> “The challenges we face are big, but our politics are small,” Mr. Cruddas said. “We have stopped asking ourselves the important question Bobby Kennedy asked. What makes life worthwhile?”
This is the real problem. I can't imagine any current politician giving a speech like the one quoted in the article. Politics today is not about "How do we make our country as good as possible?". Instead politicians only care about "How do I get my party to win and make the other party look bad?"
I find it ironic that the New York Times followed this up with "RFK was right, we DO need more jobs." Personally I'm rooting for 'full unemployment'.
Everyone should read Galbraith's "the Affluent Society". Our economy is built on scarcity; we couple productivity to consumption (thus, we need jobs because we need to have money so we can buy things so we have jobs). This is idiotic, especially when we don't have scarcity any more. It's very likely humanity is productive enough to give everyone a high standard of living, but our economics don't permit it. We're too busy redistributing income upwards.
Basic income seems a way out, at first. But a post-scarcity economy should be fundamentally different. This likely means getting rid of some forms of property; this won't be easy.
>This is idiotic, especially when we don't have scarcity any more.
We are nowhere near living in a post-scarcity world - a world isn't possible anyway (assuming an earth based society) because there is a finite amount of resources such as land, water, minerals, ect.
> We are nowhere near living in a post-scarcity world
I agree that we're not near living in a post-scarcity society, but not necessarily because of technical limitations. Humans don't need infinite amounts of land, water, minerals, etc.
The biggest problem is that a scarcity-based economy hinders the development of a post-scarcity society, by creating artificial scarcity.
Humans don't need it, but they want it. Everyone wants a bigger or fancier house, a bigger car, to travel more cheaply, to travel further(space tourism anyone?), etc.
There is plenty of land, water, minerals, etc. We just need to use it efficiently. Agriculture needs to go, for example. This is not impossible on Earth. As for whether we are post-scarcity, our productive capacity is high enough to give everyone a decent life - global GDP per capita is $13,000. We just need to organize to achieve this.
Humans have been doing agriculture for 10's of 1000's of years. Simply stating, "Well, that just has to go, period." without explanation (and then moving on from there) is cute, and ridiculous.
We're basically tapped out in terms of arable land usage; you should look at the numbers some time, they are alarming (I recommend the FAO's "Livestock's Long Shadow"). Meanwhile, the energy budget of the planet exceeds by many orders of magnitude what is required to satisfy the meager energy needs of humans. What we need to do is stop dispersing our energy consumption through soil, plant matter, cow intestines, etc., before it gets to humans.
That's only valid if people would consume infinitely. There's clearly enough dirt and oxygen on earth that we can give it away, even though there's a finite amount of it.
There is, however, an infinite amount of information, which is basically free to copy and transmit anywhere in the world. So to the extent that our lives exist on the internet, we are already living in a post-scarcity world.
And considering that robots already took all the agriculture and manufacturing jobs, and we're supposedly split between "knowledge workers" and "service workers", I'd say the problem of automation taking our jobs still has a long way to go.
Rhetoric is tuned to the sensibilities of the time. We live in a much more cynical time with much lower public faith in government: http://www.people-press.org/2014/11/13/public-trust-in-gover... (75% versus about 20-25%). Which is ironic because we had more to be cynical about back then. After all, JFK was a rapist, and his FBI director was trying to get MLK to kill himself.
It's entirely a function of economics. When JFK gave speeches, the U.S. was on the top of a world in which all its competitors had bombed each other to pieces. When Obama gives a speech, it's in a world where U.S. blue collar jobs have fled to China and Mexico. Idealism just rings hollow under those circumstances.
We live in a much more cynical time with much lower public faith in government
It also just so happens that one of the main parties in the US has been working tirelessly for the last 40 years to make sure that faith in government is lowered. I believe it's their overarching strategy to get people to disconnect from politics, so they can rule the roost. What other reason for their party's popularity, when the party policies are not in the best interest of those voting for it?
The point Rayiner was making wasn't partisan. None of us can possibly be well served by recapitulating this endlessly tedious US political sharks/jets argument on HN.
I read your comment this way: what I wrote wasn't wrong, it's just not welcome here on HN. The problem with this: smart and/or good people have for too long taken themselves out of the fray and the result is a debased public discourse.
I was merely trying to point out the cause of one aspect of the original post.
The role switches based on who controls the White House so you cannot attribute that to one party or the other but should attribute it to both.
However, do not confuse the national parties and the Washington establishment with local Democrats and Republicans. The local level politicians usually are much more responsive to the needs of their constituents.
Didn't local Republican government refuse Obamacare money because, well, it was Obamacare?
I think your statements are not in line with the facts, not by far. State Republican governments are often more beholden to corporate interests than even the federal party. They often fall in line with federal level ideological ploys as well (eg. banning gay marriage), so they're no better on that front.
