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Study Finds US Is an Oligarchy, Not a Democracy
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers from Princeton University and Northwestern University have concluded, after extensive analysis of 1,779 policy issues, that the U.S. is in fact an oligarchy and not a democracy. What this means is that, although 'Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance,' 'majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts.' Their study (PDF), to be published in Perspectives on Politics, found that 'When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.'"
Does this give us a free pass to revolt now?
I do believe the founding fathers would like it that way.. if the government isn't right, take up arms, overthrow it, and put it back the right way.
It starts before that. You must first suppress the knowledge of history by underfunding teaching institutions and manipulating curricula.
Only when the people are ignorant of their past can you pull such ridiculous capitalist dictatorships without opposition.
Ignorance is the one and only true enemy. Trying to convince the ignorant is a losing strategy, teaching the next generation is the only correct first step.
I learnt an interesting political lesson on my Commodore 64 back in the day.
There was this political sim called "Tyrant" (ancient descendant of Tropico, or civilisation), and you played as the dictator of a communist state.
It was a pretty hard game, as most times the state would collapse and there'd be a revolution.
Eventually, after playing it long enough I managed to find the one way to prevent that state from ever collapsing and have it eternally make money.
Firstly, you had to invade all the surrounding countries and smash external threats.
Then you convert to a democracy and install elections.
Then you generate lots and lots of jobs for people in the secret police
Then you brainwash the populace with masses spent on election funding.
With the population happy and brainwashed, you could raise the tax rate through the roof and no-one would care... also thanks to the huge secret police force they would turn on each other instead of resist the ridiculous taxation and the root cause of said taxation (thanks to election brainwashing)
Does this sound familiar?
It was kinda fun for a buggy BASIC program.
READY.
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You are being naive in your definition of wealth and are in fact completely very wrong in this. But don't feel ashamed, many other middle/upper class around the world have this wrong also and that is why they vote republican (in the US) or for other neo-con parties that do not actually represent their interests in practice - despite their rhetoric. (studies showing that many in the middle classes believing they will be wealthy soon and thus voting as if they were)
You are talking about "upper class" and not the sort of wealthy they are talking about in this article.
The problem with the above mentality (i.e. "I've got mine, fuck you") is that neo-cons are NOT all that good for the upper class. They are only good for the super-wealthy, the finance companies/banks etc. Being well off you will avoid the worst of the symptoms of a country led by their dogma, but you will not be better off.
So such people are not just greedy, they are stupid and greedy - the two usually go together in my experience.
And the article is not a surprise to anyone who reads the news even badly.
There is a theory, used in South Africa to help ease the transition away from Apartheid, called Spiral Dynamics. It models human development as going through about 6 worldwiews, each with their own sense of morality/justice/values. It spans history, so the first worldview is of a hunter gatherer. The most recent worldview is of an educated Western post-modern cultural relative intellectual interested in minority rights and the environment. Anyway, between those two worldviews you have the view of warlords, then the view of religious-empire-order, and then the view of individualistic achievement/playing to win in a competitive world individualism. That last one by the way was the start of modernity and freedom in the French revolution sense of the word, it recognises that EVERY human is equal and has their won brain and is an equal player and should not be oppressed by religious-empire-orders (Communism is similar in that it is also a single empire order which oppresses individual freedom and ingenuity).
OK so, this relates to politics because the politicians do, as you say, simply have to FRAME a proposal in language which RESONATES with the worldview of the people being targeted. The point is that when you are born, you are basically at the hunter-gatherer level. Culturally and intellectually and morally you then grow up and somewhere along the way, tend to stop or focus on one of the worldview levels. If you are currently living in a Nigerian bad land, you're probably hovering around warlordism. That's fine, that's just the most appropriate adaption to your environment. A pomo sensitive type will merely become a target in that environment. So whatever level people are at, that's just the best they can manage. Anyway, Spiral Dynamics might not be 100% true, but it is a useful distilling of some of the major differences.
