45* is still trying to correct his original error in firing Comey by not only exacting revenge for the appointment of Mueller but by also obstructing an investigation of obstruction.
Russia has not only gained from a crippled State Department but by the attempts to hobble US intelligence agencies. This benefits their oligarchs’ money making.
Similarly, US oligarchs have gained from attempts to create chaotic conditions for the accumulation of capital.
As a captive of Russian capital, 45* has ensured profitable conditions by failing to enact sanctions. Now if impeachment could really have a deterrent effect like that.
Unfortunately the imprecision of the American experiment has allowed the rats to run the trials, because public opinion in the age of social media has become more problematic, but no less interpretive. Then again we are fortunate to have incompetence reproduce itself...
The implicit argument behind the Gilens/Page paper, and of Gilens's book Affluence and Influence, is that in a democracy, there should be strong congruence between policy outcomes and the opinions of the American middle class — or, at the very least, between policy outcomes and the views of the American public as a whole.
This might seem intuitive. In a democracy, if 80 percent of people want universal health care, shouldn't there be universal health care? But this contention relies on a rather literal, and implausible, definition of democracy. As Vox's Matt Yglesias once put it, "The idea that the point of democracy is to implement legislative outcomes that are supported by broad-based surveys seems almost like a straw man dreamed up by an eighteenth-century monarchist."
[...]
There are "deliberative democrats," who think democracies should strive to enact the policies the people would support after calm, careful deliberation; there are small-r republicans, who measure democracies' success by the civic virtue of their residents; but you won't find basically any support for the idea that democracies should enact the people's opinions exactly as currently stated.
It's entirely possible, of course, to think the political theorists are wrong and that responsiveness really is the most important thing. These are matters of values, not of empirical truth or falsity. But strict responsiveness is not obviously the most important feature of a democracy.
www.vox.com/...