My guess is that things will have to get worse before they can get better, that it's paradoxically easier to democratically overthrow a true dictatorship than the sort of increasingly-oppressive democracy we see in the US.
I say this because most Americans are generally happy with the system. There are aspects they dislike, and lots of results they dislike, but there is still deep respect for the system itself in the people. I think the system may have reached a point where it no longer works well, but it still gives the appearance of doing so.
Dictatorships famously have rigged elections to give the regime the appearance of democracy. However, nobody actually believes it. The dictator wins roughly 99.44% of the vote and everybody knows the election is a sham.
Here, we have pretty decent elections that are mostly fair and well contested, but which ultimately don't accomplish much. We end up choosing between two candidates who have few differences when it comes to how they'll handle civil liberties, elections, third parties, and such. But the vast majority of the population doesn't see it that way, and so the election, and the system as a whole, is seen as legitimate even though it doesn't really work.
Worse, the system manages to control public opinion to perpetuate itself. Most Americans are deeply afraid of terrorism and welcome extreme measures to fight it. Expressing the idea that we should prosecute terrorists as common criminals and accept the occasional mass-casualty attack gets you labeled as a crazy person. This despite the fact that terrorism is a minor threat to our lives compared to almost every other way we can potentially die, even when you restrict it to ways you can die by being killed intentionally by other humans.
Just like elections, the propaganda machine is seen as legitimate, unlike in a dictatorship. In a dictatorship, the state news agency works as a government mouthpiece and nobody believes what they say. In the US, nominally independent media organizations work as mouthpieces of the government but since there are a bunch of them, and they're nominally independent, and they express what appears to be a wide range of views (which is actually only wide within the narrow range of what's considered mainstream), people respect them.
I'm not saying that it's hopeless or that we should give up the fight. But I do think that it's not entirely right to point out successes in overt dictatorships as proof that the current situation in the US can be fixed. I may be wrong, but it is possible that the current situation is good enough to make it far more difficult to actually improve it.
> We end up choosing between two candidates who have few differences when it comes to how they'll handle civil liberties, elections, third parties, and such...
I keep hearing this sentiment, but I think it assumes a lot, so I can't agree with it. Here are some issues I have with this sentiment:
- There has been dramatic change at the national level, the ACA being an obvious example of that.
- To the extent that big changes don't happen, that's due to gridlock, not a lack of choice.
- This gridlock is due to a very divided electorate. No political camp can really claim a supermajority (greater than 65%) of the hearts and minds of the voters. The U.S. government is set up to move slowly when there isn't something nearing consensus.
Also, on another point, the typical citizen is not happy with the government, just tired, apathetic, and fatalist. Happy electorates do not create Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party.
Note that I didn't say the two candidates are the same on everything, only on those certain issues. I agree that there are substantial differences when it comes to things like health care policy, but those are unrelated to civil liberties. I voted for Obama twice partly because of his support for health care reform (even though I don't particularly like his version of it, I think it's the best we can hope for at the moment), but I had no illusions about how he'd handle the post-9/11 security state.
Likewise, gridlock is preventing big changes on certain issues, but not these. There is nearly universal consensus among politicians in both major parties when it comes to civil liberties and things of that nature. How many members of Congress want meaningful electoral reform? How many members of Congress voted to close down Guantanamo Bay? It's not gridlock stopping these things.
And again likewise, there's no real division in the electorate on these issues. There's lots of division over things like tax policy and health care and such, but not much over civil liberties.
> How many members of Congress voted to close down Guantanamo Bay?
Most recently, a majority of the Senate -- almost entirely Democrats, though three Republicans joined -- and 174 members of the House, also mostly on party lines.
So, not exactly the best example of an issue where the parties are aligned.
> It's not gridlock stopping these things.
Well, except that, at least in the case of closing the detention facility at Gitmo, its exactly Republicans in control of the House blocking the position that the Democratic-controlled White House, the Democratic-majority Senate, and Democrats in the House all support.
Do you have a pointer to that most recent vote? Everything I can find has solid majorities of both houses voting against closure or transfers, although it is indeed not as solid as I made it out to be in my previous comment.
