Why does America fear/distrust it's government?

[Jumpingbean3]

The government has power in a very Captailistic society, I don't see a reason not to fear it.

Personally I'd be more afraid of corporations having power in a very capitalist society. Not that I'd want to get rid of all corporations or completely remove their power (that would suck for everyone) but I've always thought that they had more reason to screw us over than the government. Some people have told me "corporations can't screw us over cos they'd get caught and lose money", a statement that I have a full list of problems with:

1) Businesses are perfectly willing to make big gambles (which is one of the reasons we're in a recession right now) in the name of greed.

2) Businesses tend to be more clever about screwing people over without you knowing.

3) When people DO find out the corporations are screwing people over some of them will come out and say that the victims are the bad-guys.

4) Because in modern America even suggesting to the Right Wing that a Corporation may be more corrupt than the government boogeyman is enough to get you called a Nazi.

 

[bl4ckh4wk64]

I personally don't trust our government because they only want one thing, and they will do anything and everything in their power to get it. They will lie to you, say what you want to hear, and make problems out of nothing all in the hopes of increasing public opinion and getting re-elected.

Granted, there are the few who want to make a difference, but they're overshadowed by that majority that are self-righteous, egotistical assholes.

 

[Kleingeier]

A large number of people have already stopped thinking.

Also, there are systems where, when areas get a number of seats in the same governmental structure, they get proportional representation to who won. Say, 60% voted Republican, 30% voted Democrat, 10% voted Libertarian (or your minority party of choice), that area, if given 10 representatives, would get 6 Republicans, 3 Democrats and 1 Libertarian, meaning that you can support a party that better fits your ideals without throwing away your vote.

Voting for someone who actually represents your interests outside the main two parties in the current system is effectively throwing away your vote, because that area from before was divided up into 10 smaller areas, each of which only got ONE representative, wherein you'd see a sharp increase in Republican representatives, and NO Libertarian representatives, which is a very poor representation of the will of the people.

Two party systems may be a self checking system, but the only things this system seems to check at present is any attempt to pass legislation. Republicans and Democrats are so entrenched in their anti-other mentalities, that anything the other proposes, even if it's in the interests of both, or even in the interests of the nation as a whole, has to be either rejected or rewritten so the non-originating side can take credit for it. There is no way to encourage cooperation within the current system, it's too adversarial.

The government, to be a legitimate government, has to accomplish things on behalf of its people. The current government fails to do this, or at least fails to do this with enough numbers to validate it's current iteration.

All the more reason to give them their own personal party?

In that situation, you still have a Democratic majority. In that situation, you also have six democrats roughly voting in kind, 3 republicans resisting, and 1 libertarian trying to use the legislative process to dismantle the legislative process. How's that for a more effective solution?

The will of the people is a selfish and regionally-affected one that only halts the US national arena. If the will of the people was so infallible and considerable, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would exclude over a third of the states in the Union. Almost 50 years later, a political majority of Southerners still think inter-ethnic marriage should be illegal. The will of the people also dictates homosexuals are not full-fledged citizens, no matter the party. Trust me, politics is not so brilliantly kaleidoscopic that a know-nothing and a libertarian are going to suffer because they have to vote for a Republican.

You're wrong again. The DREAM Act, for instance, was put forth by Republicans. Democrats clamored to get a vote for that bill in Congress. The "will of the people" in late 2010 reversed that progress when a new wave of social conservatives entered the fray. Just last week in New York, a new same sex rights bill was passed by a state senate with a Republican majority. This illusion that the two party system is an unmoving two-part block of ideology is just that, a centrist half-truth to justify the intellectual stasis of postmodern apathists and vacillating idealists.

All governments are flawed. Autocracy is the only political model where a political decision can be made without mass opposition against it from another political force. And I doubt you want autocracy.

 

[conflictofinterests]

The government has power in a very Captailistic society, I don't see a reason not to fear it.

Personally I'd be more afraid of corporations having power in a very capitalist society. Not that I'd want to get rid of all corporations or completely remove their power (that would suck for everyone) but I've always thought that they had more reason to screw us over than the government. Some people have told me "corporations can't screw us over cos they'd get caught and lose money", a statement that I have a full list of problems with:

1) Businesses are perfectly willing to make big gambles (which is one of the reasons we're in a recession right now) in the name of greed.

