Your mistake is thinking that the politicians who were voted into office were anxious to make some sort of compromise to get stuff done. They weren’t. They see themselves as having a mandate (or an agenda, if you disagree with them) and that’s what they’re in office to do.
One thing I didn’t see in the OP or replies so far is that the intensity/urgency of voters’ “wants” varies widely. A policy could have numerically strong popular support that isn’t terribly intense. (I may be wrong, but I think “common sense gun-safety measures,” to use the D party’s term of art, is one of these.)
If a policy makes the majority a little happier but a minority much, much unhappier, should it be enacted under the OP’s system?
I can agree with this overall. But to counter, the recently-elected can “see themselves” however they want, but if they don’t notch a win or at least a compromise they can spin as a win, then history will repeat itself and they too will get voted out by voters tired of the lack of progress. Because that’s how they got voted in to begin with. So sure, coming in and drawing a line in the sand, refusing to compromise, that’s a perfectly sensible strategy… initially. But it doesn’t make sense in the face of increasing voter dissatisfaction. So again, why aren’t we seeing the compromises? The tax cuts in one area in exchange for support for programs in other areas, and such? Why aren’t politicians eager and desperate to notch what they can sell as wins to their constituents? Or are they already doing so already? Do voters rewards fight and the campaign sales pitches themselves to as great or greater a degree than actual results?
So I guess another possible reason for the current situation may be: 7. “Politicians (and perhaps people generally) are stupid and don’t learn from past mistakes” ?
This kind of gets into matters of polling and how to phrase questions to achieve meaningful answers. To this point, my thoughts were to phrase the poll roughly as:
“What are the top 3 issues negatively impacting your life, issues that you feel the government has a responsibility to assist in resolving?”
You collect up everyone’s top-3, find the issues where >60% of the people cited them as in their top-3, and work on those. With all the usual problems that such polling entails.
John Q. Public: “Why should we settle for only 60% when we can have 100%?”
Realist: “This guy can’t give you 100%!”
John Q. Public: “He’s saying what I want to believe. So I believe him.”
But there are significant numbers (some here on these boards even), who would self-justify their dinner by convincing themselves that the starving child was lazy and undeserving, and tough shit, sucks to be them.
And this is EXACTLY what just happened in the election. We even had Trump voters who *explicitly *said that they knew Trump was lying to them, but since he was telling them what they wanted to hear, he would have their vote.
And add in a little " My opponent thinks he knows more about what’s going on than the COMMON MAN, but I don’t agree with my opponent-I agree with you!"
Thanks for all the replies thus far, by the way. I really am interested in people’s viewpoints, rather just trying to argue a point.
To me, clearly the Federal government must be doing at least SOME things right. The Constitution was ratified in 1788 and here the US is, centuries later, as a still-functioning-country (to varying degrees, depending on who you ask). So why aren’t people happy? Not just “grumble stupid government grumble” unhappy, but “YOU SUCK!” 76% disapproval unhappy. When, in other context (state/local governments), people are perfectly capable of expressing “yeah, these guys are sorta okay”. Do voters suck? Do politicians suck? Are the will and the needs of the people being addressed?" Do we need to reform the structure of the Federal government? Is it “fine and probably about as good as can be expected”? Something else?
The dissonance between basement-dwelling approvals and relatively high re-election rates just flat out confuses me. If 75% of my company’s employees actively disliked me, I’d probably be out of a job. If 75% of my neighbors actively disliked me, they’d probably go out of their way to make my life unpleasant in all kinds of petty and non-petty ways. But 75% disapprove of Congress, they get re-elected 85-90% of the time.
A bunch of people hate CONGRESS as a whole, but like their individual representative.
It’s like if you hated your company, but thought your boss was OK. There is nothing you can really do about the company as a whole, but you’ll support your own boss, and would not want him to be out of a job. That asshole in purchasing though? You don’t like how he works, but there’s nothing you can do about it, as he’s not in your department.
Federal politicians are overall quite successful at giving SOME people what they want.
