Thursday, November 20, 2014

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 ...



3 comments:

  1. Republicans Revive Bold Scheme to Rig Presidential Election: link

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  2. What's to rig? They've already got the Obama acting worse than Bush. It's no use even pretending elections are "free and fair" - we've been reduced to a third world country politically, now our standard of living and steady impoverishment of the environment should follow suit. That should make them happy. I've been waiting years for some backlash, but the American electorate is commonly referred to as sheep for a reason. Since there's nowhere to go but down and out, anyone can be at the helm of the sinking ship of state.

    Tom

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  3. The "elections can't get worse" meme is going to be proven wrong, as is "the government can't get worse."

    Chuck Todd says that the congress collectively loses about 2 IQ points every two years.

    Expect a surge in that percentage.

    Much of that IQ evaporation is the result of the gerrymandering of House districts.

    Once the election system is rigged for the presidency and the Senate to move more and more to the far right, Bush II will seem to have been a liberal.

    WW III can't happen without an increase in the demise of accountability.

    Evolution from left to right is ongoing, with a surge here, a little step back toward sanity there, but the specific direction is unmistakable.

    Stalin once said "voters decide nothing, those who count the votes decide everything."

    The book "Voting for Hitler and Stalin" is instructive: "Dictatorships throughout the twentieth century — including Mussolini’s Italy, the Third Reich, the Soviet Union, Poland, and East Germany — held elections. But were they more than rituals of participation without the slightest effect on the distribution of power? Why did political regimes radically opposed to liberal democracy feel the need to imitate their enemies? Offering significant insights into absolutist state governance, Voting for Hitler and Stalin thoroughly investigates the remarkable, paradoxical phenomenon of dictatorial elections, revealing the many ways they transcended mere propaganda."

    ReplyDelete