I am reading Woodward and Bernstein's All the President's Men. It is okay. I know the story, and I keep seeing Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. It just does not compare to Jurassic Park. Truth might be stranger than fiction, but it is not necessarily more entertaining.
I had a professor in college point to the fact that Nixon won the 1972 election in a landslide. He proposed that for most of the Vietnam War, the silent majority of Americans supported the war, the silent majority of Americans were conservatives, and the silent majority of Americans appropriately went on with their life pretty oblivious to politics. They knew politics was corrupt but made the conscious decision to get up in the morning and go to work. Eventually Nixon screwed himself and there was a tipping point about him personally, but the silent majority rarely changes.
Similarities between today and then certainly exist. But this silent majority premise still works.
The problem with politics is that the silent majority does not determine candidates. The people who have the time to be politicians, campaign for politicians, lobby politicians, those zealots who do not get up in the morning and go to work decide candidates. This is why in the next election our choices will be between a douche bag and a shit sandwich.
This is not a personal attack on any of the candidates. To be a politician one has to compromise, one has to do things he would rather not. For that matter, to be a good manager or a good graduate student, one has to have aspects of a douche and a shit sandwich. I am not wise enough to know how to escape this situation. When I am, I will surely write about it. But douche bags and shit sandwiches do not represent the silent majority.
The silent majority really does not care about steroids in baseball. The silent majority does not care about who the New England Patriots taped. The silent majority does not think that prostitution should be illegal, but they think that a self-righteous married John deserves all the hell he catches. The silent majority gets up in the morning and goes to work. The silent majority does not care about public opinion or politics. Maybe I should replace the silent majority with I. (I am working on the "goes to work" thing.)
I do know this: the silent majority does not care about this blog.
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2 comments:
The silent majority line of reasoning I think can be used to support any cause. It is especially if effective if the politician is a bad listener. Because I haven't heard or read too much about so and so the public supports me doing it.
Well that is the way Nixon and politicians, including Bush, use it.
But the point is that the vast majority of politics do not matter to the majority. I have never used a hooker. So, prostitution laws do not concern me. I am not directly involved in the Iraq war. I have opinions about poltical (human issues), but I do not think an election will make any progress on those issues. I can fake it sometimes, and spout off how much I dislike Hilary. But I know it doesn't matter. Taxes and big government will always be reality.
A political libertarian is an oxymoron. And I think the majority of Americans are libertarian at heart. They want opportunity to make themselves happy both economically and socially. They really don't care about what others are doing. They do not want hand-outs. They just want the "pursuit of happiness." Now I do think that media and other sources like religion have masked some of these libertarian tendencies, but that is a different discussion.
But here are the two main points I wanted to make:
1. The silent majority does exist. It is all the people who are unaffected by politics. All the people who get up in the morning and go to work. It is like my Dad's employee Ben says "I don't give a shit about the stock market. I don't have anything there. I don't give a shit about the housing market. I don't own a house." Yeah there might be feedback effects, but if Ben doesn't see them, do they exist and are they (economically)significant?
2. Politics has become a side-industry just like construction or financial services or American Idol. It is just another market, just another game full of signals and bullshit. Ben will probably vote like his wife does on American Idol, but like American Idol, I just don't think that the vote will affect his life whatsoever. McCain, Clinton, and Obama are just entrepreneurs or potenital American Idols however you want to look at it.
I wanted to say that a candidate with a libertarian mindset, who was a great marketer, and very rich could be President of the United States one day, but I really don't think this is possible even ignoring the incompatability trinity. And again, there wouldn't be any progress made anyway. Big government and high taxes would still rule the day.
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