America was built because we rebelled from our government via violent revolution. The Constitution was clearly written by people fearing a new tyrannical government (see 2nd amendment). Whether this attitude should be so pervasive is another discussion, but that's where the seed is from.
> The Constitution was clearly written by people fearing a new tyrannical government (see 2nd amendment).
The original text of the Constitution was written by people tired of the failings of a weak government and wanting to replace it with a much stronger one. The bill of rights, including the 2nd Amendment, was written to mitigate the fears of a significant but somewhat less prominent faction that feared that without the express boundaries it provided, a stronger central government would become too strong.
Yes, they were responding to the impossibly weak Articles of Confederation. The framers put several checks in place to prevent the federal government from becoming too powerful:
1) Enumerating the powers of the executive. There will be no King George in America!
2) Designing the checks & balances system such that (in theory) no one of legislative, executive, judicial could become too powerful to override the other two.
3) As you mentioned, the inclusion of the second amendment (and third, fourth, eighth) were all designed to prevent repeating problems the colonists faced before the war.
4) Tenth amendment was added to further strip the federal government of its non-enumerated powers.
The framers wanted something stronger than AoC, but they were very clear in their desire to limit the power of the federal government. They wanted a weak executive, and the legislative, particularly the Senate, was designed to be the main "doer of things".
The executive was initially quite powerless on purpose. When Jefferson tried to do the Louisiana Purchase, people challenged whether the executive had this power. Andrew Jackson then came along and began the journey of expanding the powers of the executive, followed by Lincoln suspending habeus corpus, and more modern figures such as FDR with the internment camps and New Deal all continuing to expand these powers. While this is obviously only a partial list of expansion, it contains several notable examples.
> The Constitution was clearly written by people fearing a new tyrannical government (see 2nd amendment).
Alright quick pet peeve: First off I agree that the constitution was specifically written to make it hard for a dictatorship and or tyrannical government.
But my pet peeve is: You cannot use the 2nd amendment as an example of that. It was written four years later and by almost a completely different set of people.
That's a fair criticism of my post. However, do you believe the mindset just four years later was any different? The second amendment very explicitly mentions militias, which implies the same fear of government.
Yes, it's worrisome. Don't forget that we've had 45 years of one of the major parties telling us 'government is the problem'. So, a whole generation has been brought up hearing this as a valid view.
And, there's a deep distrust of centralized authority in American history. Up until the closing I'd the western frontier (1890s), that distrust could be mollified by moving to 'unsettled' land. Then the USA had a almost a century of increasing government size and action, and then the Reagan reaction I mention above.
> As an non-american this baffles me.
Why is there so much distrust towards the government, police, and military in US ? Isn't the US the oldest democracy ?
I don't think you speak on behalf on all non-Americans. As an Eastern European, I can perfectly understand mistrust of government and police (and I think people from many other countries can share these feelings).
No. They're one of the youngest. The English empire had a parliamentary system when the US left, that's where the whole "taxation without representation" thing comes from, they didn't get a representative in the English parliament.
In fact the US governmental system is largely influenced by the English government system (with several changes made due to lack of monarch, and a need to elect 100% of their government as a policy).
PS - Before you argue that "if people are appointed it isn't a democracy!" you may want to think that position though, the two houses and the president are elected, but most other positions remain appointed in the US (e.g. supreme court for just one example).
PPS - I'd also argue that any FPTP system is only "barely" a democratic system since by design a vast majority of people feel they have no one who really represents their interests in either house. Instead of minority voices getting one seat, they get none, see the Nordic countries for how it should work in a democracy.
Distrust towards the government might by one of the reasons why the US is the oldest (or one of the oldest, depending on the definition) uninterrupted democracy.
I don't quite understand how someone with the username 1971genocide could possibly trust the government. But I guess operation searchlight was a minor thing - after all, official government statistics say only 26,000 people were killed.
You are taking two very completely different situations to create a false equivalency.
The people of Bangladesh fairly elected Sheikh Mujib but for some reason the government didnt want a bengali as the president and that was a good reason to overthrow the government.
If Obama won the election by a decisive victory and someone said "hey! that was joke - we are putting Mitt Romney in power". That would be a good cause to rebel against the government don't you think ?
My concern is that the american people are able to elect their representative and the same time seem to have a deep mistrust towards them. That is what I am brining up.
Having distrust towards your government is healthy - but just like everything, taking that ideology too far can be problematic as things needs to get done. Roads cannot be built if people think the government is up to something nefarious. I remember a paul graham article where he talks about "putting checks in a system" , it reminds of software systems that have validation set up. Do you think any software system can run with having validation every-time you pass an value to a function ? We put validation only in cases where the cost of putting it ( time-efficiency , memory ) is lower than the cost of security.