2) Businesses tend to be more clever about screwing people over without you knowing.

3) When people DO find out the corporations are screwing people over some of them will come out and say that the victims are the bad-guys.

4) Because in modern America even suggesting to the Right Wing that a Corporation may be more corrupt than the government boogeyman is enough to get you called a Nazi.

There was a great example of ALL of those points in American history. It was called the Robber Baron Era, and it was the reason Labor Unions started popping up (but they caught a shit ton more flack than they do today) Corporation: LABOR UNIONS ARE STOPPING MY TRAINS, GOVERNMENT, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT! Government: ALRIGHT, HERE ARE SOME OF OUR MILITARY UNITS. STRAIGHTEN OUT AND FLY RIGHT, WORKERS. ALSO, STOP DOING THAT UNION THING. WE DON'T LIKE THAT. The workers were doing the Labor Union thing because of something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUpTJg2EBpw&feature=related

 

[Walter Sobchak]

Because on average people here in america are stupider than any other place in the world

 

[IThinkImASofa]

It seems to me that the media is the main source of the fear. Our news sources come in many different varieties, but they all seem to agree that breeding fear is the main source for good ratings. And there's no real cure for that. It would only take one well placed, far reaching failure (resource depletion, infrastructure failure) for us to "rip each other apart through fear". And if it doesn't happen that way, we will make sure it does through the slow passage of time. Its aggravating to watch your own people burn, but there doesn't seem to be a doable solution. Realistically we've been around for more than two hundred years, historically speaking that's a good amount of time for your average nation. Within this century there will be either a major shift, or total failure, and really its just our time.

I think I answered the question somewhere in there.

Because on average people here in america are stupider than any other place in the world

also what he said

 

[Johnny Reb]

because every single movie about the CIA or some other government agency are fucking scary. i mean just imagine if there was a real Jason Bourne out there and at any moment your government could end your life with him. you don't fuck with Bourne.

 

[Puzzlenaut]

Well I imagine the Constitution's set up that way given how Parliament treated the colonies when they first arrived, and the power they tried to exert over them (taxes and stuff, but with no representation or say in how the government was run).

Its not bad to be wary of the government, but it does mean that a lot of people have no grasp on the concept of Socialism (Obama is not a socialist - that is not a matter of opinion), or can see that giving a little more "control" will do them the world of good (health care).

First of all, I do think that if he were in a situation that would allow him to push through whatever laws he wanted to, he would be quite a bit more socialist than he currently is, so I do believe he's a socialist (which I view as a good thing), however because of the ingrained fear of left-wing politics, anything approaching what would be considered the middle-left in Europe is considered to basically be communism.

But enough on that, my second point is the main thing I want to say:
Exactly how were the colonies treated badly? They (or at least the white peopel there, though it was basically only white people involved in the uprising) were subject to basically the same laws as everyone else in the UK, and around that time less than 5% of the population were given the vote anyway (which was pretty standard in the advanced countries at that time) -- only the middle class land owners and up were allowed to have their say in the running of the government via a vote back in Britain, so really, for the working class man, there was really no difference in how important their say was either at home or in the colonies.

American history has always taught this story of how the British ruthlessly suppressed and abused the people living in their colonies, when in fact conditions there (for white people, that is) were never anywhere near as bad as inner city London (or any other industrial city in the UK) at the time. Taxes were no worse for the people in the colonies in north than anywhere else in the globe (under British control I mean).

OT:
I think that generally, the bigger a country, the more distant the government seems, and the more distant the government, the more wary the citizens are of it.

 

[King Toasty]

Sometimes, a little paranoia is healthy. In America's case, a lot of paranoia.

 

[Nosforontu]

I think that you have to keep in mind certain aspects of our history especially in our role as one of the first modern Republics.
1: When we successfully rebelled the original idea of the United States was that we were more a loose collection of nation states directed under a weak centralized over state. This is something I think a lot of Europeans don't quite understand about the American System. That while the Federal government has increasingly been the dominant partner in this relationship that our State government's have always been another very important layer in our history.

I am not really familiar with the workings of the European Union is set up but I think it does have some correlations for how we relate to our government. Think of the EU as your version of the Feds and the individual nation states within the EU as our States and I think you will understand our system of government a bit better (unless of course I am completely off with this analogy which is quite likely of course ).

