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Here's something I've always found to be interesting. I think there's a latent political prior model going on that often interferes with political discussion. Namely: What motivates the people in Congress, individually?
Here's what I feel like is a fairly exhaustive list:
Obviously some of these overlap or could both be true. A few approaches (rank them or something?) but I feel maybe the best is simply to answer the question, "What percentage of people currently in Congress (House and Senate) ran for Congress (most recent election) for this as one of the principal reasons?" Here's my take:
Of course a lot of these can overlap a bit, but that's fine. I'm talking about major reasons to run for office in any given election. (PS: should I have split help people into generally vs some specific group?)
Do you think these are about right? Too charitable? Too cynical? I bring this up because I was recently talking to a friend who his mental model had pegged something like 60% of people in Congress as in it for the money and power. Another friend thinks that 70% are pure partisans (ideological purists). Another thinks it's mostly special interests and corporations. You can see how these can subtly skew opinions about almost any given topic.
Of course, to me, I'm correct of course :)
No but actually, if we think about the process many go to first get involved in politics, there's only a few common paths. There's being an activist of some sort and then you (or supported by an org) run as a logical next step. There's being fed up of some specific status quo and starting to run for something on a local level and then you end up working your way up. There's being wealthy and/or having connections (famous sometimes) and jumping in to something directly. There's being a pure egomaniac and running just for that. And then there's some group of people where you're minding your own business and you get recruited into it. And that's actually most paths into politics. Seems to me that there are better ways to make money, and better ways to spend your time, so I think most people run because they actually want to. Congresspeople aren't aliens, they have similar motivations to you and I, at least I think. How many people that you've talked to who have idly talked about what they would do if they were in charge, have given a corrupt reason to do so?
Envelopes stuffed with cash, and bars of gold.
This led to a debate between me and the friend about if he was caught, and it's just the tip of the iceberg, or he was caught because the police normally catch this kind of thing. You can see how those schemas are very different, haha.
He was a first-generation college student of cuban immigrant parents who became a lawyer and while still in law school I believe he was an aide to a mayor. It looks like he then spent a decade or two in shady and backstabbing New Jersey local politics (known for being one of the most corrupt states to begin with, I would say). He definitely did some backstabbing himself. The history is a little wild. Why he didn't just go on to be a lawyer is hard to know -- maybe he got pulled into a cycle of power and retribution and ambition? The district got a lot of attention as a swing district. After about 20 years in local and then state politics, he ran for the House and then the Senate.
It seems to me this isn't a very typical political upbringing, and he was further corrupted by power while in office. So I don't know if this case moves the needle of "how much corruption is there" very much for me.
He was caught because he wasn't criminally sophisticated enough to know that the best way to receive bribes is underpriced investment opportunities.
Gold bars and envelopes of cash are seen as gauche.
It's hard to make money as a lawyer with a private practice. He built up his early career connections in politics instead of getting into the good graces of the local legal community, so he was basically shut out from the high paying jobs.
Hillary Clinton is an amazing cattle futures trader. Or her financiers found a (not so) sneaky way to transfer cash to her.
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Ehh the best way is high five figure speaking fees. Do twenty speaking engagements a year. Do that for 15 years. Couple that with underpriced investments and you are pretty rich.
Only the top politicians get access to the high paying speaker opportunities. Even your average representative isn’t being paid $5,000 for a 20 minute speech, let alone $500k to show up to a conference.
Depends on what committee you get on, etc.
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Yes, of course, your stuck prior is in your username.
Haha, it's definitely not always true. But my general political background view is that working within the system works a lot of the time, with enough time. I think it's pretty evidence-supported by US history. I was trying to come up with a new nick for the new forum to disallow cross-looking, I knew a prolific redditor with a similar and memorable nickname, and I was at the time of the opinion that signifying prior inclinations in a username would be helpful information on the forum. So it was a deliberate decision, not an indication that I'm some sort of status-quo warrior. As I noted, there's a specific story of Menendez' political upbringing and it's far from being some "regular senator we thought was a saint turns out to be corrupt" -- a major needle-mover if true -- it ended up being "senator from corrupt state with sketchy personal history ends up being corrupt" which... just isn't all that surprising?
Please refrain from wasting space with a low-effort personal attack (the very definition of rule-breaking, I might add) if you don't have anything to contribute. Would you care to outline what your percentages might be, or at least of a particular category? Part of the point is to get a read on people's priors and see if I'm wildly divergent (or if they are).
Which senator do you have in mind? I think perhaps we’d have a better understanding of why you perceive the system the way you do if we had some specific examples of individuals who you believe are in it for wholly altruistic reasons.
For my part, there is not a single individual over the last ~fifty years that I could name. Once upon a time, in my days as a member of the Fraternal Order of Bernard - often called Bernard Brothers for short - I would have said Bernie Sanders for sure. (I also sang the praises of Barbara Boxer, attempting multiple times to convince my cynical politician-hating mother that Boxer was the genuine article, a real paragon of moral virtue, committed to the betterment of her voters and of mankind as a whole.)
Of course, this is when I, like most millennials, believed that big business was uniformly conservative. That leftist politicians couldn’t possibly be taking big money from shady mega-donors and Fortune 500 companies, because why would those entities donate to the party dedicated to curbing their power and influence? And this almost seemed a teeny tiny bit true at the time!
Of course, only a decade later we live in an era where nearly every important corporation not only donates to progressive politicians and causes, but also makes a huge public deal out of doing so. (And that’s to say nothing of slightly more under-the-radar groups like the Open Society Foundation, and of investment firms like BlackRock who literally cut off companies’ access to funding if they fail to sufficiently debase themselves to progressive activism.) So there is basically no reason to believe that Democrat politicians are receiving less money from corrupt companies and cynical mega-donors than their Republican counterparts are; in fact, the dynamic may in fact be the opposite.
Given the obscene sums of money sloshing around in DC, why do you believe that even a person who started their political career with the purest of intentions would be able to withstand the onslaught of venal incentives that are immediately thrust at any politician who gets anywhere close to that level of power and influence?
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