There is nothing people can do. The only change will happen when the ones on top, decide it's enough and that is unlikely. Everyone has become docile and the old ways of getting people in power to do something doesn't work anymore. Culture has even started evolving into a broadcast what I can get away with doing and that shows how one sided the system has become.
"It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot; and as oligarchic when they are filled by election." Aristotle, Politics 4.1294be
It's not just money, it's how we run our elections. A small minority pay attention to primaries, and those people's interests are different. By the time a general election comes, the candidates with broad appeal lost the primary.
From the article:
Realsearchers compared enacted policies to “the expressed preferences of average Americans (50th percentile of income), affluent Americans (90th percentile), and large special interests groups.”
Researchers did not evaluate legislation on its merits. Indeed, they did not evaluate the legislation at all. They rely on work done by Gilens. Gilens assembled a dataset of survey results about support for legislation in which the income of the respondents is known. See Testing Theiretical Predictions section of the full reseach article: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/62327F513959D0A304D48...
Economic-elite is defined as individuals with income at or above the top 10%.
Absolutely. I clicked through to the underlying paper and read it for that very reason, but couldn't find a table or any examples of what some of the policy differences are. Be very curious to see where our elitist policies differ from what the average person wants.
It’s important from here moving forward that we understand “liberal” to mean the same as it did in the French Revolution; that is bourgieous who say they care about working people to gain popular support. The “left” and “liberals” are 2 very different factions. If they ever seem similar, this is a matter of understandable confusion at the hands of liberals.
Yeah, this is why people are mad now, and dare I say it exactly explains why Trump won.
The fact that the US is run for the elites isn't something that happened in the last year, its been that way for decades. Which is why when presented with the option of re-electing a dynastic choice for President and a (on the surface) political outsider who captured their rage, people voted for rage.
People are angry about elites and somehow they could be convinced to vote for a guy who is part of the elite, hires mainly people from the 0.1% and makes policies for the 0.1%. In addition the Christian value voters could be convinced to vote for a serial cheater and liar. That's true genius.
To be fair, almost every leader portrays themselves as a “man of The People” when this is almost never the case. Even authoritarian dictators like Gaddafi claimed this in order to lend legitimacy to their rule. What’s really surprising is that it actually often works, at least as long as the leader keeps handing The People table scraps that is.
In the United States, I find the phenomena of well educated, wealthy republican businessmen playing themselves up as—for lack of a better term—Good ol’ Boys to be a particularly ugly version of this. It’s a cynical and demeaning farce, yet it still seems to get results.
Perhaps the root cause is that true men of The People rarely make it to power. Perhaps it is some human quirk: a primal desire to latch on to leaders and identify with them. Whatever it is, it doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon so I guess you can either try to fight it or exploit it.
> somehow they could be convinced to vote for a guy who is part of the elite
You're politically left, that's why you don't see it. This is your blindspot.
Trump could be the leader of the elites, but he doesn't act, or talk like the 'elite', and most important of all, nearly all the elites genuinely loathe and hate him.
Bloomberg is part of the elite. If Bloomberg ran for election then the site which hates elite will not vote for him.
In fact, even if he did talk exactly like how Bloomberg, Laureen Powell Jobs, Zuckerberg, Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, etc talk, he is the anti-elite because all the elites hate him.
It's sad that the who explicitly prefixes his claim as 'dare I say' is being downvoted because you don't like what he said.
In what sense is Trump not elite? He was born elite, grew up elite and does things for the elite. In the context of the US being governed by and for the rich he is part of that trend. Maybe he uses different talk than the elite you mention. But they all have the same interest which is to amass as much money as they can in their own hands. None of these people cares about making life better for the average citizen. Maybe they do in an abstract sense but do nothing (like me caring for poor people around the world and doing nothing).
The elite are the people with money. They have the real power.
Ok lets put it this way. Lets just say it is discovered that Jesus was actually a banker himself. Does that really change the fact that he purged the bankers/money changers form the temple of Jersualem?
And because he did that, do anti-bankers and money changers care about the fact that Jesus himself was a banker and a money changer? Especially since the banker community repeatedly comes to the television and talks about how Jesus is breaking the fabric of our society and throws a barrage of anti-Jesus message through media?
Look, Bernie Sanders made $1 million second year in a row, but do Democratic Socialists care about it? He is far richer than most of his followers would ever be, but if Jeff Bezos writes Editorials talking about how horrible Bernie Sanders is, then it just gives Bernie more credibility, irrespective of his newfound wealth.
The anti bankers should care if Jesus was a banker, did not purge the bankers from the temple but the only thing he did was not to talk like a banker.
I think we are talking about the same thing. Watch what people do, not what they say and not where they come from. Trump got elected by the little guy because he talked for the little guy but in reality he is another rich guy who acts for his people.
This deserves more nuance. Trump didn’t win for this reason alone, but if his weren’t the case, Trump would not have won.
The main reason Trump won was the void of lost self-identity of so many Americans. In such a scenario, that void is often filled by becoming the antithesis to the external identities that seem to have robbed the person’s own identity. None of this would be such a big deal if it weren’t for the overwhelming tension of mass media and rapidly changing technology and swindling of corporations. Then there’s the Mexicans who took the construction jobs, the homosexuals who made feminine males acceptable, the computers that have to be learned at age 50 just to get through the day. The whole world seems to be telling middle aged average Americans that they are outdated unless they get young again, and telling some younger Americans that they can’t follow in their parent’s footsteps like they had hoped to. Combined with a dwindling income, these things are sure to be very angering. The resurgence of outward racism is an ignorant and immature desperation for self-identity. It’s not excusable, but it’s also not happening in a vacuum.
Corporate America absolutely created this environment, not to hurt others, but to help themselves. But it did hurt others, they didn’t care, and they still don’t.
As much as my emotions would like to, I can’t blame these people for voting against Hillary. She embodies all of it, and absolutely does not care.
Voting for Trump was really stupid but voting against Hillary was just a given.