2: We are a Continental Nation State that has not had a serious contender for control over this continent since probably the time of our civil war a 150 years ago. For the vast majority of our time as a nation state we have not needed a strong central government. Until 1913 the United States Federal government did not even have a permanent federal income tax to support itself (instead it made do largely with various tariff's on trade) though we did have a few brief ones in our history to cover the cost of some our more expensive early wars.

Additionally we benefited from the fact European diseases hugely decimated the local native population and that said native population was several centuries behind Europe in several important technologies. Once we became in our own right this allowed us to advance across the continent with little long term effective resistance.

This gives us a much different historical experience than that possessed by Europeans we did not require an increasingly powerful nation state to compete with other powerful nation states until very late in our history (probably World War I or World War II for that idea to sink in though the Civil War changed things quite a bit as well).

3: We are a continental sized nation with only 300 million citizens spread out across the continent. To be perfectly honest the technology and infrastructure to control such a dispersed population across the continent is fairly recent. Add in the divergent though still recognizably American State Governments and it has been historically very easy for Americans to go off the grid so to speak reinvent themselves else-wear in the country. Again that has changed over the last century but it has historically been true for Americans over our history.

4: Our own experience with the quality of government work has been that the overall quality of the work and is lower and its cost is higher than what we have found in the private sector when those two groups find themselves in competition with each other. This along side Americas Wealth (I believe that we currently control approximately 25% of the worlds G.D.P.) that over all when given the choice between government providing service A or the private sector providing service A that everyone involved is better off if it is the private sector doing the work.

It is even a common belief among many Americans that our wealth and standard of living derives from recognizing that the government needs to be the last choice in our economy to solve a problem that because of the massive size of our country that we have a real inability at the federal level to fine tune a federal answer to local issues without a relatively massive expense compared to any other solution offered.

5: If it isn't broke don't fix it we control approximately 25% of the worlds G.D.P. our domestic borders are absolutely safe from a national incursion from another state on our continent (illegal immigration and possible terrorist infiltration is a different story altogether both being impossible to truly stop because of the size of our borders). Our Navy and Air Force is absolutely the most powerful in the world our Army is arguably the most powerful in the world as well (I would say it is but it has grown ragged over 10 years of fighting in the war on terror and probably needs some secure peace time to refurbish and rest up), and our nation is still among the most advanced in the world.

Quite honestly this does not encourage rapid or radical change in the way our government works. It is going to be resistant and sluggish to change because no one wants to be the one that screws up this level of national dominance.

 

[Xisin]

So, why does America distrust it's government so much more than Europe?

Well seems pretty simple to me. There has been 7 pages of discussion and almost no one agrees with each other. No government is perfect because people run it. Everyone will always disagree therefore no one will ever be completely happy with the way the government is run.

 

[conflictofinterests]

All the more reason to give them their own personal party?

In that situation, you still have a Democratic majority. In that situation, you also have six democrats roughly voting in kind, 3 republicans resisting, and 1 libertarian trying to use the legislative process to dismantle the legislative process. How's that for a more effective solution?

The will of the people is a selfish and regionally-affected one that only halts the US national arena. If the will of the people was so infallible and considerable, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would exclude over a third of the states in the Union. Almost 50 years later, a political majority of Southerners still think inter-ethnic marriage should be illegal. The will of the people also dictates homosexuals are not full-fledged citizens, no matter the party. Trust me, politics is not so brilliantly kaleidoscopic that a know-nothing and a libertarian are going to suffer because they have to vote for a Republican.

You're wrong again. The DREAM Act, for instance, was put forth by Republicans. Democrats clamored to get a vote for that bill in Congress. The "will of the people" in late 2010 reversed that progress when a new wave of social conservatives entered the fray. Just last week in New York, a new same sex rights bill was passed by a state senate with a Republican majority. This illusion that the two party system is an unmoving two-part block of ideology is just that, a centrist half-truth to justify the intellectual stasis of postmodern apathists and vacillating idealists.

All governments are flawed. Autocracy is the only political model where a political decision can be made without mass opposition against it from another political force. And I doubt you want autocracy.

How many instances like the DREAM act can you cite for me? Because if it's ONLY that one, then I retain my opinion, but if you have a fair number of them, I guess I'm wrong.

