Someone asked me:  If we all agree that our political system is badly broken, why aren’t we fixing it?

There’s a lot of agreement about the problems, gridlock, inability to move forward on issues- gun control, debt ceiling, even a budget, health care.  But to fix them, the parties would have to agree that fixing is in their best interests. And then they’d have to agree on how to fix them. They seem to highly value blaming the other party, so there’s payoff in letting problems persist.

Why are we so willing to be lead over a cliff?  What are we all doing that has us so busy that we stopped being vested?

We don’t want to be led over a cliff.  We are vested.  The problem is that we’re individuals piled in the back of the pickup truck, with no real access to the driver.

Each party seems to be generating a plan to veer off, believing it’ll be easier when the cliff is inevitable.  Plus, each side sees the other’s plan as a worse cliff. The problem is, we the people can’t do anything to stop it.

In a recent poll, over 60% of Americans said the parties are doing such a poor job that a third party is needed. But the way our system is set up, supporting a third party is seen as letting the opposition win, so a third party isn’t possible until we change our voting system, such as to use approval voting. But the parties don’t want to consider that, so there seems to be nothing we can do.

In addition, politics has degenerated to being about philosophy rather than action.  Many want “small government”, but the only concrete proposal I’ve seen is to end the EPA or Planned Parenthood, and Democrats see this as having minuscule fiscal effects but lots of bad consequences. A much bigger win could be ending agricultural subsidies, but the industry puts pressure to keep this out of the debate, and the Congress is more accountable to industry than to us. The military budget is also huge, but there the conservatives and industry work together to keep it high.

When it comes to philosophy, we really do have two sides. But there’s little evidence that people are really split between them on practical issues.

To fix these problems, we can’t just blame people, we need to fix our political system so that as a people we can work together. We need a systemic fix.

I think your premise is flawed because I think the real issue is our own laziness about being involved in politics.

We’ll look at this in tomorrow’s article.