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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31272 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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And that last point I think is where the focus should be. Because across all of those previous grievous institutional failures he mentioned, you'd be hard pressed to name any authority figure who paid any significant personal cost for their role in the events. The Iraq war, the 2008 crisis, the botched Afghanistan withdrawal just last year. A point of comparison I sometimes seen brought up is Iceland, which actually put bankers on trial for fraud stemming from the 2008 meltdown and put many in jail, vs. in the U.S. where they got bailouts and golden parachutes. I have no clue as to how justifiable those convictions were, I just note that they happened.

Neocons will still tell us Iraq and Afghanistan were not failures. Liberals will say that flatten the curve and masks still worked or were not done correctly. Part of the problem is that it's impossible to remove the bias inherent in humans and politics when determining if or when something works. Sunk costs fallacy is another problem. This could explain why policy makers are inclined to not abandon bad policy. Admitting failure means losing reelection and credibility, whereas continuing bad policy still means the possibility things could get better.

Neocons will still tell us Iraq and Afghanistan were not failures.

I think they often go the extra mile and tell us that Americans wanted and voted for these wars and our leaders were evidently unable to decisively withdraw because that would have dismayed voters too much.

Not an exaggeration:

Tom Nichols: "Afghanistan is Your Fault."

Afghanistan was different. This was a war that was immensely popular at the outset and mostly conducted in full view of the American public. The problem was that, once the initial euphoria wore off, the public wasn’t much interested in it. Coverage in print media remained solid, but cable-news coverage of Afghanistan dropped off quickly, especially once a new adventure was launched in Iraq.

and

But as comforting as it would be to blame Obama and Trump, we must look inward and admit that we told our elected leaders—of both parties—that they were facing a no-win political test. If they chose to leave, they would be cowards who abandoned Afghanistan. If they chose to stay, they were warmongers intent on pursuing “forever war.” And so here we are, in the place we were destined to be: resting on 20 years of safety from another 9/11, but with Afghanistan again in the hands of the Taliban.

Which he might have a point on if there was ever an actual declared war in Afghanistan. But no, we got an Authorization for Use of Military Force that received effectively ZERO congressional debate year after year. Pretty much no President made it a campaign issue.

How were voters to express any opinion on the situation other, perhaps, than electing Ron Paul in 2012?

But this is ultimately what I'm saying. They hang the blame for the debacle on 'us' since diffusing responsibility and shuffling blame for political outcomes to 'the people' who ostensibly voted for it is, as mentioned, the primary purpose of Classical Liberalism these days.

They're definitely not advancing the classically liberal principals that ensure free speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of association anymore. They sure as hell ain't making free markets a priority.

But this is ultimately what I'm saying. They hang the blame for the debacle on 'us' since diffusing responsibility and shuffling blame for political outcomes to 'the people' who ostensibly voted for it is, as mentioned, the primary purpose of Classical Liberalism these days.

One of the purposes of a representative democracy, rather than a direct democracy, is that the buck stops with the representatives, not the voters. Legal responsibility for a government's actions fall on them, not the general public.

Surely that's only true until the next election? If an elected representative makes a decision, and his electorate decide to re-elect him, that looks to me like ratification of his decision.

Sure, representatives make a lot of decisions, so re-electing them is more aggregate approval than specific approval, and then there's the factor of "is he better than the alternatives," but at some point, accountability has to go back to the electorate. It's the people who are sovereign, and responsibility comes with that.

Is this essentially the poltical version of that "borrowing the jack" parable one of our mods linked once? Our leaders never bothered to pull us out of Afghanistan until last year because they thought they could read our minds and decided inaction was better?

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