Todd Stadler's blog

You knew I was going to respond to this one... :)

I'm not going to contest the idea that our government is seriously broken. But I will contest the idea that our government cares more about oil interests than democracy. Unfortunately, defending our oil interests *is* democracy, in this country anyway. You nailed it when you said "we do love to drive, and if there's one thing that could be said to unite us as a nation, it's our highways bristling with gleaming alloy cars." The american people want to drive, and
in most cases have evolved their own cities so that they *have* to drive. To make decisions that make it more expensive or unfeasible to drive are political suicide, because of our democracy.

Our foreign policy is oriented around this too, even though it's spun into a fight against right and wrong to make it less distasteful. The American people make it unfeasible to stop doing whatever it takes to keep the price of gasoline down.

I cheer your personal efforts to stop driving and recognize the ill affects of that behavior, but more will have to be done.

I had a similar personal crisis a few weeks ago- my reaction was that the federal government should protect the common interest by slowly raising gas taxes, over the next 10-20 years, forcing people to look for alternatives and wean themselves from gasoline. But once again, passing a law like that is political suicide. Too many individuals and companies have too much at stake.

It's a vexing problem- economists call it the tragedy of the commons. A group of people acting purely in immediate self-interest, tend to degrade any common resources. The solution in other situations has been to subdivide owernship (get rid of the commons, impossible when the common resource is clean air or livable cities) or impose government regulations. And imposing regulations is hard in a democracy when there is no palpable, immediate pain.

Wish I had some nice way to conclude this post, but I don't. :)

Hi Josh. I always appreciate your unique viewpoints, and thank you for playing along at home.

Unfortunately, I'm having some difficulty understanding your comment that "defending our oil interests is democracy". I agree that it would be political suicide to crusade for insanely higher gas prices or an inability to drive as you want, but to equate a politician's desire to stay in power (by avoiding such ends) with democracy seems a bit like doublespeak to me. Maybe I misunderstood.

Democracy is best served when all the facts are made known, so that the people can make the best decision for themselves. As such, I just really wish our government (or at least some major media outlets) would stop pretending we champion democracy when we stomp all over the globe to protect our oil supply. I wonder how popular our wars would be if Americans perceived them as little more than power grabs (in which thousands of innocent people die), rather than the glorious crusades against evil we're usually served. I'd guess that such a depiction might make wars just as distasteful as raising oil prices.

Of course, as long as opinions like mine remain solely with the disenfranchised "loony" left, the average American won't pay them much heed. After all, America loves democracy, right? Even if, you know, mistakes are made by, um, somebody every once in a while. Whoops.

Mind, I'm not even saying I think democracy should be applied in every situation. Our government seems to, installing democratic governments in societies with huge ethnic and religious factions in which there is often more talk about how to get fed than who is the best public speaker.

I just wish we could admit what is astoundingly obvious - that failing to denounce the overthrow of a democratically-elected leader is in no way pro-democracy.

Or maybe I'm just upset about the state of things and I can't stop typing.

Hrm. My unique viewpoints. DOn't know what to make of that.

Do you envision some sort of pure democracy, where every citizen votes on every issue? If you recognize that this isn't possible or advisable, then you have to accept a democratic republic. To define republic: "a government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law." We have elected officials who are elected according to the desire of their consituents and expected to act in their best interest. You said it yourself- people want to drive their shiny new gas-guzzling SUVs. And those who don't generally need to drive to support themselves. A representative who says that he is going to make it harder for people to drive their cars is not going to get elected, and a representative who defies this desire is not going to stay in office. The people will speak.

We all tend to refer to politics as if it were a dirty word, and decry politicians desire to stay in power. But in general, politicians need to do things that people approve of to stay in office. Its how our system works. It's imperfect, but that's the way it is. So my point was that blaming politicians isn't achieving anything- blame the people they represent and get them to change.

The other unfortunate thing is that our government is rigged to cater to the lowest common denominator- you can't win elections doing the smart thing that most people can't or won't understand. Hence the propaganda about good vs. evil. Politicans try to form opinion, rather than respond to it. I would like to say that this is a wholesale wrong, but it isn't- there are times when our government needs to act contrary to our needs for longer term benefits.

But yes, it sucks when they are wrong and slimy and we know it. Iraq. Venezuela. Cuba.
(Occasionally they doing something on the positive side though- the senate rejected drilling in the ANWR last week.)

But foreign policy I can't get my head around. We have such an inconsistent foreign policy- pushing for democracy here, destroying it there, support these people, ignoring those people. That's another vacuum in our democratic government- people generally don't care about countries over the sea filled with brown people. Or poor countries filled with white people, for that matter. Unless the activities of the other country have an immediate impact on them, or they are whipped into a frenzy by the federal governments propaganda machine, most people don't care.

So with venezuela- failing to denounce the overthrow of a democratically-elected leader is indeed in no way pro-democracy, but since when has the US ever really cared about democracy abroad?

Hi folks. This is where Josh and I publicly hammer out ideas we have in lieu of e-mailing each other. You can't join in, so don't bother. Ha ha.

Josh, your first point was that politicians are unable or at least unwilling to violate the will of the people, so the people are to blame.

Then you say that politicians (try to) mold the will of the people, and sometimes do what is contrary to the "needs" of the people. Which would imply that we should blame the politicians.

I agree with both statements, so obviously work needs to be done on both sides. I guess my point is - I wouldn't dismiss either tactic.

As to what I envision, I am aware of the limited form of democracy we enjoy. But I am also aware of the power that knowledge has in our system. The people vote based on the facts they know. And most people don't know much about the "why" of our foreign policy (it is often questionable if our government itself knows). They also likely don't care. That is a problem, I admit.

Still, if the American people were convinced that our warring was not for noble purposes, the government could be coerced to stop such actions. Wasn't it such public opinion that eventually ended the Vietnam action (and hamstrung it from the get-go as well)?

And while my forum here isn't likely to affect the American people at large, it's all I have, no? I welcome ideas on what more could be done.

One small tangential point to your post, Todd:

Actually, I've been led to believe that public support for the Vietnam war was really strong for a long time during the war, and that the general public didn't like or support the student protests. It wasn't until near the end that public opinion became important to the people making decisions.

But my history teacher was a bit of a revisionist, and I wasn't alive during the war, so I can't really say what I just said with any conviction. So there.

Julia- I've heard similar things. And I bet that even students would protest less if their lives weren't at stake.

Todd- You're right. People need to be educated and motivated and politicians need to be disciplined. But like you, I don't know how to achieve that. (When I post here and argue, I'm usually trying to explore issues, and not refute you.)

I actually think that the best models are the environmental and civil rights movements. But those problems, while complex, are pretty simple to grasp in essence and rally behind. But how do you rally people behind more moral foreign policy?

Tangent:
I'm going to sound like a dreamy-eyed technologist here, but I wonder if the internet will have an impact on governance? What if all government bodies were required to publish all activity and decisions on the internet? What if it were able to make plebiscites possible for more issues?

I wonder how much of the current apathy in our country is due to people not believing that it matters whether they pay any attention or not?

And speaking of politicians molding the will of the people, here's something else that should upset you: href= http://www.economist.co.uk/world/na/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1099030&CFID=3439290&CFTOKEN=4b5f831-669be5d3-5ace-41d9-b098-8b5d5a22e895 gerrymandering

Raise the gas tax!

Hmm. I think my brain is getting tired.

As to Vietnam, the fact that the war was only unpopular at the end seems to indicate that the government pulled out only when the people complained. Which was my point.

As to the internet solving anything, I'll play the dreary-eyed pessimist and say that it won't. A lot of information is already out there. And yet most Americans (I assert) have enough trouble comprehending the amount of news in a half-hour broadcast, complete with commercials and several minutes of human interest stories, let alone any decent newspaper coverage. Asking the voting populace to go out on the internet and find things for themselves sounds pretty hopeless.

Let's face it, things are pretty good right now for most Americans. Most of them are employed, healthy (or at least not dying), and so on. Who needs to pay attention to the news?

As to gerrymandering, ... sigh. I think I'm in a jaded mood right now. Clearly it's a bad thing, but what can I do, really? And if I feel that way, less informed people can only feel moreso.

Finally, Josh, I'm confused about your gas tax link. Are you for or against it? I mean, I like the idea of it, sure. But then, I'm not much of a driver, so of course I don't care. Tax the other guy, right? It'll never really happen in America though, will it?

Y'know, Todd, you corrupted me for life by showing me a "This Modern World" cartoon my sophomore year. Talk about opening a window to a worldview.

Anyways, I'm hopelessly technologist myself, and I put my hopes for the solution to many of our country's ills in the form of alternative energy sources. (Note: I think fuel cells will be a great way to power cars, but switching to a "hydrogen economy" still doesn't solve the energy generation problem. Sure hydrogen will be a great pollution-free source of energy in fuel cells, but we've still got to produce the energy to strip hydrogen from water(or wherever) in the first place.) What we need (and I'm stealing this concept and metaphor from Jim Hightower's _Hightower Lowdown_) is a nation-wide scientific and technological push, on the scale of the 1960's drive to the moonshot, to finally develop solar/wind/bio/tidal energy on large and economic scales.

I think we could get everybody to rally around this, if they really knew the devastation that oil politics has wrought. Heck, you don't even have to push the fact that we are guzzling what is relatively free energy right now (and when we've used up hundreds of millions of years of stored energy in the next century or so, all our technological advances grind to a halt.) Throw in the pollution you save by not burning those fossil fuels, and alternative energy starts sounding like an even more important goal than that supremely cool achievement, man on the moon.

Nuclear energy would be cool, too, but fission is much too dirty. Fusion would do the trick, I guess.

Anyway, funny how one topic can bring out everybody's favorite subject, from youthful cynicism to gerrymandering to Neal Armstrong.