Kooky
Freedom from Sanity
Do you have counterexamples?Reread your own post and it should be fairly obvious to you what I was commenting on. You claim that people have never been capable of cleaning up the ever-present political corruption by voting for better candidates. This is false.
I did not call it "ever present" and did not want to imply that it was. I simply stated that you cannot get rid of systemic corruption simply by voting in the 'correct' people. That doesn't mean we cannot do anything at all. It is a serious flaw in the thinking of many citizens of democracies that you only ever change society with elections, or that elections are even the predominant or most effective way to change society for the better. They are not; they are simply one tool in a revolutionary's toolbox - not to be willfully discarded, certainly, but also not to be overly relied on, unless the situation specifically calls for its usage.Such corruption is not ever-present, nor is it impossible to eliminate it through concerned voting.
Au contraire, the purpose of government has always been to serve the ruling class first and foremost.I agree that our capitalist economic system causes and feeds the current runaway political corruption. But that's the 'tail wagging the dog'. The purpose of government was never supposed to be to serve the whims of commerce (human greed). It was supposed to be to oversee the whims of commerce, so as to protect us all from each other, economically. Capitalism gives all commercial control to the capital investors, exclusively, which rewards wealth with more wealth. And that means that the wealth piles up under the control of the most aggressive and greedy few among us, enabling them to use some of that massive wealth to corrupt and control the government. Hence, the 'tail wagging the dog'.
Any further benefits for the masses have been the result of extended political struggles and the exertion of massive pressure on elected officials and unelected elites both. We can see this in the Reaganization/Thatcherization of Western social states from the late 1970s on, when as soon as the threat of a communist takeover was off, governments started cutting brutal swathes through previously guaranteed labor rights and welfare programs.
There are deeper underlying reasons why politicians take corporate donations/bribes, this is not just due to their failing morals or the corrupt nature of certain politicians, but the economics inherent to this system, economics that need to be challenged themselves, and this needs to start long before elections are up, at the point when campaigns are being organized and funds are being raised.The solution is end or limit capitalism so that the wealth cannot pile up under the control of the most aggressive and greedy few, but that can't happen until the dog gets control of it's tail. And since it will not do so of it's own accord (the politicians can't refuse the bribery) we have to do it for them. And the ONLY means we have of doing that is through the vote, or through violent overthrow.
At this point, there are two approaches that have been shown as effective in circumventing the existing corporate donation economy:
- The first is the Trump approach of candidates simply being independently wealthy and outright buying their own campaign (though it has also been shown that this has the exact opposite effect on political corruption than people have been hoping for).
- The second is simply avoiding corporate financing in favor of increasing the sheer amount of private citizen donations to a campaign, as demonstrated by Social Democratic candidates like Sanders or Occasio-Cortez.