrifice something for the greater good, and I guess the same is true of the anti-vax movement as well.
Democracy can actually function fairly with a relatively dull population. Democracy is likely to fail not due to a lack of intelligence but rather, because of a collapse in the value system that makes democracy work.
It seems that the more media choices we have, the more divided we become. It’s probably no coincidence that the rise of the modern conservative movement coincided with the rise of cable TV.
Term limits would help, not enough time, nor a need, to constantly be consolidating power.
By the second term they would, hopefully, be less about staying in office, and more about their legacy.
Maybe you wouldn’t have so many old people, get younger blood instead. It would incentivize quicker action on their promises maybe too!
There would be no ‘long game‘ to play, all of government would, by necessity move faster!
Absolutely correct. The demassification of media complicates democracy in a society that is as large and complex as the United States.
Anyone who’s studied marketing is aware of how marketing communication has changed since the 1970s. It used to be that you put a message out over the airwaves, and it would reach its target audience, even though many of the viewers had absolutely no connection to the product or message. Cable TV marked the beginning of the end of massified media. There were actually forerunners to Fox News but they were mostly local channels over the airwaves. The success of right wing news channels on cable, however, changed everything. Now conservatives could stay in their little info-bubble.
But without question, social media is the biggest force driving the divide. Individuals and groups can amplify toxic messages, and over time, different groups get stuck in a feedback loop of generating their own toxic messages and reacting to them at the same time, which leads to more toxic messaging.
This, exactly. The same could be said of Mitch McConnell, Jim Jordan, Ron DeSantis, and others. Just say what your voters want to hear, and not much else matters.
Of course, Trump didn’t have to pretend to be as dumb as the people who elected him.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record - I believe that most, if not all, elected officials have getting re-elected as their highest priority. Nothing else is even close. They will say and do whatever is necessary to get another term. They will cross moral and often legal lines without a second thought. All the high talk about what is good for America and democracy is just that - talk. Sound bites for their base. They say one thing and then say and/or do the opposite. Sometimes, only days later. (I’m looking at you Mitch.) I don’t know how people can live as such complete hypocrites. Both sides are guilty but the Republicans are clearly the bigger scumbags. It truly boggles my mind that nearly half the country supports them.
In the early 90s, I worked in Government Relations for a large cable corp, and remember reading about a new channel called “National Empowerment Television” that was being contemplated. At the time the term “empowerment” suggested (to naive me, at least) something positive, eg, uplifting under-represented people.
A little more research revealed it was a Koch-style effort:
If I could pick only three things to fulfill the “US is doomed” scenario, I’d go with:
Almost 75,000,000 Americans voted for Trump.
Fox News is the most watched news program.
Of the 100 US senators, 52 of them represent only 18% of the US electorate.
If that isn’t the sign of a broken system, a recipe for continued disaster…
Dems have to win in '22 or it could be lights out.
We need more Adam Kinzingers.
Climate change: that’s our doom. But then again, there are gonna be a lot of other countries just as ‘doomed’, if not more, than we are. It’s going to change a lot of maps around the world.