Regarding "rape", perhaps Google [mimi alford]; it comes close.
His overall point was to contrast the actual behavior of elected officials with the mores of the time. Compare the epic freak-out over Clinton and Lewinsky to the reverence people have for JFK.
> And yet Alford demurred when friends later characterized her first experience with JFK as rape. “I don’t see it that way,” she wrote. After all, she hadn’t told him to stop. From her perspective, she added, “Resistance was out of the question.”
How do you consent when the power dynamic is such that you feel like "resistance was out of the question?"
Given the power imbalance between men and women in the US up to the 1970s — remember that women were still being sterilized by court order in the 1970s for having children without having a husband — I feel like the question of consent at the time was pretty dodgy in very many cases that involved people of opposite sexes. Which of course is what feminists of the time were (metaphorically!) lambasted for saying, that all heterosexual sex was a sort of rape, because even if a woman was intentionally saying yes, her ability to say no was always limited. Obviously this goes in spades when we’re talking about JFK and not just your grabby teenage boyfriend.
I think things have gotten considerably better since then.
Things have gotten considerably better. Read that NYT article. As recently as 1994 we were debating whether sex without consent but without use of force was rape or not.
Obama's rhetoric was uniformly and unironically idealistic during the 2008 campaign. I can't pinpoint when it changed, but he really fooled a lot of people into dropping their cynicism.
It's not about fooling people. It's about the fact that it's a lot easier to be idealistic when you don't have to interact with the realities of governing.
It has never been. Parties or other representatives will represent (or claim to represent) their backers, not everyone. The more important the backers are the more they will influence the politicians. If there are two parties, one represents everyone equally and the other provides you slightly more advantage than to others, then you will (normally) vote for the latter.
You should _always_ look at politics from the game theoretical and/or evolutionary perspective. (Read 'The Dictators' Handbook').
There's certainly a lot of truth in that, but for whatever reason -- game theoretic or otherwise -- I would practically fall out of my chair if I heard a president today say stuff like what's quoted at the top of this article. Even if it was just politics, it's clear to me that the bar for political speech has dropped considerably.
It is our own fault: we no longer vote for idealism. And the other party will just drag you through the mud if you try to run on something like "hope."
The guy who ran on "hope" was elected President twice, and then continued doing the same things his predecessor did that we "hoped" that he would stop.
I didn't feel that way. Obama is just the president, not a dictator whatever the republicans would like us to believe. But he did getone thing important done in a term that was otherwise quite lacking in oppurtunities.
He had the power to roll back, or at least stop using, the executive powers that Bush established. Instead, he expanded them, to the point of personally authorizing the extrajudicial killing of American citizens overseas.
Can you imagine how it would have went if he didn't do that? I mean, ya, sucky choice, but when the Republicans are ready to pounce on him for being weak on national security ("see we told you Obama was a weak"), I see how it is hard to go backwards.
If there is one thing Americans hate more than they gov killing Americans abroad, its Americans getting killed by terrorists at home. Ya, this is a very abstract threat, but politics revolves around it.
> It is our own fault: we no longer vote for idealism.
We who?
> And the other party will just drag you through the mud if you try to run on something like "hope."
A pretty much immutable property of the two-party system in the US has been -- from day one -- that the other side will drag you through the mud for whatever you say. Whether it is idealistic or pragmatic or anything else.
The idea that this is somehow new is, well, historically blind.
I believe that's incorrect, although I cannot find the article that I read recently: One of the oddities of modern America is that one party promotes idealism strongly (or it's antagonistic synonym, ideology, if you like) and many Americans strongly identify themselves (and vote) by idealism. The other party has been more pragmatic, and apparently a significant majority of Americans like the specific policies. A chunk of them just don't vote for their preferred policies.
Not really, but pragmatism, rather than idealism, would be a better idea. Most of the time, people believe in ludicrous promises and take the candidate as a just and incorruptible individual.
One would be better off looking at what candidates and their backers truthfully represent.
The key to rhetoric isn't that you have to be correct, its that you have to prove that the other person is wrong(or incompetent). Thus, we have the ad hominem attacks that are so prevalent
> I can't imagine any current politician giving a speech like the one quoted in the article.
You don't have to imagine... if you like, you could listen to them all day. They hire speechwriters who author stirring oration, and not even just during campaign season.
No one bothers to listen. Ignorance? A disdain for becoming informed?
I actually think that it's we all know how hollow their words are. How conditional and revocable their not-really-promises are. How many excuses they have ready when nothing changes.
This is the real problem. I can't imagine any current politician giving a speech like the one quoted in the article. Politics today is not about "How do we make our country as good as possible?". Instead politicians only care about "How do I get my party to win and make the other party look bad?"