I'm also very confused as to your argument for the two party system. Your arguments seem to be ones that could be used towards autocracy, as you say. I find it a fair enough argument that the tyrrany of the majority is as threatening as, if not more threatening than the tyrrany of the minority. I just don't understand how minority political parties deserve to be subjugated to majority political parties in this system. Yes, it isn't what I want for the "will of the people" to justify banning interracial or same sex marriage, but the check we have against that is the Supreme Court, to determine the legitimacy of laws, so I don't see how people voting exactly how they want could fuck things up to the extent you're suggesting. Still, I'm open to your arguments.

 

[martin's a madman]

Because they are a bunch of Communist fascist alien lizards.

Or something...

 

[TheTaco007]

The majority of people (not just America, but in the whole world) are complete idiots.

The people who are in power are elected by a majority vote. (yeah, I know it's an electoral vote, but it's close enough)

Therefore idiots pick who is in charge of this country.

How does that NOT scare you?

 

[Woodsey]

Well I imagine the Constitution's set up that way given how Parliament treated the colonies when they first arrived, and the power they tried to exert over them (taxes and stuff, but with no representation or say in how the government was run).

Its not bad to be wary of the government, but it does mean that a lot of people have no grasp on the concept of Socialism (Obama is not a socialist - that is not a matter of opinion), or can see that giving a little more "control" will do them the world of good (health care).

First of all, I do think that if he were in a situation that would allow him to push through whatever laws he wanted to, he would be quite a bit more socialist than he currently is, so I do believe he's a socialist (which I view as a good thing), however because of the ingrained fear of left-wing politics, anything approaching what would be considered the middle-left in Europe is considered to basically be communism.

But enough on that, my second point is the main thing I want to say:
Exactly how were the colonies treated badly? They (or at least the white peopel there, though it was basically only white people involved in the uprising) were subject to basically the same laws as everyone else in the UK, and around that time less than 5% of the population were given the vote anyway (which was pretty standard in the advanced countries at that time) -- only the middle class land owners and up were allowed to have their say in the running of the government via a vote back in Britain, so really, for the working class man, there was really no difference in how important their say was either at home or in the colonies.

American history has always taught this story of how the British ruthlessly suppressed and abused the people living in their colonies, when in fact conditions there (for white people, that is) were never anywhere near as bad as inner city London (or any other industrial city in the UK) at the time. Taxes were no worse for the people in the colonies in north than anywhere else in the globe (under British control I mean).

OT:
I think that generally, the bigger a country, the more distant the government seems, and the more distant the government, the more wary the citizens are of it.

Yeah, there's more than two points on the political spectrum, he's not a socialist.

Anyway, it wasn't to do with conditions, it was to do with them being governed by Britain and having no say in the matter despite the people telling them what's what not having lived there and making them pay taxes. Their situation may have been "better", but they had the means by which to gain control for themselves.

That's my understanding anyway, I've literally only just started that aspect of things in 6th Form.

 

[Mark Hardigan]

First, governments generally never give up power once they gain it. So every time you consent to give a government more power, it's out of the hands of the citizens and in the hands of government officials FOREVER.

QFT. You want proof positive of this, then just read a few history books about the civil war. In the reformation period after the civil war, the federal government took a lot of powers from the individual states. The promise was that these were temporary powers that would only be used to help speed the process of reformation and the reconstruction of the south.

To this day, the states have not gotten those powers back.

 

[mrdude2010]

i dislike the government because certain political parties are more interested in scoring cheap political points to get themselves elected than actually fixing the f*cking country

 

[mrdude2010]

The government has power in a very Captailistic society, I don't see a reason not to fear it.

Personally I'd be more afraid of corporations having power in a very capitalist society. Not that I'd want to get rid of all corporations or completely remove their power (that would suck for everyone) but I've always thought that they had more reason to screw us over than the government. Some people have told me "corporations can't screw us over cos they'd get caught and lose money", a statement that I have a full list of problems with:

1) Businesses are perfectly willing to make big gambles (which is one of the reasons we're in a recession right now) in the name of greed.

2) Businesses tend to be more clever about screwing people over without you knowing.

3) When people DO find out the corporations are screwing people over some of them will come out and say that the victims are the bad-guys.

