What I find unusual is the nobody from the loner gun nut crooning over his weapons collection to the Black Lives Matter activist organizing campus protest, thinks the system is working, nobody. The two presidential candidates with the greatest voter enthusiasm are both running against a political system including their own respective parties which, they charge, isn't getting the job done. Neither one is thought to have a chance of being elected.
The initial thought I had about your comments was "yes, there's a lot of situational irony there." Immediately after thinking that, however, I realized that the irony is but a smokescreen for the real irony being of the tragic variety.
I think what's going on is that people allow themselves to be told what to think, and not knowing how to think, or bothering to (due to time constraints, information overload, apathy, ignorance, presumed political impotence, etc.) if they do know how, connect themselves with an ideology that, on the face of things, seems generally consistent with how they want to perceive themselves. The outcome of that is that people not only do what they are supposed to do -- trust the elected leaders of the republic to do their best and do so with integrity, that is, let leaders lead -- but also they allow leaders to lead them in the analysis and choice of whom to elect to be the leaders. People allow themselves to be pandered to.
When voters let that happen, the result is that the people and interests that truly "give a damn" about what happens and how things happen, and who are also willing to make sure it does, willing to do what it takes to have their way, are able to successfully obfuscate the reality and recast to the detriment of the pandered to, all the while the manipulators' fortunes rise, and the pandered to are left disappointed yet again and still complaining as before that "the system is broken."
I don't think the system is broken. I think it works exactly as the people controlling it want it to. It works just as they have manipulated it to work. Why do I think this? Well, mainly just from what I've observed re: the correlation between some folks' economic position and their political preferences.
I come across a pretty wide variety of folks, but not especially huge quantities of folks, and with about some 50 or so of them, I occasionally have political discussions with them. Some of those folks could easily be Republicans or Democrats, and I understand that, and I don't have a thing to say about which party they prefer; they'll make out just fine regardless of which party controls things at any given time. They may be a little better off with one or the other party running the show, but in the scheme of things, their life's not going to be materially different either way. That's clear to me and to them. Among the folks in that group, some of them vote based on what they think is best for the nation, that is, best for others in general, and some of them vote based on what works best for them personally.
I also know some folks who are Republican, and for the life of me, I swear that their party choice makes no sense at all. For example, a fair number of the working class poor to middle income folks whom I know say they are Republicans. I don't understand that at all. What the heck have Republicans ever done that actually is good for working class people? The folks who most need things to change are supporting the party least interested in changing the status quo. I mean really; at the most basic level, that's what it means to be conservative.
Some of these folks have said to me they vote Republican because they are pro-life. This as some of them (as individuals or as a couple) can hardly afford to just be pregnant, let alone actually raise a child, or another child. But they have that one idea in their mind -- pro-life -- that is so important to them that they'd sooner vote for a candidate who is going to foster the aims of the very organizations and interests that have no real interest in them except what they can get out of them. It's tantamount to cutting off their nose to spite their face. I don't criticize them for their views; I just know they won't go far in life overall, not because they lack ability, but because they refuse to see the entirety of their own circumstances. The very folks whom I would expect to vote for their own and their kids' self interest, the folks who can reliably expect that nobody is going to do a damn thing on their behalf and thus must vote to elect someone who'll give them a fair shot, don't. I don't get it.
I also come by folks who are doing well; they aren't the X% of the 1% folks I first mentioned, but are getting on quite well in terms of earnings. Yet a good number of these folks are just one catastrophe (or near catastrophe) away from ruin, and they yet are keen on the Democrats. They are folks who have good jobs and whose livelihood depends on the fortunes of corporate America. These are the very folks whom I'd expect to be Republican because fiscal conservatism is exactly what is going to move them from "teetering on the edge" to joining the ranks of the "quite secure."
It's the "strange" political affiliations that I see among "regular folks," and all the groups I've described are comprised almost entirely of "regular folks," that makes me think that it's the polity that's "broken," not the system. To achieve one's own betterment -- economic, social, whatever -- one has to have a clear picture of what one's own situation is and what is the intended outcome of the various individuals whom one empowers as leaders. The system isn't going to tell one what either of those things are. It wasn't designed to do that.
The sytem is designed to allow and give well informed, bright people who have a track record of success the opportunity to vote for the person whom they believe will best represent their interests. When our nation was founded, whom was given the right to vote? White male landowners. And what distinguished that segment of society from all the others? White male landowners were the folks who had the brains and education to critically evaluate matters, in large part because they were the people who were given an education (however they came by it) and who had the resources to exert political influence.
Our nation has evolved so that one need not be white, male or a landowner to exert influence, but the influence one can exert is limited largely to one's vote. If one also isn't well educated, well informed and willing to use those two things to critically assess one's own position and that of aspiring political leaders, one is consigned to letting things happen rather than making things happen. Well, if one does that, one is hardly likely to find the things happening are what one would have wanted. What will happen is what someone else wants, and one will be left griping about broken systems and just complaining in general. Isn't that about where we are in this country? Surprise!
