[losteric]

What about option C: none of the above.

I think it ultimately boils down to civic engagement, or lack thereof. Democracy is not a state of being, it is a system that requires perpetual participation to maintain.

Casting a vote every 4, 2, or even every year is not engagement. Participating in the primaries is minimum engagement.

Yet for the past 20 years American voter turnout for Presidential elections has held steady at roughly 50%. Dismal. The primary participation numbers are much worse.

America struggles with a massive burden of "civic debt" - disengaged citizens that are not actively participating in the democratic system. People that don't read current events, don't follow the news, don't talk to their representatives, and ultimately embody the polar opposite of an "informed electorate"... these people contribute taxes and tacitly grant the system power, but they do not hold it accountable for improving their lives.

When people engage, our representatives are held accountable for delivering results in accordance with our values. Perhaps some inefficiency is acceptable, perhaps not... but the decision lies with those that engage in the system. It's up to the people to drive change.

---

That said, I agree there are merits to reducing the levels of government to their minimum responsibilities, but I just don't believe that fewer levels of governance helps with the issue of uninformed electorate. A Republic is just as vulnerable to apathy as any other form of governance.

[DickingAround]

I don't think we can ever expect that level of engagement. People don't engage because the ROI just isn't there. When America first became independent it was a much smaller body; their votes and conversations mattered. I did some calcs once and it would have been like voting along with 4 sq miles of Chicago. Now, voting with tens or hundreds of millions of others, there's just no incentive to be involved. It might be a democracy in name, but none of what it does has anything to do with my vote.

[losteric]

I used the term "debt" very intentionally. You're talking about return on investment... I'm saying we aren't invested, we're in debt. We must pay back the debt before we see any returns.

No one's going to wave a magic wand and fix America. It took decades of apathy to get here, it's going to take years of work to clean up this mess and regain control.

We have to start with this year's local elections, and next year's midterms.

[jdavis703]

What about at the local level? People barely know what their councils and mayors are up to.

[cookiecaper]

Most of these problems are related to the emergence of the federated mass media that seriously changed the way people received information and shared ideas.

The American Revolution was, in no small part, sparked by one man's widely circulated pamphlet. As radio and TV with extremely high production values became dominant and the accepted standard, the relative credibility of a pamphlet from some guy you've never heard of before plummeted. People could still self-publish and make small runs, but when contrasted with the professional output from a slick media company, there's no contest as to which report your average person would be more likely to accept.

Media has been in corporate control for the last 100 years or so. Why is the draconian extent of our intellectual property regime widely despised and mocked by those lucky enough to be clued in to its absurdity, yet almost never discussed in the news? Because the small handful of companies with a TV studio and an FCC license have a vested interest in keeping the curtain drawn on the Great and Powerful Oz. They don't risk attempting a propaganda backfire on the topics they're really worried about; they just refuse to discuss them, and for the last 100 years, that's been enough to make counter-corporate effectively silent.

As mass media and telecommunication via phones made it feasible to communicate with people across the country in a matter of minutes, people sort of stopped seeing why they needed to go to a local authority (who could easily be overruled by other competing local authorities) when they could go straight to the highest authority. Combine this with the fact that the highest production values and most recognizable faces were covering the national beats, and that local news outlets can't go more finite than the state and sometimes county level for practical reasons, and you have a recipe for a populace that knows nothing about their immediate political leaders.

The internet has democratized mass media and given a credible voice back to the little, non-corporate guy, after 100 years lost in the darkness. And that really makes the corporate propagandists mad.

A lot of problems today flow out from struggling with and trying to learn how to handle the closeness that has been afforded by things like instant telecommunications and fast, reliable interstate transportation across the sky and the nation's highways. One non-political example: neighborliness is going away (as is socialization in general).

In former times, people relied on their neighbors and neighborhood because they had to. You couldn't exist in a physical space without having a moral responsibility to it and the people around it. Now that everyone's friends and families live in their pockets, "neighborly" relations, in the classical sense, are disappearing. My family and I have lived in half-a-dozen different places over our marriage so far, and in each case, we've never had a nextdoor neighbor come introduce themselves or welcome us to the neighborhood. And to be fair, we've never done this as neighbors have moved in and out around us either.

tl;dr Mass media, shipping, and telephones made it so people only needed to care about federal level anymore.