I'm not sure how much is a change of opinion and how much of it is an erosion of the decision by Democrats to simply deny the issue to Republicans after the Administration fumbled the political optics (or, arguably, was a victim of deliberate, highly-placed sabotage from within on the political optics) to focus on other areas; if you look at the politics of the 2009 vote, it wasn't that both sides were opposed, it was that the Republicans were opposed and doing a full-spectrum attack, and the Democrats collapsed after the administration -- which was pushing to close Guatanamo -- showed incoherence with the testimony of FBI Director Mueller raising concerns of attacks in America if prisoners were transferred to the US. Even simultaneously with the near unanimous votes to block funding for closing Guatanamo, you see many of the Democrats who voted to block funding saying that they supported closing Guatanamo and would vote for it given a specific closure plan that addressed security concerns.
I think the gaps always been there, but a very specific event threw a monkey wrench in the political viability of the Democrats pursuing what was clearly their preference all along.
> I agree that there are substantial differences when it comes to things like health care policy, but those are unrelated to civil liberties.
The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the individual mandate was constitutional. This was (and is) a highly contested question of civil liberties. The questions about which organizations (if any) should be compelled to pay for coverage for abortions is a civil liberties question as well.
It may be highly contested but it's not highly important. It won't make a particularly big difference, freedom-wise, whether the mandate exists or not.
As long as both major parties remain supportive of indefinite detention without trial, of assassinating Americans without trial, of routinely bombing foreign countries without a declared war or any sort of authorization, of wholesale spying on the American public, of imprisoning people who take the wrong kind of drugs, and so on like that, then stuff like the individual mandate is a sideshow. It's exactly the kind of not-terribly-important issue that's used to make people think that the system works.
The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 on the difference between, basically, the numbers 299 and 301. Everybody, from Congress to the Supreme Court to the news media to the average Joe on the street, acts like 299 is extreme in one direction, 301 is extreme in the other direction, and 300 is the "middle". Meanwhile, the numbers 1-1000 are ignored.
We should be having highly contested questions on the massive abuses being perpetuated by the US government, but instead that energy all gets pumped into little stuff like whether it's OK to make a small extension to the government's power to tax, or whether the punishment for not having health insurance should simply be random bankruptcy and premature death. Don't get me wrong, health reform is an important issue, but it's not an important civil liberties issue.
I say this because most Americans are generally happy with the system. There are aspects they dislike, and lots of results they dislike, but there is still deep respect for the system itself in the people. I think the system may have reached a point where it no longer works well, but it still gives the appearance of doing so.
Dictatorships famously have rigged elections to give the regime the appearance of democracy. However, nobody actually believes it. The dictator wins roughly 99.44% of the vote and everybody knows the election is a sham.
Here, we have pretty decent elections that are mostly fair and well contested, but which ultimately don't accomplish much. We end up choosing between two candidates who have few differences when it comes to how they'll handle civil liberties, elections, third parties, and such. But the vast majority of the population doesn't see it that way, and so the election, and the system as a whole, is seen as legitimate even though it doesn't really work.
Worse, the system manages to control public opinion to perpetuate itself. Most Americans are deeply afraid of terrorism and welcome extreme measures to fight it. Expressing the idea that we should prosecute terrorists as common criminals and accept the occasional mass-casualty attack gets you labeled as a crazy person. This despite the fact that terrorism is a minor threat to our lives compared to almost every other way we can potentially die, even when you restrict it to ways you can die by being killed intentionally by other humans.
Just like elections, the propaganda machine is seen as legitimate, unlike in a dictatorship. In a dictatorship, the state news agency works as a government mouthpiece and nobody believes what they say. In the US, nominally independent media organizations work as mouthpieces of the government but since there are a bunch of them, and they're nominally independent, and they express what appears to be a wide range of views (which is actually only wide within the narrow range of what's considered mainstream), people respect them.
I'm not saying that it's hopeless or that we should give up the fight. But I do think that it's not entirely right to point out successes in overt dictatorships as proof that the current situation in the US can be fixed. I may be wrong, but it is possible that the current situation is good enough to make it far more difficult to actually improve it.