I.e., the wealthy and powerful who tend to fund political campaigns. Those people have seen their incomes skyrocket, their taxes go down, their regulatory burdens lightened, and their effective freedoms increased. For them, the system is working just fine.
Democracies are always going to have substantial levels of popular dissatisfaction for the various reasons mentioned above, because people are often unreasonable. But I think we’re ignoring the additional factor of the disproportionate influence of wealth in US politics, which effectively makes it somewhat oligarchic rather than democratic.
Oligarchies aren’t designed to fulfill the needs or wants of “people” in general, but rather to cater to a comparatively small elite at the expense of everybody else. For them, failing to serve the interests of the populace as a whole isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.
Right, but I like my boss because he does stuff for me, and my boss has the power to do stuff for me that benefits me personally, regardless of how I may feel about the company at large. He keeps signing the paychecks because he has discretion over the budget, and if I’m real lucky, he gets me a salary increase once a blue moon. He let’s me have an extended lunch break if I need to go to the doctor’s so I don’t have to take PTO. And so on, he does things that directly benefit me, so I like him for it and want him to stick around.
My Congressional representatives are not like my boss. They do not have the power to unilaterally make decisions on behalf of myself and other constituents, they have to get 50% of Congress to agree with them. Sure, if you call them up, they can pull strings and grease wheels to assist with some personal issues, but they aren’t going to be passing down health care reform to me all by themselves. (substitute whatever issues may matter to you). So I don’t see how you can reconcile “My representatives serve me well but Congress overall serves me horribly” when the output of two are so coupled.
But I fundamentally disagree that “Feeding people what they want to hear” is a long-term winning strategy. At some point, people notice if you haven’t been delivering. It can explain why politicians get elected, but it doesn’t (to me) seem to explain why politicians keep getting re-elected.
Give the people what they want
You gotta give the people what they want
The more they get, the more they need
And every time they get harder and harder to please
Give 'em lots of sex, perversion and rape
Give 'em lots of violence, and plenty to hate
Give the people what they want
Give the people what they want
The Kinks
But if you aren’t in there with a career in mind, but to grab all you can and make all the deals that kind of power allows, then skip town, it’s the perfect strategy.
No. No they don’t. You just feed them more lies ("those other guys prevented me from fulfilling my promises to you… It’s that other guys fault over there. That other guy is the Antichrist, and he was born in Islamabad… Whatever.)
People who believed your first lies will definitely believe your subsequent lies. To change their minds now would be admitting they were idiots in the first place. They will cling to you no matter how much bullshit you spew at them.
I guess. Maybe I just think about things weird, or am otherwise in the minority in some way. But my response to “it’s the other guy’s fault” is “hey look, you said you’d get the job done, I don’t want to hear about your problems. Can you get it done or not?”.
Maybe it’s the parent in me. (“I don’t care who started it; stop hitting right now.”)
The problem with compromise is that, too often, people don’t see what the politician achieved by compromising - they see what he “lost” by compromising. Many people have this fantasy universe where things can be 100% achieved their way, and if a politician negotiates for 70% he sold out 30%.
You don’t think about things weird, and you may not even be in the minority… but there are enough people who just uncritically accept blatant lying to their faces that it is still beneficial for politicians to pull this shit.
It’s especially egregious if the politicians are really good at lying, and they are also expert at blaming others, and creating distractions by tweeting insults.
There are problems in politics, that are partly irrational or psychological. If you ever try to have a political convo here you may have found that people just say “You don’t recognize that I have my own preferences, You are in a bubble. You are an elite condescender. Maybe I just don’t care about income inequality.” This is a polite paraphrase.
These problems are basically coming down to propaganda and trolling as a lifestyle or political philosophy, an attempt to gain purchase in your world, where this is of more benefit than a better society. It happens here all the time. We are vulnerable because of the irrational and psychological in political choices.
How would this solve that problem? No one is going to get everyone to agree on anything anymore. The truth has taken a huge body blow in the last year. We might be able to go back, but it will be hard and involve personal attributes that you don’t see a lot of in enough of us.