To be honest, I think most of this kind of talk comes from an attitude of cynicism and disdain for people involved in public life. People blame politicians and public servants for things not going how they'd like them to go, so they want to punish people who go into public service. It's not really a product of serious thinking about how to reform public service.
To a lot of people, cultural issues matter a lot more than technocratic issues. I'm not sure they're wrong, since "polarizing topics" usually underlie even the most seemingly arcane technocratic issues. So I don't think the solution is to become more technocratic and less political; it's to improve the political.
Yup. One thing I'm observing at work a lot right now (but I think it bleeds over into the real world) is that people are a lot more interested in identifying problems than fixing them. Like you suggested, being cynical is easy and allows people to snipe safely from their safe spaces without ever actually doing anything.
The CFTC is a bigger joke. The commisioner actually admitted on a zoom-type call that they manipulate markets with the help of banks. And their mandate is to stop and prosecute any manipulation of commodity markets. This is not a D or R debate. This has been going on for years. Gensler has admitted that they corrupted and crashed bitcoin in 2017(Trump was pres.).
I'm not sure I follow what you are saying at all.
Yuval Levin has expanded on this pretty brilliantly, I think: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/opinion/sunday/institutions-trust.html.
What I'm saying is that there are usually cultural/social issues underlying even some of the most arcane-seeming technocratic issues. For instance, you can objectively say how certain policies will affect the economy, but you can't objectively judge whether a smaller, more localist economy is better than a larger, more globalist economy. And I don't think we want to try to turn all of our disputes into apparently only technocratic disputes. In fact, there are real differences in belief about what's good, and how our public life should be organized that shouldn't and can't be reduced to numbers. We need politics to address those differences, but we don't always do politics very well.
But... your entire post is an expression of cynicism. You say I'm arrogant, but as with most cynics, you seem to think you're superior to the people actually involved in what you're criticizing, and that what you think we should do ought to be obvious to everybody who's not corrupt.
I’m not sure how any of that excuses how core human emotion is manipulated for political gain. It’s no different than how the same is manipulated for clicks or tv viewership.
I agree that happens, but I don't think you can just make a blanket statement that "social issues" don't really matter just because people tend to have feelings about those issues.
“Social issues” could much more easily be tackled by just stating the common goal. We want less abortions. We want less gun deaths. The strategies used to meet those goals should come from all strings of thought. But sadly these issues are only used to pander to the base. To make people chose sides. Etc. No progress is ever made.
I don't think they're only 'used" the way you describe, but the quality of our discourse about these issues could definitely be improved.
Do you think these topics are in the top 10 most important things facing our country today? Do you think our elected leadership thinks they are?
Sure I do. I think there are some people who get elected for whom those were their motivating factors for running for office. Ultimately, I think those kinds of issues are the most important issues because they're so much more indicative of differences in values. But because resolving those issues is so much harder than addressing more technical issues, you can't just be working on those things day in and day out.
So the abortion issue (which the Supreme Court has already ruled) and gun rights (which the constitution protects) is of top 10 importance of current issues facing our country today? Wow. Man….I couldn’t disagree more.
I think you may be conflating issues of immediate importance with issues of general importance. I get that some people don’t care about “social issues,” but not everybody feels that way, and I’d argue that the delineation is pretty contrived to begin with.
Immediate/general. Either way. Doesn’t change my statement. Some issues are important because they really are. Some issues are perceived as important because weve been led to believe so.
