Americans' faith in institutions has been sliding for years. The chaos in Congress isn't helping
Americans' faith in institutions has been sliding for years. The chaos in Congress isn't helping
For many Americans, the Republican dysfunction that has ground business in the U.S. House to a halt as two wars rage abroad and a budget crisis looms at home is feeding into a longer-term pessimism about the country’s core institutions.
Remember, this is absolutely by design. The elite want to remove government as a protector of the people, and they’ve been doing extremely well at that by corrupting our politicians and undermining our elections process.
What you’re seeing is a coordinated attack against the working class by the elite: destroy trust in elections, corrupt politicians, attack unions, prevent uniting in protest (by buying out and tanking social media, such as Twitter and Reddit). Not to mention continued slave wages issues, ‘gig economy’ over being considered an employee, the fight against social medicine and continuing to attach healthcare to employment. Attacking WFH when data shows that it positively affects productivity, at the expense of managerial control.
The attack on public education, the constant increases to rent, the refusal to permit student loan cancelation combined with skyrocketing costs of further education?
And the republicans want to cry about raising taxes on the extremely… ultra… ungodly rich? While they’re actively destroying and enslaving the working class?
It’s disgusting.
Most of it isn't particularly coordinated, albeit still by design.
It's the nature of capitalists to want to keep their workers relatively ignorant and distrustful. This translates to many disparate plans that all tend to have the same outcome. Occasionally the capitalists hold hands as they run rough-shod over the "little people", but for the most part they're in it for themselves. Any alliances or coordinated efforts are opportunistic, not endemic.
I don't disagree with you, but our institutions were designed at a time when messages traveled at the speed of a horse and 90% of the population were growing food for everyone. While there has been a concerted effort to undermine our institutions, they're also old and there might be better
Of course, this means a Constitutional Convention, and because those rules were written hundreds of years ago it will also give land more representation than people, and we'll probably end up with something worse than what we have.
Ronald Reagan looked straight at the camera and said that government was the problem. Now his heirs are shocked- SHOCKED- that they have no idea what to do.
I know a lot of folks are going to say corpos want to destroy the government so they can have free reign, but I think that's a bit naive. Corpos need the government. You see, the government as it is right now is completely captured, it protects corpos. It protects their interests. It protects their homes, their money, their assets. It doesn't protect me or you, no, definitely not (unless you're very wealthy).
My point is, their rampant corruption is causing the very thing that will lead to their own downfall, in time. By corrupting the government so much, they're inadvertently leading everyone to loathe it. When the people eventually destroy the government due to desperation, there will be nothing left to protect those corpos in the ensuing chaos. For some, it won't matter, their dozen-some-odd houses across the globe will provide redundant sanctuary options. But many of those empires' home bases will lie in ruin, and I'm sure foreign countries/rivals will jump on them in the aftermath once the US won't be around to protect them with unfair treaties.
To me, this is poetic irony. Terrifying, but poetic nonetheless.
When you look at their goals for what they're trying to do, they do want the government to protect their interests, and nothing else. They want an army and a police force, and everything else the government does they want dismantled. To accomplish the latter they must convince the public that the government is bad and can't help them. That's why the government always does little enough and less that's helpful whenever Republicans take power.
You just summed up why capitalism will always eat itself.
Mission accomplished. Grover Norquist declared this goal many years ago. You can't shrink the government if people have faith in it. That's what every Republican since Reagan has been working toward, and we're seeing the fruits of their labor.
Sliding for years? It's gone. It's been that way. It's mostly rich people fighting to keep institutions, any institution, and blaming millennials or gen z for the fall of those institutions, when it was their corruption that caused it the whole time.
Id say it is helping. It's helping us not trust institutions which is good because many of them aren't trustworthy right now. I haven't been to Missouri in decades but I'm feeling a bit of that "Show me" vibe. Show me why I should trust you again. Until then...
This is all by design. Wanna do away with government, get elected and fuck it.
Make "the government doesn't work" your campaign promise and somehow both monopolistic corporations and homophobic lunatics will be on your side.
Hopefully they have faith in the institutions that these politicians need to be committed to.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
WASHINGTON (AP) — For many Americans, the Republican dysfunction that has ground business in the U.S. House to a halt as two wars rage abroad and a budget crisis looms at home is feeding into a longer-term pessimism about the country’s core institutions.
Part of that business, he said, is approving money for Ukraine to continue its fight against Russia’s invasion, something he says ultimately helps the U.S. — a point President Joe Biden stressed Thursday during an Oval Office address.
Multiple AP-NORC polls from earlier this year find that the dearth of confidence is pervasive, spreading to organized religion, the government’s intelligence gathering and diplomatic agencies, as well as financial institutions.
David Bateman, an associate professor of government at Cornell University, said the tea party movement during former President Barack Obama’s term was the beginning of a steadier decline in confidence, as noted in polling from Gallup.
But Bateman believes the most acute problem in recent years has been Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, despite dozens of courts rejecting his claims and multiple audits and reviews in the swing states where he disputed his loss.
“The biggest threat to trust in institutions was the Trump campaign’s refusal to concede the election and insistence that they had won,” along with a large segment of the Republicans in Congress going along with the claim in the certification process, Bateman said.
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Of course. The point is not to disregard malice at all times. It's to make sure you're not dealing with simple incompetence before you land on malice as the root cause.
Sliding?
No, I completely lost faith in the satire that is the federal government right around the time that the Democrats rigged Bernie out of the primary win.
The Party is selfish, greedy, and completely incompetent. Been that way for a long time.