I hate this. There is plenty of research showing that the opinion of the broader electorate has almost no influence on most policies. Only lobbyists and donors count.
There are differences in how individual congress members and coalitions handle policy, so who voters choose matters.
Also, some of that research you’re invoking shows that most officeholders try to keep their promises:
https://theconversation.com/do-politicians-break-their-promi...
I agree lobbyists have influence. What is a lobbyist and why aren’t more people lobbying?
Donors also have influence, and yet the electorate has every opportunity to determine who donors must influence every election. Why would they choose someone who is only beholden to donors?
trump voters voted for no war with iran. their guy won, and yet, war with iran
People had 10 years to see what Trump is. I wasn’t excited about Kamala but between the two, it was a very easy decision for anyone that isn’t an imbecile
In a system where money in politics is unlimited (US v. Citizens United), elections consist of a first past the post two-party system, the president is not elected by popular vote, investigative media has been gutted and consolidated into oligarchal ownership, and proportional representation doesn’t exist (see: Washington DC residents have no representation, senators per Californian versus senators per Wyoming resident, gerrymandered districts) I don’t think we can blame the electorate for Congress not doing things that the people want.
But ultimately, money doesn’t remove the fundamental electoral mechanisms (yet) or opportunity for volunteer direct lobbying. It primarily distorts to the degree that it can be used to buy the focus of the electorate and to the degree it can be used to buy other people’s lobbying time.
People could spend their time managing their own political /public policy focus and volunteer lobbying instead of any other leisure activities. I’ve done it and I know others who do. Most Americans don’t, and that’s a revealed preference. Other leisure activities are more important.
Walmart is the largest private employer in America and they are have the most employees in America who receive SNAP benefits due to their lower income status.
I think we can’t create the step-by-step plan and budget for someone who works at Walmart as a cashier for how they’ll engage in the lobbying system. It’s just not possible.
Sure, there’s a lot of free things you can do to be an activist and make your voice heard, but it’s not at the same amplitude.
We can’t blame apathy and leisure when so many people don’t even have the budget for most forms of leisure.
Meetings in DC are probably not the right focus. Every congressional officeholder has offices in the region they represent, most have multiple. Most people don’t use them for the same reason they outsource their understanding of current events to Fox News or Rogan & guests. Some people do contact offices by phone or message, but fewer band together with others who care about a policy topic and leverage collective influence.
Sure it’s hard and time consuming. I’m not speaking from a position of full ability or particular privilege (though I have enough time to post on HN). But it’s also a bit like the old saw about meditation — 10 minutes a day, and if you’re too busy, 20 minutes. The activities themselves don’t always produce immediate leverage but once they lock in the return is powerful.
Just look at how Occupy Wall Street was broken up and twisted into irrelevancy by our media. It was a nonpartisan movement that corporate influence successfully split off into the two warring sides so that critical mass could never be achieved.
Any issue that is perfectly partisan never gets resolved, and the oligarchs know exactly how to turn most issues in that direction.
My prediction is that the data center and AI backlash could work exactly the same way if resistance grows too strong.
Anyway, perhaps I’m too far off-topic now.
The statistics I've encountered suggest that this is smaller than 10%. Between there and the percentage of people who even vote is one margin of responsibility, and there are many people who have time for more but put it somewhere else.
That's a choice, and people are free to make it. It also has consequences, like the elections that select officeholders.
Calling this "victim blaming" seems like rhetorical lane-shifting. We're not discussing crimes where someone suffers a violent attack of some kind they had no agency in, we're discussing a society where those who govern are selected by voters in elections, which at some level means issues are representative of those who vote (and those who don't).
We're all very used to locating agency in large systems somewhere we don't have control over, and at one level that's even pretty understandable as a first approximation -- most people don't have substantial influence at an individual level. And no individual contribution to your retirement account will leave you comfortable, it's the collected effort over time that might. That's true for individual influence too, and magnified by organized cooperation.
You brought up OWS. That's a reasonable example to consider in a lot of ways -- it was collective cooperation, certainly better than apathy, and I respect it for that (and did not take kindly to the ways it was disparaged especially in some partisan media).
It was also a movement that was probably overfocused on the the idea that social leverage is primarily about expressed demand, especially given that the goals of participants were diverse and unfocused. At times it almost seemed like the tactic (occupation) was the goal. It was successful in injecting some longstanding ideas into some parts of public consciousness (there's a 99% that's poorly served by things as they are now and 1% that are dramatically overserved) and may have created some networks that have had a longer influence. But I think it also showed that many participants don't know what effective ongoing influential cooperation looks like.
We want achievements like the civil rights movement but we have Woodstock ideas about what that looks like instead of movement-momentum habits.
I've had this conversation enough to know that I'm also in a sense making a similar mistake, expressing ideas and expecting that alone to change things, which is especially naive given that I know the mindset shift is a bit of a hard sell. At least I know that someone who argues back and forth over a series of comments probably cares more than average, maybe enough to create ongoing habits of influence themselves.
