Oil-Qaeda Wins Big - 2

"Take that politicians!"

In the first post of this series we noted how strange the recent midterm election results in the U.S. were.

Especially when those election results are compared to the musical favorites of those various states (Oil-Qaeda Wins Big).

Democracy of various sorts is alive when there is accountability, but it is pronounced brain-dead when accountability becomes extinct.

In the U.S. version of a constitutional-republic that respects one form of democracy, the health of its accountability is diagnosed in substantial part by election integrity.

The story line goes that with this American structure the people hold their politicians accountable via periodic elections:

Accountability is the missing conceptual link in the current debate over how best to advance democracy. Democracy affirms the need to justify decisions made by citizens and their representatives: it is a system that connects the values of the individual with the decisions of the collective. The preferences of citizens revealed by fair elections (representation) or organized and definitive discussion (deliberation) are the starting points of democratic legitimacy.
...
A clearly defined accountability system is crucial to any system of representative democracy because citizens, through their vote, legitimize or give authority to leaders to act.

(When Accountability Is A Plague, 2, 3). The nation claiming to be a democracy must have election integrity so as to facilitate accountability.

The actual diagnosis of U.S. democracy does not match the official rhetoric and propaganda:

1) Norway,

A graph from the Report (p. 9)

2) Germany,
3) Netherlands,
4) Iceland,
5) Czech Republican,
6) South Korea,
7) Austria,
8) Slovenia,
9) Israel,
10) Cyprus,
11) Lithuania,
12) Australia,
13) Rwanda,
14) Japan,
15) Chile,
16) Italy,
17) Grenada,
18) Malta,
19) Argentina,
20) Georgia,
21) Mongolia,
22) Micronesia,
23) United States,
24) Mexico.

('Electoral Integrity'; c.f. The Electoral Integrity Project). Perhaps that report is a scientific version of the intuition the American people seem to have?

Perhaps their intuition, which their participation or lack thereof indicates, is that to them "that something" called elections stinks:

Turnout of the voting-eligible population was just 36.4 percent, according to the projection from the United States Elections Project, run by Dr. Michael McDonald at the University of Florida. That’s down from the 41 percent that turned out in 2010. You have to go all the way back to 1942 for lower numbers when turnout in that midterm was just 33.9 percent. They had a pretty good excuse back then — many adult-age Americans were preoccupied with fighting in a world war.

(2014 Midterm Election Turnout Lowest in 70 Years). There is a lot of "blame the victim" going on, but that analysis by bullies in McTell News does not change the reality of an increasing lack of election integrity in the U.S. (Election Conspiracy Theory Confirmed?, Voting For Hitler and Stalin).

Americans know that their democracy has been slowly stolen, and they want their democracy back quickly (A Tale of Coup Cities, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12).

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

---

Irrationality within the cultural trance ...

---