War Wagon wrote:Smackie Chan wrote:In your opinion, what have we done or failed to do as a society to "deserve" shitty government? Allowed deviation from the Constitution? If so, what should we have done to deserve good government?
What factors should be considered to determine if a country (any country) deserves a shitty government? Religion? Racial composition? History? Does Germany deserve a shitty government? Iraq? Iran? North Korea? Afghanistan? Mexico? Canada? South Africa? China?
What countries deserve good government, and why?
I don't have the answers to your questions and neither does anyone else here (including 88) I suspect, but I am wondering where you're trying to go with this.
Since the question asked for an opinion, not only can 88 answer it, but so can you or anyone else.
Where I was initially going with this was to address the word
deserve in the context that 88 used it. At the individual and small group levels, and to highly simplify the discussion, we commonly use the word as it relates to good and bad. In the religious context, "good" people
deserve to bask in the eternal glory of Heaven, while "bad" people
deserve to forever rot in Hell. Professionally, individuals who work hard and produce desired results deserve to be promoted and rewarded, while slackers don't. In the sporting world, teams who draft, trade, and sign free agents wisely, are well managed and coached, play hard and fair, and win lots of games are considered deserving of championships. But how should we apply the word to, in our case, a "group" of >300 million people and its government? Are we as a society so bad & evil that we deserve a shitty government, and how should that be assessed? mvscal is fond of saying that "stupid should hurt," and I don't disagree with him. 88 says the answer is education - if we were smarter, we'd deserve better government. But smarter than whom? Contemporaries living elsewhere? Our American ancestors? An arbitrary ideal? And how should this "smartness" be measured?
Most of the limited research I've done indicates that Americans are more highly educated today than ever before. The scientific output of American universities is unparalleled.
The average American IQ today is reportedly higher than ever, and has jumped 3 points per decade since the early 1900s according to this report. So if there is a correlation between education/intelligence and quality of government, shouldn't our government have gotten progressively better and be at its best now? If reports such as the one I linked are to be believed and it's accepted that we are getting smarter, and it's also accepted that our government is getting worse, than I would have to reject the hypothesis that a better educated populace results in, and is deserving of, better government. Besides, at least as 88, mvscal, and most posters here are concerned,
better equates to
more conservative. Yet the overwhelming criticism of academia is that it leans far to the left, so it would appear that getting smarter would lead those getting educated to become more liberal. It's hard for me to reconcile how a society getting more educated in a liberal environment would lead to government becoming more conservative.
On at least one occasion, mvscal identified himself as a nationalist, which I assume most of us would consider ourselves to be. We're proud to be Americans, and believe our Constitution provides the framework for a system of government that is superior to all others. After all, we enjoy benefits such as freedom, liberty, opportunity, and the
pursuit of happiness. (Doesn't mean we are guaranteed happiness - just that we are free to pursue it within limits. Don't North Koreans, at least implicitly, also have that?) We hold
opportunity in high regard, without really analyzing why. If I buy a lottery ticket, I have an
opportunity to become very rich very fast. Of course, that opportunity is rather slim, but it's there. I realize the opportunity of achieving success & happiness through more traditional routes (education, hard work, entrepreneurialism, etc.) is what we're talking about here, and that the odds of achieving more modest goals than lottery wealth are better than those of buying a winning ticket, but how much better? I submit that the opportunity we as Americans take great pride in having by virtue of our system of government is not unique, and is overrated.
I'm guessing there are citizens of many countries who take the same, and perhaps a higher, degree of nationalistic pride in their homelands & systems of government as we do. Why? For the same reasons we do - it's natural to take pride in something over which you have no control (i.e., the country in which you are born and/or educated), and each country's educational system will instill in its young people a sense that their form of government is the best around. Essentially, we're brainwashed into believing it, and few of us seriously question it. Sure, there are all sorts of easily swallowed justifications as to why ours is better than anyone else's, even in the face of data showing there are other countries who enjoy better standards of living and quality of life than we have, despite our abundance of resources and advantages. So why do we continue to believe our system is the best? Basically, because we don't want, and refuse, to believe otherwise, and blame our woes not on the system, but on our deviation from it, with the implication being that we at one time did abide strictly to the Constitution, and that our government was “better” then than it is now, but we have drifted away from it since then (whenever that was).