That’s not a reason for non-engagement, but it’s wrong to shift the burden onto the public. Congress is elected and paid to represent the will of their constituents, and part of that job is constant fact-finding to determine what the people want and need.
Blaming constituents is like blaming drivers and non-recyclers for climate change when the military is the largest polluter, by far. Or blaming poor consumer choices for the cost of health care. Perhaps victim blaming isn’t the right word, “burden shifting” seems more apt. The media and politicians constantly try to shift the burden for large, difficult problems onto the public, when there is an obvious coordination problem (“raising awareness” will never solve the issue) and when there are often actual identifiable parties who are to blame for the bulk of the problem.
People's stated preferences are as you say. Most agree we'd like responsive representation that's conscientiously engaged in opinion gauging and fact-finding to determine what the people want and need. We can even select for those preferences, and be consistently unkind to those who are evasive. Yet we're not always consistent about that, and different preferences are often revealed at the ballot box.
This is the inescapable fact of the electoral system: officeholders are selected by voters in elections. There is no other mechanism for selecting them. That's a key difference between your other "is like" examples and elected representation. Pollution and health care are interesting problems to consider in their own right, they even have collective action components, but they also both actually have other identifiable agents and dynamics to whom more of the responsibility can be assigned. When it comes to elected representation, not only are there no agents with more responsibility, there are no other agents with power to select representation. Who else can bear ultimate responsibility for who is selected and how they govern?
You can identify things that make it difficult for people to meet that responsibility productively, and that's reasonable enough, all my comments here are essentially identifying the psychological barriers that assign agency elsewhere, and I'm happy to talk about others.
But there is no other place responsibility lies. The hands on the levers are ours collectively. No one else is coming to save us but us. No system fix will let us run on rote habit and get better results (and also, to fix the system, you have to work to win big under the system as it is).
Most people don’t have the background or the psychological fortitude to see through the charade. They are up against world-class propagandists with unlimited budgets, a lifetime of media programming, and an educational system that encourages passive participation. It’s not a fair fight.
Change is coming, eventually—but it won’t be easy, and it will likely only come when the system finally and completely breaks down in a way that can’t be papered over or denied.
This is not the same situation as someone who is the victim of a violent crime they didn’t volunteer for, choosing language that creates that confusion won’t change the reality that officeholders are chosen by the electorate.
(Let me pause to pre-empt any bothsideism by saying that I think that’s silly and I doubt you’ll change my mind on that, but you can try)
Continuing on - liberals tend to point at systemic issues, but personal responsibility is a thing too. I’m a bit tired of the “education this, social media that” arguments. I grew up in rural Texas, one of the most conservative, fundamentalist, and poorly educated states in the US. By the time I was 14 I rejected the then nascent Fox-style fascism and bigotry I was surrounded by at home and church, because I actually bothered to seek out information on the internet and hear the other side even when it was uncomfortable or felt morally repugnant to me
I don’t say this to congratulate myself (or maybe I do, deep down). I try to stay humble and I feel that I succeed in that to the extent that I have often had self esteem issues. I genuinely have tried to see the other side. Everyone in my family is conservative. It would make my life easier if I didn't have the cognitive dissonance of caring about them while at the same time frankly reckoning with the fact that I consider them weak and stupid people that I would never associate with if we didn't have history. It feels mean and bad to say that out loud, but no matter how much I try to repress it, it's the way I feel. I really don't want to be someone that lets politics come in the way of relationships, but at some point it's a matter of personal values
So after 2024, I have to say, what the hell is wrong with the people in this country? Why is everyone so stupid, selfish and easily misled? There are so many legitimately interesting and inherently difficult problems to be solved with politics, and so far in my 30 years I’ve only seen conservatives blowing the United State’s huge lead by clogging up all of the political bandwidth of the entire country with barefaced bigotry. I’m so tired of it. 2024 was a breaking point for me. I don’t know how I can identify with or be proud of this country.
Happy 250th y’all
The hundreds of billions of dollars spent on conditioning them to be that way
electorate.
Congress is composed of people who the electorate sends there.
Once there member choices are shaped by the people who contact and persuade them.
If the USPS is poorly funded or managed, it’s because US electorate either wanted that, or was inattentive about the relevant funding and management and cares more about other things.
And if the postal service dies or is captured and privatized, that’s a reflection of the preferences of voters, or a testament to the limits of their attention and intelligence to the point where they voted for people who did things they don’t want.
Most Americans also prefer to blame political folk devils to for the failures instead, and seem to be more happy with that than personal and community discipline that would be necessary to engage responsibly, though, so the system is arguably working to reflect people’s revealed preferences already.
EDIT: I should probably add that it’s not obvious to me that it’s poorly managed. I’ve enjoyed decades of adequate-to-impressive service via USPS over a variety of locations.