Quote:
Originally Posted by bombadillo
Ah, but the prerequisite for that is that people should be more intelligent, informed and discerning. And not be susceptible to mass advertising and propaganda, to empty and meaningless rhetoric. And because this is absent, this is why democracies don't work. This is why the candidate with the biggest war chest can afford to buy more advertising and hence win more votes. And why those who contribute to such a chest have a disproportionate impact on public policy. In the USA, politicians are a commodity just like labor, land, and equipment. If I had $5 billion behind me, I would buy political influence just like I buy other factors of production. As Greg Palast says, the USA is the best democracy money can buy. So forget the waving flags, the balloons, the empty pledges and promises, the worthless rhetoric: the real deals are being made behind closed down. They just need the rubber stamp of public approval in terms of votes -- by a public that doesn't even know (or maybe even care) about the deals made. This is why the candidates are almost identical -- they've been vetted and bought by the same buyers. Regardless of who gets voted in, the policies will be almost identical. In the rare instances that someone really radical and populist gets in, he will get assassinated.
|
I'm well aware that it's more or less a case against human nature by at least some theories on it from the behavioural sciences. But I think there's more to it than what can be predicted that way. The corruption of public life is a gradual process. And even if most people aren't all that smart, I think we will probably get to a point where the bubble of confidence bursts, and people may then adopt a sceptic attitude to the hands that feed them, just as dogmatic as the accepting attitude they used to have. It may well come to a point where people are threatened in a physical way before that, but I think it can happen. And there's some truth to it that real politics happen in everyday life, because even if we are a small bunch, we can change other people's points of view. The sceptic line of defense against corrupt politicians takes you only halfway. We need something positive to back it up.
Conspiracy theories about what would happen if someone "really radical" gets in aren't very productive in my opinion. And why would "really radical" be "populist"?