Mr Khan said:
On the former point, that's deliberate, because its an easy way to guarantee votes and distract people from the economic issues. Democrats get by with race-baiting because it allows them to lock down the Black and Latino votes without having to produce much in the way of results for either community, and Republicans happily indulge that by pandering (unconsciously) to the racist impulses of middle America, which means that very few blacks consider jumping ship, while helping lock in votes from white American suspicions of "the other." Other wedge issues work on both sides, like guns, gays, and abortion, each one a very small part of the world we live in (the big picture stuff is the economy and the environment), but they are easy vote getters because they allow people to vote "brain-off" and go with what their gut tells them (gay marriage is fine, i love my guns, unborn babies shouldn't be killed, etc). Essentially, if we removed the wedge issues, both parties would be forced to work much harder for votes, as groups like the blacks would start to question why black households are still so much poorer than white households despite 50 years of Democrat promises, or why poor rural whites who rely on medicaid and food stamps to survive are voting for people who want nothing better than to eviscerate medicaid and foodstamps, and are voting for these people because "the democrats are gonna snatch my guns." Wedge issues make some demographics into political supplicants, while it makes other demographics actively vote against their own interests. On the latter point, there is still a lot that can be done to alleviate future climate change by continuing the push away from fossil fuels. Climate change is also only one part of the environmentalist docket. |
I would say voters who vote only for their own interest are enemies of democracy, although there's not much you can do about it besides denounce it and discourage it, because it's their right to do so if they want to. If you vote for your own needs, not only does political machinery deadlock, but discussion stagnates. It doesn't matter how much we disagree on policies, if we both vote for the good of the citizenry, we can sit down and have a civil discussion because we have like interests. If we vote for ourselves, we don't have like interests. In fact, they're mutually exclusive.
Of course, this could go too far, too. If your vote ever boils down to utterly ruining yourself, democracy failed long before you got to the voting booth.
Wedge demographics is just the voter half of the issue. Voters make these shortcuts because 1) parties have stopped offering candidates who deviate from the party lines, and more importantly 2) politics is now too complicated to follow.
The poster child of this is of course the Healtcare bill. Representitive democracy presupposes that the average voter can make decisions, that they can sit down, read the bill itself, and figure out for themselves if they liked it. You can't do that with a 1,500 page bill, or at least you can't if you have a job or a life. Most people immediately deferred to executive summaries by people who either loved it or hated it, which were in turn summaries by people who either put it together or were looking to poke holes in it. No matter how you cut it, this leads to biased results.
Theoretically, we should be able to trust our representatives to handle the legalese for us, but like I said they're voting for their own interests before ours.
As to the climate change, what I meant is that if that warming graph which shows warming as far back as 150 years ago (when our emissions were microscopic) is not egrigiously misleading, then the CO2 needed to utterly ruin the climate was probably pumped into the atmosphere twenty years ago. It is literally too late.
Of course, I agree that there's plenty we can do, likely because the alarmism IS so exaggerated. It's just a shame that people reach out to politics for this one when the solution thus far has been "build a better light bulb."
