Comment by AnthonyMouse
2 years ago
> The message was "you can't trust X, you can only trust the invisible hand of the market." Systematically, these (mostly right-wing) talking heads have worked through an extensive list of Xes - Government, police, school, courts, vaccines
This is not really a partisan thing. "You can't trust the police" is hardly right-wing. Anti-vax started in the anti-GMO anti-corporate homeopathic organic food subculture. Most of the recent criticism of the courts has been from the left (e.g. outrage over Dobbs).
> IHMO, one place to start might be getting money out of politics. It was a choice to call showering money on politicians, "free speech" instead of corruption.
There is no getting money out of politics. Money is power and power is politics. Notice that most of the criticism of "money in politics" comes from the media, because money is a source of power that competes with media ownership for political influence. "All organizations can influence politics" is not actually worse than "only Fox News, Comcast and Google can influence politics."
What we're really suffering from is an erosion of checks and balances. Capturing enough of the government to enact self-serving legislation was meant to be hard, but we kept chipping away at it because people wanted to do their new law, without considering that the systems preventing it were doing something important.
If you want to restore trust in institutions, you need to structurally constrain those institutions from being crooked.
I don't think your first first statement is supported. Right now one party wants to:
Remove the SEC, the FBI, defund the IRS and the DOJ. And a member of congress is refusing to appoint any leaders of our military. Ostensibly due to a disagreement over abortion, but many believe it is retaliation for the military refusing to support an attempted coup a few years ago. Also there is discrediting all trust in voting and democracy itself after losing a national election (even though the administration's own Attorney General could find no meaningful evidence supporting it following his own nationwide investigation). And then there is the meme of the deep state, namely shorthand than anyone who is a civil servant and not a political appointee is not to be trusted. And I'll stop there as anything else start to get pretty political.
Are there items where the left is against trust in society? Absolutory. You called out a few (specifically the police), and the makeup of the courts. As well as you left out forms of de facto power the left typically opposes like board rooms and lending (vs de jure power listed above).
But to say that both sides/parties are against trust in American society in my opinion is either a false argument, or tunnel vision in news sources.
There is still no comparison between the two and the level of distrust in all aspects of society the right has been consistently seeding into broader society.
> Right now one party wants to:
> Remove the SEC, the FBI, defund the IRS and the DOJ.
There is negligible chance of actually eliminating these federal agencies, and even if that was the position of the entire party, you're just talking about a policy position.
If you brought in James Madison and he said that we shouldn't have a federal IRS because the government programs it funds are the role of the states, that wouldn't be any evidence that he is opposed to institutions, it's just a question of which institution should serve that role.
> And a member of congress is refusing to appoint any leaders of our military. Ostensibly due to a disagreement over abortion, but many believe it is retaliation for the military refusing to support an attempted coup a few years ago.
Which wouldn't work. If you were trying to retaliate against some specific military leaders, you can't do it by refusing to appoint some entirely different ones. If you were trying to retaliate against a bureaucracy as a whole, the way to do it is to reduce their budget.
Meanwhile we have the obvious motive that opportunistic politicians will do anything they think will get them on television regardless of whether it otherwise makes any sense or serves any purpose.
> Also there is discrediting all trust in voting and democracy itself after losing a national election (even though the administration's own Attorney General could find no meaningful evidence supporting it following his own nationwide investigation).
For this to fit your argument they would have had to do this with the purpose of discrediting the voting system. The most obvious motive for that would be to bolster support for their proposals for in-person voting requirements and voter ID etc.
Maybe they have an ulterior motive for wanting these things, but it's hard to argue that they wouldn't increase trust in the voting system. Election security experts broadly agree that optical scan paper ballots are more secure than purely electronic voting systems.
> And then there is the meme of the deep state, namely shorthand than anyone who is a civil servant and not a political appointee is not to be trusted.
This is fundamentally an argument about democracy.
Local governments commonly have separate elected offices for the board of education, the constabulary, the comptroller, even the dogcatcher. Because the US federal government was envisioned to be small and limited in scope, the only elected positions are the general legislature and the Presidential ticket.
Leaving the entirety of the administrative state to unelected officials was never the intention and it's hardly an unreasonable position to be critical of the consequences.
> But to say that both sides/parties are against trust in American society in my opinion is either a false argument, or tunnel vision in news sources.
In general if you think that one party is dramatically worse than the other, it's because of your news sources. The parties agree with each other on almost everything and most of the points of contention are drenched with hyperbole.
These are not angels and demons, they're human politicians representing different constituencies.