4) Because in modern America even suggesting to the Right Wing that a Corporation may be more corrupt than the government boogeyman is enough to get you called a Nazi.

in addition, to what you've said, choice- the ability to not pay for something if the company running it is overcharging/being a dickweed is absent, because there are too many things that people really can't boycott, can't live without. like food. or healthcare. or gasoline. all of these things end up costing more than they're worth because the companies involved are well aware that they can charge basically what they want and people will probably find a way to pay for it.

and invariably, one corporation ends up controlling a disproportionate chunk of the market, ruining competition. that and the various things all corporations in the same business have agreed upon to make choice more difficult- things like planned obsolescence in appliances (they still cost the same but don't work for as long, so they're forcing you to buy an inferior product, because it's pretty difficult to live without a refrigerator), or cancellation fees (a cell phone company courageous enough to lower their rates to a reasonable level won't be properly rewarded for a year or so while everyone else's subscriptions to other companies run out, because the cancellation fee is usually something stupid like $200)

 

[LiftYourSkinnyFists]

Would anybody trust a country where it's government is daft as the people living under it.

 

[Kleingeier]

All the more reason to give them their own personal party?

In that situation, you still have a Democratic majority. In that situation, you also have six democrats roughly voting in kind, 3 republicans resisting, and 1 libertarian trying to use the legislative process to dismantle the legislative process. How's that for a more effective solution?

The will of the people is a selfish and regionally-affected one that only halts the US national arena. If the will of the people was so infallible and considerable, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would exclude over a third of the states in the Union. Almost 50 years later, a political majority of Southerners still think inter-ethnic marriage should be illegal. The will of the people also dictates homosexuals are not full-fledged citizens, no matter the party. Trust me, politics is not so brilliantly kaleidoscopic that a know-nothing and a libertarian are going to suffer because they have to vote for a Republican.

You're wrong again. The DREAM Act, for instance, was put forth by Republicans. Democrats clamored to get a vote for that bill in Congress. The "will of the people" in late 2010 reversed that progress when a new wave of social conservatives entered the fray. Just last week in New York, a new same sex rights bill was passed by a state senate with a Republican majority. This illusion that the two party system is an unmoving two-part block of ideology is just that, a centrist half-truth to justify the intellectual stasis of postmodern apathists and vacillating idealists.

All governments are flawed. Autocracy is the only political model where a political decision can be made without mass opposition against it from another political force. And I doubt you want autocracy.

How many instances like the DREAM act can you cite for me? Because if it's ONLY that one, then I retain my opinion, but if you have a fair number of them, I guess I'm wrong.

I'm also very confused as to your argument for the two party system. Your arguments seem to be ones that could be used towards autocracy, as you say. I find it a fair enough argument that the tyrrany of the majority is as threatening as, if not more threatening than the tyrrany of the minority. I just don't understand how minority political parties deserve to be subjugated to majority political parties in this system. Yes, it isn't what I want for the "will of the people" to justify banning interracial or same sex marriage, but the check we have against that is the Supreme Court, to determine the legitimacy of laws, so I don't see how people voting exactly how they want could fuck things up to the extent you're suggesting. Still, I'm open to your arguments.

Barack Obama is the most bipartisan president in recent history, but I digress.
Just over five years ago, legislation was passed to make sure Congress could not longer tack on special bills to block transparency in Washington.
In the 90s, there was bipartisan education reform, especially in the way of improving funding for daycare and educational institutions like Head Start for kids.
Just several years ago bipartisan legislation was reintroduced and passed to make hate crimes against the disabled, gays, and women more severely punished under the law, after being rejected in the 90s.
The list goes on.

There is no tyranny of the majority in a two party system. Those minor political affiliations manipulate the course and creed of the two parties(excluding independents) and create a mostly-encompassing political vehicle. The compromise you seek is within the parties. Only when a minority faction rules the majority is it tyrannical.
And you should brush up on your Supreme Court law and history, because the Supreme Court is actually the only aspect of the US government that has no checks in place. Most supreme court decisions are decided in a 5:4 ratio. The five being one party and the four being another.

There is no decision-making in a multiple party system. Instead of two arguments, you might have eight. A nation the size of the US with as many demographics as the US cannot be run democratically. It must be a republic.

It's simply no solution.
How would you decide a vote when there are six democrats, three republicans, and one libertarian, on a nation scale? Does the nation still adopt the democratic policy? Or does each region of the nation adopt the law according to their political swing?