AMERICAN POLITICS—WHAT TO DO

December 11, 2013

Anil Mitra

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Umm—the purpose of these little blurbs is that they are a little wordy for a social media post. At least I think so. But they’re just of the cuff and not particularly thought out. At some point I might make a collection of these blurbs as a blog or something.

This post is probably a micro aspect of ‘what to do’.

Big business has money; it buys government (influence); it owns the press and buys opinion; so while they’re taking the shirts of our backs they have us believing that it's for our good. Last year when Nate Silver who predicted the exact numbers of the final Electoral College count was consistently counting Obama far ahead, the press mostly reported things like a see-saw, doing their own polls in which they found now Obama, now Romney ahead. Since their readership is select, of course their own polls would be biased: big business buys and manufactures (our) opinion.

On the other side, standing against all this, there's a few of us, the people, and a smaller percent of politicians, news, and business. Liberals (I'm one) have two weaknesses. We tend to think and so not so much to emotion; conservatives have learnt to appeal to (baser) emotions. Second, we think that because we are right, others will agree with us; that's just not the case.

The weakness of conservatives (by the way, I don't mean to imply that conservatism is essentially bad, it's just that there is a particularly virulent form of it around today) is that since their agenda is self-interest (despite loud proclamation to the contrary) they inevitably harm the country--the services, the economy--and the people who have been fooled see that the conservative government isn't working.

So far we've been lucky. Bad government gets into power under false pretense but then the agenda makes the economy falter and they lose elections. We might not continue to be lucky. Self-interest politics might come to power and write laws to keep themselves in power (we saw some of this recently in the Federal shutdown when procedures were passed in Congress to prevent consideration of bills to get government working).

I'm not saying anything new. I'm reminding myself to stay angry and do something about it. I'm not sure what I can do. But speaking out, trying to identify the issues and problems precisely is one thing. Even though bad government hurts the country and people see this many make excuses “Bush was a good leader. He made the bold and decisive step to do something about terrorism. Obama equivocates” where the truth ought to be that Bush was lousy and Obama avoided getting us into something quite messy in Syria (for example).

So, come the next round, people are ready to vote conservative again.

Speaking out is important but not only to other liberals. It's important to be open to all—liberal and conservative—so that we speak out to all and not just to those with whom we agree.