--- cgrimes at rawbw.com wrote:
> It's now obvious to me that Obama is the one who can
> withstand a
> character assault. I just didn't expect it would
[WS:] Yup. I came to the same conclusions. I used to believe that Clinton would be better at that, but not anymore.
> I think this parsing of difference that leads to
> smear is the
> consequence of no campaign's willingness to take a
> stand on anything
> or engage in education where voters are confronted
> with the trade offs for and against their positions
> in a realistic
> manner. For example, no political figure is going to
> step up to the
> podium and say the public infrastructure is falling
> apart because the
> majority of voters refuse to pay for the much needed
> county, state and
> federal projects needed to fix it.
>
> So, I blame the voters. A bunch of wheenies who
> think all
> this shit is supposed to appear out of thin air or
> that somebody else
> is going to pay for it. The public mentality is what
> can you do for
> me? The honest answer is take your civic
> responsibilities seriously
> and understand you get what you vote for. You vote
> for lying, theiving
> jerks, then that's what you'll get. And indeed
> that's what we got.
[WS:] While I fully agree with the first paragraph above, I have some issues with the second. I do not think that "blaming the voters" is an appropriate frame here, because it obscures more than it explains.
It implies that voters are too stupid or greedy to to agree to being taxed for public goods, wheras this a far broader variety of factors that are at work here.
The US has a long history of squandering public dollars on private pet projects to support well connected businessmen, buy votes etc. (aka patronage, crony capitalism, or machine politics, which is as Amerikan as apple pie.) or pursue imperial ventures like the war on Iraq that fatten the military industrial complex at everyone else's expense. Unlike postawar Europe, where tax dollars deliver, for the most part, public goods that benefit almost everyone, the US spends most of its tax dollars on projects that benefit special interests first, and only incidentally the general public. Given such track record, opposing taxation seems like a reasonable starting assumption if not a stance.
This public unwillingness to pay for public goods has been theorized, from a slightly different angle, by Burton Weisbrod who hypothesized the condition of "government failure." This is a condition of high demand heterogeneity (i.e. diverse interests and preferences) that prevent consensus which public goods are to be publicly funded. Since public goods cannot by defintion be funded by market sales, this failure of public funding results in unmet demand (i.e. shortage of) public goods. Given its socio-demographic, geographical and economic diversity
- the US is particularly vulnerable to such "government failure."
Another factor is populist rhetoric that dominates Amerikan politics. Anyone who proposes a tax increase faces an imminent attack by his/her political opponents who resort to populist appeals claiming to protect "the common folk" from "excessive" taxation. This populism crosses the party and ideological lines.
We had a good example of it here, cf. Jordan's valiant attempts to save the common man's wallet from paying too much dfor scarce resources.
Such populist rhetoric does not have to resonate with the whole or even the majority of the public. It only needs to resonate with a mionority large enough to sway the chances of winning the election in the antiquated "first-past-the-post" electoral system.
In short, things to blame are not necessarily the voters, but the idiotic features of the Amerikan political system, in particular: (a) its crony capitalism embedded in the every fabric of this society (b) its populism (c) its winner takes all electoral system.
This of course does not necessarily deny the stupidity, greed or arrogance of some segments of the US population - but I do not think that US is exceptional in this respect.
Wojtek
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