If you want to know why the United States is such a screwed up country, William Cooper writes, don't blame the politicians. Blame the people who put them there:
Data from Google Trends — the search giant’s tool for tracking and analyzing Google’s search statistics — shows that Americans have a stunning indifference to public policy and, at the same time, a gross infatuation with triviality. It’s no surprise, then, that our elected officials are frequently incompetent and our governance often poor.
Consider a few examples:
Take, first, a comparison between Americans’ interest in the multi-trillion dollar federal budget and in reality television. The United States budget reflects our national values and measures our global impact. Given its size and scope, the budget materially alters billions of lives both at home and abroad.
Google Trends shows, however, that Americans care far more about the inconsequential happenings of strangers than they do about how our trillions are deployed. There is, for example, tremendously more interest in the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills than in the Office of Management and Budget, the executive agency that oversees budgetary spending – peaking at over ten times the interest when the housewife drama gets juicy.
Even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell — a key player in the government’s fiscal response to the coronavirus — gets unceremoniously brushed aside when The Bachelorette is in season — typically peaking at roughly 25-50 times more interest in The Bachelorette.
A second example of the staggering disconnect between what Americans are interested in and what matters is a comparison between the Kardashian family (Kim, Kylie, Kanye and the gang) and Africa (the entire continent). Despite making great progress in recent decades, Africa continues to have widespread and profound challenges including preventable hunger, economic distress, and child mortality.
Yet Americans care far more about the Kardashians than all of the countries in Africa.
Additional examples abound. There’s Meghan Markel (the wife of England’s Prince Harry) versus Boris Johnson (the country’s prime minister). Justin Smollett (at the peak of the previously little-known actor’s fake-battery scandal) versus China (yes, China). Deflategate (Tom Brady’s deflated-football controversy) versus the Federal Reserve (yes, the Fed).
So is it any wonder that a reality TV star is president? Americans focus -- or don't focus -- on the same things Donald Trump does.
Image: everythingsproblematic.wordpress.com
10 comments:
I think that's a facile notion. The breakdown in the connection between the public and their elected officials can't be written off to public indifference or some obsession with celebrity. People who are worried, people who live with uncertainty in precarious circumstances aren't indifferent. If they don't engage isn't it more likely that they're disaffected?
They know their government doesn't work for them. That left them so desperate a good many voted for Trump, enough to hand him the White House.
The public didn't corrupt their government. They public didn't create their "bought and paid for" Congress. The public didn't corrupt the judiciary. The public didn't corrupt the executive. All of those evils were legislated by elected representatives who represent, not the public interest, by powerful special interests. As Stiglitz so powerfully demonstrates, inequality today is neither market nor merit-based. It is legislated.
The public has ceased to exist as some collective entity. It has been rather skillfully divided across many fault lines, each group and sub-group set against another. The reason that has been done is to mute the vox populi, to render it powerless. The resulting transition from liberal democracy to oligarchy is almost effortless.
The writer, Mr. Cooper, is no plebian. He's of an order where it suits Higher Purpose Persons to deflect blame onto the afflicted. I find his kind rather disgusting.
I agree that the move to autocracy is top-down, Mound. But what disturbs me deeply is that so many of us have drunk the Kool-Aide. Where we live, tourists have arrived in the thousands. They defy rules about wearing masks and they urinate and defecate on people's lawns.
Corruption at the top has become normal. Perhaps that's because people have given up. One thing is certain: If corruption has become acceptable, we're doomed.
Jeebus, I just read my comment (for the very first time). I must proofread. Sorry.
I have been deeply troubled by the deterioration of social cohesion in recent decades. I remember an earlier time when conservatives and liberals could disagree constructively. It afforded an opportunity to accommodate the other even as one side prevailed and the other lost.
How we came to treat every difference as an affront escapes me. We use legitimate differences as a cudgel in a greater culture war where grievances simmer but rarely does anything get resolved. Everything gets politicized: medical issues such as this pandemic, environmental issues such as climate breakdown, social issues such as inequality.
Do you share this sense that we're losing our ability to respond to the great issues of the day? Climate science has been an urgent reality since at least as far back as Chretien yet we still have not formulated a coherent plan that would direct successive governments, Conservative and Liberal. It's a recipe for catastrophe but failure has become our reality.
I truly do believe that we've lost a sense of perspective, Mound. We fight small battles and are overtaken by the massive forces arrayed against us. What is the good of besting your neighbor on your tax return, if the planet is burning up?
A very interesting post and exchange between you and the Mound, Owen. I watch American news each night for a half-hour, and my bemusement at how far they have fallen is constant. Maybe people never had a lot of concentration or interest in the important things happening around them, but the acceleration toward trivialization and factionalism has definitely accelerated over the last few election cycles. My own addition to this discussion is hardly profound or original, but the power of social media to cultivate and exacerbate pettiness and divisions surely contributes this phenomenon.
Language has power, Lorne. It can be used to enlighten. It can be used as a weapon. Sometimes -- I am ashamed to admit -- I have used it as the latter. A great deal of what is going on these days is the weaponization of language.
Despite our technological advances, I fear that we no longer live in an Age of Enlightenment. Perhaps we never did.
"Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups." There's another that goes with it. "No one is more dangerous than a moron with an agenda."
Humans swarm. That's why we are occasionally called sheep.
But, yes, Mound's right; we have been seduced.
We have been seduced, Toby. And we should have known better.
The Disaffected Lib said...
I think that's a facile notion. The breakdown in the connection between the public and their elected officials can't be written off to public indifference or some obsession with celebrity.
I beg to differ.
The US electorate have more interest in who wins or loses than the substance of issues of which they would seem to be ill informed.
They are riveted to polls and opinion makers on the MSM.
As with much of the western world they seem addicted to and torn apart by allegiances to political parties , celebrity and indifference to the rest of the world.
FWIW; it seems odd to be writing an obituary to the USA.
TB
That best of American writers, Mark Twain, knew that obituaries could be written prematurely, TB. However, unless Americans are riveted by things substantial -- not hot air salesmanship -- they could find themselves with another Trump, who is smarter and more dangerous.
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