Ted Cruz really fucked up when he got between McCain and a camera. Now it’s on!
When has the elected left ever been at that extreme?
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Given the fact that a significant percentage of our electorate base their vote on who they’d like to have a beer with, I know better than to hope your theory will ever see the light of day.
Oh, give them time. They are moving to the right in subtle ways. I said everyone was corrupt, and I stand by that. I do, however, think it is pretty extreme to spy on all the citizenry and take away their rights in order to protect their freedom.
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It appears that part of the problem is that “winning popularity contests” is a completely separate skill from “competently managing complex systems”, and unfortunately the former is the most important factor is everything from business to politics. It’s like we’re breeding a super-parasitic cohort of plutocrats unskilled at anything other than self-promotion.
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Just because a person is intelligent doesn’t mean they’re ethical or empathetic. We could easily end up being governed by very smart people who put their interests first and use their intellectual ability to cover up their activities.
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One could argue in the 60s and 70s. The problem is when leftists get into power and start actually managing to do stuff, a couple of decades later it doesn’t look leftist at all, whereas conservatives tend to look more and more conservative as time goes on.
Social Security and Medicare were both incredibly progressive programs, not to mention the Peace Corps, the New Deal, and so on.
That’s why there is so much fight over Obamacare. They know that once people start using it that it will become impossible to take away. Look at all of Europe, if you told them you were going to take away their state controlled healthcare system they would punch you in the face. It’s impossible to remove now. Because of that, it’s much harder to make billions of dollars in healthcare profits over there.
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The proliferation of horserace political coverage
Yes. Democracy is supposed work thusly: candidates state what they stand for, what they would prefer to do if in office, and maybe they even mention some leeway in the matter (e.g. “I am personally opposed to fill-in-the-blank, but I recognize that it is not the business of government” or something like that), THEN we vote for who we think best represents our own views, and the chips fall where they may.
Instead we get games, candidates trying to figure out how to appeal to the most number of people, focus groups to hone “their message”, and endless endless fundraisers. It’s hard to tell if a candidate actually believes in anything other than winning.
And the media (that loves a scandal as much as a tick loves blood), enforces this horse race mentality by focusing on polls and gaffs and looks.
But I actually trace our current problems back to the popularity of Rush Limbaugh. Nobody is more to blame for promoting this strict adherence to ideology, spreading angry phrases and simplistic concepts (“cutting taxes will fix the deficit!”) that your drunk uncle can spout at Thanksgiving dinner. Limbaugh is the godfather to Fox News, conservative bloggers, and whole host of copycat broadcasters on talk radio, all of whom parrot this same crazy conservative utopianism (which is often just knee-jerk anti-liberalism-- what’s the logic behind deliberately turning on all your lights and gizmos on a night you hear “tree-huggers” are promoting everyone saving electricity by turning off lights and tvs? Answer: spite.) Like Lovet says, there has always been the little devil whispering in the ear of the Republican party, but now that devil has his own network.
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Could easily end up?!
If you had to pick someone to advance upward toward governing, wouldn’t you choose whomever seemed most capable or most reflective of your values? There are so many more cues given off when you’re face-to-face with people. You may end up picking someone for subliminal reasons, such as their smell. I have to imagine that whatever problems a coffee-klatch election process might give us can hardly be worse than what our current process gives.
HAH HAH HAHAHH…
Oh, wait, you were being serious.
I have a better one: pick people for positions at random, á la jury service. Then, at the end of there term, we hold a ‘do you get a pension, or do you go to jail?’ plebiscite.
Playing the regular Devil’s Advocate, but this whole sentiment of “If only Team B wasn’t here, everything would be just PEACHY” is so phony and hamfisted that it’s embarrassing when people make it.
The cretinous morons clamoring to run our govt are capable of identical feats of stupidity regardless of the party affiliation after their name. Buying into those 2 dimensional party stereotypes just proclaims that you’re either unwilling or unable to identify the evil idiots in your preferred tribe.
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That’s not too far off from how ancient Sparta was run. Immediately after his term in office, a Spartan King would be put on trial for everything he did while in office.
The result was a hideously conservative policy where nobody had the guts to introduce change lest he be vilified for it.
It would be like Obama finishing up his second term and then immediately going to the House where they would decide if he should get retirement or be sent to jail. How do you think that would go today?
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Bah. Bonfire: pissed on 
In general I agree with your assessment of the “if only team B wasn’t here…” mentality.
But I think generic_name has a fair point in trying to describe a specific example of one influential person doing something and the effect. And, specifically, is there any lefty pundit as popular (and vile) as Limbaugh who has influenced the political discourse to such detriment? I dunno, there could be. If there is, I haven’t heard of them.
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Well, the House wouldn’t be a good choice. How about a national vote on what to do with him?
How would that affect his political choices while in power? What if that applied to everyone else too? No reelection possible, only a judgement by the people who you represented.
Would they still be prostrate before the plutocrats as they are now?
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One aspect of the Dunning-Kruger effect is that people are notoriously bad at evaluating the intelligence of others.
As is frequently pointed out, Newt Gingrich, for instance, is what a stupid person thinks a smart person sounds like. One need only to look at who Fox News identifies as having “exciting new ideas” to see this dynamic in all its glory.
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And that “Bomb Iran” song… warmonger.
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Reform is possible - http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/19/us/california-upends-its-image-of-legislative-dysfunction.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0 in this case by using independant consultants to draw the district lines. This forces the politicians to appeal to the broadest possible constituent base. I’d love to see this approach used nation wide.
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