So yes, the tradition-valuing, we are one nation, one flag, NCIS TV show committed marine of honour and purpose, holy order type worldview is about half of America, I forget the exact percentage they estimate, and so anything that speaks about being a responsible individual who self-sacrifices their own selfish needs for the sake of serving the lager community, any issue framed in that way, will gain a lot of voter approval. People like W. Bush, Al Gore, and Hilary Clinton know all about Spiral Dynamics and such theories (various institutes and advisors etc.) and it is anybody's guess how much they are using them.
Another important frame: Pro Life! Abortion is bad, because it undermines the power of the father in the family. When a teenager becomes pregnant, it's her own fault, and she should live with the consequences. She didn't listen to her father, who is the moral authority and who decides what's good and what't wrong. When an adult woman decides to have an abortion because she wants to work on her career, she undermines this strict-father-morale as well. A career is not for women - they should stay at home and raise the children. Pro Life is not about life, it's about male dominance. Pro Life is not about the life of that baby - they don't care about that baby that probably would have little value to them. Pro Life is not about life, because it's OK to physically attack and occasionally kill people who work at abortion clinics. Casualties of war!
This doesn't seem right. I'm not familiar with pro-life rhetoric being about abortion undermining patriarchal power in the family, usually it seems to be a general attack on women, often no different than opposition to contraception. Usually it seems to be about undermining female sexuality by increasing pregnancy risk, which may affect patriarchal authority coincidentally but not specifically. The other angle seems to be a more general cultural conservatism that sees non-reproductive sexuality as a general contributor to moral decline -- with pregnancy as a non-risk (through contraception and abortion), there's no reason for marriage as a necessity for sexuality since there is no pregnancy.
I think it's even been argued that contraception and abortion actually contribute to male promiscuity since they also free men from the responsibility burden of pregnancy. It wouldn't surprise me if this doesn't tie into some radical feminist critiques of contraception/abortion as having an inherently patriarchal nature, since it eliminates any male responsibility for their sexuality and reduces women's value to that of merely a transactional sexual partner at best When the classist and gender discriminatory nature of economic relations is taken into account, women are further reduced to near-prostitute status, being obligated by both economy and lack of male sexual accountability. Of course I'm not advocating this as being true, but it's not hard to tie it together with this kind of rhetoric.
"...because the politicians do, as you say, simply have to FRAME a proposal in language which RESONATES with the worldview of the people being targeted..."
Sadly, you do not know the US of A.
The politicians inside the United States of America do not need to frame any proposal to the people, all the need to do to get anything done is to use their influence to rally a portion of semi-elites to his or her cause, and through the butterfly effect , it is done.
Case in point - United States attacking Iraq
When George Bush decides to attack Iraq, he did not need to get the approval from the Americans. All he did was to rally the world community (elites from different countries) to his cause, and when he got the support, off goes the Desert Shield and Desert Storm.
I was from China, and I still remember how hard the Chinese Communist Party had to rally their own people to support their decision to send troops into Korea to fight the Korean war.
In contrast to what George Bush did - the Chinese government, under Mao, almost tapped into all the resources it could muster, to get the people into the mood.
In a way, at least back in the time of the Korean War, the Communist government which rule China was more attuned to their own people, than George Bush, to the Americans.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
He might be wrong about some things, but the American Dream(TM) lie is well understood. The UK had a its own version called Thatcherism. The idea that anyone can make it if they work hard. Well, maybe they can if they get really lucky, but for the majority they won't get rich in their lifetime. Not to say that they will have bad lives or anything.
The problem is people vote for tax cuts for the rich because they think they will be rich one day. They vote based on ideas that only really affect the rich because they think they are upper-middle class, when in fact they are working class. The majority of working class people in the UK think they are middle class, it's that bad. My aunt was a school cleaner and my uncle a factory worker, they thought they were middle class.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC