US Politics Mega-thread - Page 4737

At first glance, it seems the cause of corruption seeping into politics is identical on both sides of the Pacific: an elite class who is not accountable, and a political system that does not adequately give power to the people. In China by removing any semblance of a democracy: there is one party and opposition will not be tolerated, and in the US by giving an illusion of choice: you can vote for the elites' lap dog or their attack dog, but either way you are voting for their pets. In China it's by design, and in the US it's by inertia, but in both systems there is a powerful elite that keeps a tight control on the reigns and the only way to get into positions of power is by being one of them or dancing to their music. In addition, the media is firmly under their control too, allowing them to fully shape the message the population hears. Whether that is through a giant firewall and state media organisations controlling the rest, or by outright ownership of the media. They are thoroughly uncritical of their own government and elites. Examples: try finding any info in China about Tiananmen Square. And anything Musk posts on Twitter, but also Bezos instructing the WaPo not to endorse either candidate, and a cartoonist having her cartoon cut when it threatened to be slightly too critical of the boss.

However, these similarities conceal a serious difference between the two. In China, the very institutions of government are the ones that incentivise corruption. The lack of democratic oversight is intentional, and the problem is party members using their mandate to ensure friends and family get lucrative business positions outside of civil service.

Meanwhile in the US the institutions of government are meant to prevent corruption. They have been degraded and eroded to the point they don't work at all anymore. You can't be a politician without spending millions on campaigns, which obviously makes you beholden to whoever gave you those millions. Combine that with an anachronistic constitution that specifically gives disproportionate power to lower population states, allows presidents to pardon their family members, and a disproportionately huge role to unelected judges, and it's clear the system that was supposed to protect the people from abuse of power has failed. But at least it existed.

So. Where do we go from here? Clearly a socialist rebuilding of the US political system would have to build on such institutions and ensure oversight. But how does socialism ever avoid the centralisation of power? It seems built into the system. Maybe an extreme form of direct democracy would allow for decisions about how to allocate resources to be taken collectively, rather than centralized in an elite. It would be very hard and require a full reeducation of the populace to be capable of this responsibility. Those same school teachers who voted for Trump and whose funding was subsequently slashed, will need to teach Freirean critical pedagogy. It seems like a utopian dream that anything like this would work. And how else do we empower people who don't know the first thing about medicine to take informed decisions about what and where to spend money on medical research. Or innovation in farming. Or AI. Not to mention "mundane" decisions like whether we need a traffic light at the intersection of Lenin Avenue with Trotsky Street.

So yes, I look at this and think this is inevitably how socialism succumbs to totalitarianism. I can start small: the day-to-day decision-making at my work cause enough meetings to add stress and overhead to my day. I have repeatedly been offered the possibility to move into management and have turned it down, because that is just not the kind of work I enjoy. I'm perfectly happy working under a competent boss. And the company is big enough that he has a boss, and then there is 1 further layer of directors before we reach the CEO. The CEO spends his entire day hopping from meetings with those directors to meetings with investors and other stakeholders, ensuring that everybody is strategically aligned to meet our company objectives, and find ways to work around obstacles to meet them in the face of adversity. I cannot possibly imagine how this, relatively simple, business would run with more democratic decisionmaking, and my workplace is a fairly young, fairly modern and fairly transparent workplace. I'm very happy to say that most decisions are taken in committee with employees who have a stake in that decision. However, the hierarchy is necessary. And that means that some people will have more power than others.

Even my brother, who runs a regenerative farming co-op had to abandon the ideas of decision-making by committee: the day-to-day practicalities of running a farm make that far too hard. Everybody has their speciality, and owns that and the decisionmaking in that vertical. But when push comes to shove in a decision that impacts the farm as a whole, one person's voice counts more than others. And that doesn't mean they don't have meetings to discuss these things, but decisions often need to be made in a timely manner, and especially on a farm, time is in spectacularly short supply! So instead of their ideal of unanimous decisionmaking or at the very least, voting, they often end up having the decision made by a dictator. A benevolent one who has the best interests of the farm in mind. And one that they can remove and replace if trust is lost. But still, hierarchy arises naturally. And as long as people are happy to give their power to others, how do you avoid them eventually giving it to a Trump, a Maduro or a Jinping, who do everything with that newfound power to (1) keep it and (2) abuse it. You're going to need very strong institutions. But institutions are als just people. So