Comment by Gormo
1 hour ago
It's amazing how you've managed to position "politicians were pursuing their own hidden agendas and then lying about it" as a desirable state of affairs.
It sounds like they were defrauding people into giving them donations under false pretenses, and the transparency measures were effective at mitigating that.
There's quite a lot of strange bias in your comment: the unjustified disjunction between "constituents" and "donors", the concept of a "donor class" as some singular bloc rather than an arbitrary aggregation of anyone who donates on behalf on all sides of all issues, the idea that donations are more important than the actual votes, etc.
> It sounds like they were defrauding people into giving them donations under false pretenses, and the transparency measures were effective at mitigating that.
There are no pretenses in political giving (at least at the U.S. federal level), because it is illegal to tie a donation to a particular position, vote, or action by the politician. It’s called a quid pro quo and is the test for whether a donation is a bribe.
In the U.S. the political system is based on people, not positions or policy. Donations to a politician are to the person. It’s not a proxy for buying an outcome.
In practice, of course people are going to support politicians who they like and think agree with them. But under the law, a politician can’t rip you off by taking your money and then voting contrary to your desires.
Which makes the initial promise to vote a certain way in exchange for donations itself illegal. That seems fine. So what is the problem with transparency, again?
What initial promise? You’ve fabricated something that was not in the comment you replied to.
2 replies →
My read was that the people who are getting fleeced aren’t paying enough attention.
That seems like an assumption, and a counterintuitive one: wouldn't you expect someone getting "fleeced" by the political system to be motivated to pay attention due to that very fact?
If you have a system of open transparency, then everyone who is motivated to pay attention has the means to do so. If they're not paying attention, it means they're not sufficiently motivated, and are choosing not to pay attention, not being constrained artificially.
This seems to be converging to some sort of "false consciousness" argument, where someone speculatively projects motivations and intentions onto other parties, then criticizes those other parties for not acting in accordance with the motivations strangers have projected onto them.
Needless to say, these sorts of arguments are utterly disingenuous, and in this case, somewhat ironic, because the people arguing that outcomes should conform to their speculative ideologies -- even in defiance of what the public themselves are manifestly choosing -- are themselves special interests trying to exert their own influence over politics.
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