Right or wrong, we associate the quality of government with the quality of the President. While Congress is getting all-time low marks in most of the recent polls I’ve seen, we still judge our government based on who’s sitting in the Oval Office.
I don't know much about Buchanan, Hoover or JFK. I was around for the rest. And they were all shitty in most respects.
Let’s say it’s fair to judge the quality of government on the quality of the President, even though an inherent problem of doing so is that there is no single definitive source for ranking Presidents. More than one poster on this board have expressed that Obama is by far the worst President we’ve ever had, and are sure that historians will validate that opinion. One recent poll ranked him as 15th best overall, so it’s clear that opinions vary wildly. So I’ll take the liberty of choosing
US News & World Report as a source of determining who the worst Presidents of all-time were, regardless of whether it’s fair to do so. Its results are consistent with many I’ve seen, and ranks Buchanan as the worst. Only one President in my lifetime cracked its “bottom 10” list – Nixon. If this list is anything close to being “fair” (whatever that means), it indicates that most of the worst Presidents were elected long before our government supposedly went to hell in a hand basket. This doesn’t seem to square with the opinion that our Presidents, and therefore our government, are progressively getting worse. If this is a fair assessment, does it mean that we’ve deserved shitty government for > 150 years?
We elect the same assholes to occupy the same offices over and over and over. We never hold them accountable for anything by throwing the bums out and demanding appropriate government.
By what processes & mechanisms should we hold them accountable, other than not re-electing them? Are “we” convinced that the losers of the elections that resulted in the occupation of the same offices by the same assholes would not have been assholes themselves? Or are assholes our only choices when it comes to candidates? This is an important question, since the answer will be an indicator of whether the problem lies with the system, or deviation from the system.
Since “you” are, by definition, part of the “we” you reference, are you at least partly to blame for the shitty shape of our government? Or is the blame to be placed on others who comprise “we”? Do you believe in the saying, “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem”? How can you & I do what you’ve proposed be done to become part of the solution?
The most important thing is that the citizens have to be well educated and informed. If the people were well read and engaged, rather than stupid and entertained, this shit would never have happened.
I’ve addressed the education part. As far as the availability of, and access to, information, it’s certainly better now than it was a century or more ago. So why haven’t things gotten any better?
We need to return to first principles. Limit the power of the federal government and make the most important government in your life the local government, which you most directly have a say in. To do this, we need to educate the population to understand what is happening now, and how completely stupid, wasteful, inefficient and disfunctional it is. Then, we need to amend the Constitution (or at least scare the justices sitting there) to demand that the People and their local governments should govern themselves, and not some faceless beaurocrat in Washington D.C.
Sounds like some good ideas there, counselor. Let’s get right on it. How do you propose we do this?
My bottom line is this: there is no ideal form of government. It’s a necessary evil, and all forms (democratic, authoritarian, socialist, communist, monarchies, etc.) have their pros & cons. Ours
might not be the best available option, even though we’ve been programmed to believe it is. While I certainly won't argue the merits of having a better-educated and informed citizenry, I don't believe having one necessarily results in better government. I’m not sure it’s appropriate to advance the argument that simply having the
opportunity for individual success & happiness afforded by a hands-off central government absolutely outweighs the potential benefits of higher standards of living and quality of life that certain types of socialist governments may be able to provide, although an argument can be made that high standards of living/quality of life in socialist countries like Norway may not be sustainable over the long term. And finally, I don’t believe we, or any country, “deserves” whatever quality of government it gets stuck with. Societies are comprised of individuals, and there are good and bad individuals in every society. On balance, I believe most people are for the most part good, with bad apples scattered throughout. From that perspective, ALL countries “deserve” good government. Not sure why anyone would say our country in particular, or any country in general, deserves shitty government.
