[vundercind]

1) A bad system of elections that tends to result in only two viable parties that substantially differ in policy positions from their own voters. Our system of elections drives that outcome.

2) Cowardice. Being personally punished (say, by losing an election) for problems caused by too much spying or too much military spending or too much surveillance is vanishingly unlikely. Being punished because something bad happens and maybe that thing you voted against would have prevented it? That’s possible.

3) Probably blackmail campaigns by various law enforcement and spy agencies, aimed at politicians. I very much doubt that sort of thing stopped after Hoover was gone, or that the FBI was the only agency to engage in it. I guess the “how we got here” for this part is failing to aggressively dismantle the whole tainted edifice and start from scratch back when that was feasible, and failure to keep those agencies on an extremely tight leash.

[lapcat]

> Being punished because something bad happens and maybe that thing you voted against would have prevented it? That’s possible.

Do you have any examples of this? Nobody was politically punished for allowing 9/11 to happen. There are countless examples of bad things happening for which nobody was politically punished. As far as I see, there's an almost complete lack of consequences in politics.

[NegativeLatency]

4) The amount of money and corruption in politics means that the people who are better at sucking up to donors end up winning. These people are also not really interested in governing, but are interested in accumulating wealth and power.