Magic Poriferan
^He pronks, too!
- Joined
- Nov 4, 2007
- Messages
- 14,081
- MBTI Type
- Yin
- Enneagram
- One
- Instinctual Variant
- sx/sp
Your representative represents you.
People love to look for some kind of social linchpin under our current political ills, and who am I to stay out of that game? I have my ideas. What I think is among the most important, but I rarely spoken of, is that the public concentrates its attention the wrong part of the government.
The president is the big deal. The presidential races make the news, get the big bucks, draw the most voters (by percentage of the voting base). Well before the election comes around, people began rambling about the various notions that will influence their vote. It depends to be a bizarre hodgepodge, eclectic and often filled with irrelevant issues. How many people, every four years, weigh their vote on the price of oil, as if electing a certain president is going to significantly change the price of a barrel of oil?
I have a former classmate on Facebook. In 2008, she was very excited about Obama. To my surprise, she now runs around supporting Ron Paul. Given her beliefs, particularly about environmental regulations, I found it baffling that she would support Paul, but I guess it has to do with his anti-military stance and his message about getting corruption out of Washington. But didn't Obama have both those messages, too, to an extent? Granted, he never said he was going to pull out of Afghanistan right away, but lord knows many a liberal expected him to be quite anti-military. Indeed, perhaps my classmate is disappointed in Obama because he failed to achieve many of the non-libertarian things she favors, so she's settling for a guy like Ron Paul. Here's the thing; even if Ron Paul were elected, she'd just be disappointed again. She'd be disappointed because Ron Paul is merely seeking the presidency, and the presidency is crap compared to the combined sum of the house and senate. Ron Paul will fail the same way as Barack Obama, none of his interesting or characteristic policies will ever be passed. The president is just not nearly as powerful as the American people think.
The people who bitch about the horrid state of the union usually seem incredibly apathetic and ignorant toward the legislator, but they are oh-so busy debating the significance of Newt Gingrich's marriage history. The unwittingly depict the problem as they complain about its consequences. But if you ask someone what the powers of the president are, they will likely have very little idea. They will attribute him/her powers of the legislator and the judiciary. There's a good chance they won't even know how many representatives, senators, or supreme court justices there are. With that kind of misinformation, of course people will focus on the president, but how did this happen in the first place?
When I read The Federalist Papers, the most memorable line came from Hamilton, when he stated that there is more likely to be anarchy from the bottom than tyranny from the top. In the context of his time, with feudalism and colonial rebellions, and no industrialization, maybe that made sense. It's absolutely not true, now. Tyranny is more likely than anarchy, by far. Hamilton and the others believed that citizens would be predisposed to focus on their representative and be loyal to their district. They never could have been prepared for an age of mass transit, mass communication, and mass production, which made the district seem much less significant.
What this change in technology did was allow national powers to consolidation. Districts, counties, states, stopped being so fragmented. The country became a single playing field for those with the resources to span the whole thing, and the people with that level of resources could easily overshadow a mere local politician. Likewise, it gave people everywhere more of an ability to keep up with what was going on at the federal level, so they did, all across the nation. I do believe people are more likely to understand individual power than collective power, so the idea of paying attention to a president instead of members of a congressional body comes naturally. Given the flow of information needed to constantly keep track of the president, people will forget about their representatives.
At the moment, I don't have interesting ideas on how to sway people back to considering their representatives, which is unfortunate, because at this point the president amounts to spectacular red herring that draws everyone's praise and scorn while those who possess the real power to steer the course of our society are ignore and largely unchallenged.
*It's worth noting that I did not really mention the judiciary, nor did I discuss state vs federal government. In that sense, I was only touching the tip of the iceberg.
People love to look for some kind of social linchpin under our current political ills, and who am I to stay out of that game? I have my ideas. What I think is among the most important, but I rarely spoken of, is that the public concentrates its attention the wrong part of the government.
The president is the big deal. The presidential races make the news, get the big bucks, draw the most voters (by percentage of the voting base). Well before the election comes around, people began rambling about the various notions that will influence their vote. It depends to be a bizarre hodgepodge, eclectic and often filled with irrelevant issues. How many people, every four years, weigh their vote on the price of oil, as if electing a certain president is going to significantly change the price of a barrel of oil?
I have a former classmate on Facebook. In 2008, she was very excited about Obama. To my surprise, she now runs around supporting Ron Paul. Given her beliefs, particularly about environmental regulations, I found it baffling that she would support Paul, but I guess it has to do with his anti-military stance and his message about getting corruption out of Washington. But didn't Obama have both those messages, too, to an extent? Granted, he never said he was going to pull out of Afghanistan right away, but lord knows many a liberal expected him to be quite anti-military. Indeed, perhaps my classmate is disappointed in Obama because he failed to achieve many of the non-libertarian things she favors, so she's settling for a guy like Ron Paul. Here's the thing; even if Ron Paul were elected, she'd just be disappointed again. She'd be disappointed because Ron Paul is merely seeking the presidency, and the presidency is crap compared to the combined sum of the house and senate. Ron Paul will fail the same way as Barack Obama, none of his interesting or characteristic policies will ever be passed. The president is just not nearly as powerful as the American people think.
The people who bitch about the horrid state of the union usually seem incredibly apathetic and ignorant toward the legislator, but they are oh-so busy debating the significance of Newt Gingrich's marriage history. The unwittingly depict the problem as they complain about its consequences. But if you ask someone what the powers of the president are, they will likely have very little idea. They will attribute him/her powers of the legislator and the judiciary. There's a good chance they won't even know how many representatives, senators, or supreme court justices there are. With that kind of misinformation, of course people will focus on the president, but how did this happen in the first place?
When I read The Federalist Papers, the most memorable line came from Hamilton, when he stated that there is more likely to be anarchy from the bottom than tyranny from the top. In the context of his time, with feudalism and colonial rebellions, and no industrialization, maybe that made sense. It's absolutely not true, now. Tyranny is more likely than anarchy, by far. Hamilton and the others believed that citizens would be predisposed to focus on their representative and be loyal to their district. They never could have been prepared for an age of mass transit, mass communication, and mass production, which made the district seem much less significant.
What this change in technology did was allow national powers to consolidation. Districts, counties, states, stopped being so fragmented. The country became a single playing field for those with the resources to span the whole thing, and the people with that level of resources could easily overshadow a mere local politician. Likewise, it gave people everywhere more of an ability to keep up with what was going on at the federal level, so they did, all across the nation. I do believe people are more likely to understand individual power than collective power, so the idea of paying attention to a president instead of members of a congressional body comes naturally. Given the flow of information needed to constantly keep track of the president, people will forget about their representatives.
At the moment, I don't have interesting ideas on how to sway people back to considering their representatives, which is unfortunate, because at this point the president amounts to spectacular red herring that draws everyone's praise and scorn while those who possess the real power to steer the course of our society are ignore and largely unchallenged.
*It's worth noting that I did not really mention the judiciary, nor did I discuss state vs federal government. In that sense, I was only touching the tip of the iceberg.