I'm very much pro-Bangladeshi independence, and pro-secession/revolution in general. I didn't mean to suggest any pro-Pakistan sentiment whatsoever. I'm just citing it as an example of why governments in general can't be trusted.
But I don't know why you cite Obama's election favorably. He ran on a platform opposing an individual mandate and then personally pulled the "hey! that was a joke - Obamacare time." Before him, Bush ran on a platform of humble foreign policy and limited government and then pulled "hey! that was a joke".
I'm not sure why "hey! that was a joke" is horrible when applied to a person, but acceptable when applied to policies. But then again I don't really go for identity politics - e.g., I don't care if the president is a Bengali or not, I care what actions he takes. (I'm also not pro-democracy.)
Do you think any software system can run with having validation every-time you pass an value to a function ? We put validation only in cases where the cost of putting it ( time-efficiency , memory ) is lower than the cost of security.
I believe the future of computing will be in dependently typed languages (e.g. Idris) which do exactly this sort of thing at compile time.
> I'm not sure why "hey! that was a joke" is horrible when applied to a person, but acceptable when applied to policies.
Let me quote Bret Stephens' take on the matter, writing in the (Republican-leaning) Wall Street Journal --
"Sometime in the 1990s I began to understand the Clinton way of lying, and why it was so successful. To you and me, the Clinton lies were statements demonstrably at variance with the truth, and therefore wrong and shameful. But to the initiated they were an invitation to an intoxicating secret knowledge.
What was this knowledge? That the lying was for the greater good, usually to fend off some form of Republican malevolence. What was so intoxicating? That the initiated were smart enough to see through it all. Why be scandalized when they could be amused? Why moralize when they could collude?"
Disclaimer. No representation is made in this comment as to the exclusivity or generality of this manner of lying to any particular political parties, politicians, or nations -- that is left as an exercise to the reader.
> Why is there so much distrust towards the government, police, and military in US ? Isn't the US the oldest democracy ?
The US became a democracy in no small part because there was so much distrust towards the government, police and military right there at the get-go... and the distrust of the system that is built into the system (the whole three-branch, checks-and-balances system) is one of the reasons it has never veered off into a deranged dictatorship like, say, ancient Rome.
(I mean, the power and longevity of the FDR administration was pretty insane -- probably the closest we got to that -- but nothing like Julius Caesar).
I think for the connotation in the parent comment you might say that the US became a democracy in 1920 or 1965 (but we still deny, for instance, children, the right to vote).
(at least, I tend to think that the modern concept of democracy is bound up with self determination, something that ancient Greece sort of did not have, nor did the US when it was founded)
This is going to depend on the definition of "democracy". Iceland, the Isle of Man, and New Zealand all have strong claims. UK has constitutional continuity back to 1707 but neither the UK nor US had universal suffrage until the 20th century.
What really baffles me is how others DON'T intrinsically mistrust those in power. Human nature is human nature after all.
NSA revelations, "I'm going to close GITMO", "weapons of mass destruction", "I did not have sexual relations with that women"... This list goes on and on.
Trust is out of the question at this point for many people. The word gullible comes to mind.
For the record, I don't mistrust the government. I think most of it is low level bureaucracy that somewhat functions, (albeit a bit inefficiently), and basically keeps things running. But it is run by people. And historically most people have been lazy, a bit stupid, and corruptible. But there isn't necessarily a pernicious conspiracy. And I would let the government prepare my taxes. As long as they have good software and it isn't a politician doing it.
> Why is there so much distrust towards the government, police, and military in US ?
Well, for one thing because certain factions (heavily represented, oddly enough, in government, including the police and military) actively promote that distrust to get more power for themselves. This doesn't seem like it would work, but it has more than one would think.
> Isn't the US the oldest democracy ?
US politicians, especially recently, have taken to claiming that a lot, but you'd probably have to construct a very special definition of democracy for that to be even arguably true.
At least since WWI, the US Federal Government has a long history of fucking people over in profoundly undemocratic ways.
What's happened to actual Americans is nothing compared to what the Pakistani Government did to East Pakistan in 1971... but it happens over and over again, the global consequences have been huge and terrible, and the wealth and political power of most Americans have been systematically eroded by it. Even small betrayals accumulate to significant mistrust.
I'm also non american, and I'm always surprised how much american politics piss me off.
Maybe I'm kinda scared since it's the most powerful country in the world, so the whole world might be influenced by how crappy those politics are. Capitalism is everywhere, tax dodging is rampant, and it all seems to seed from american capitalism.
I'm not anti american, I love so many things about the US, but there are particular aspects that are just so senseless.
The US individual tax reporting process is an annual reminder to voters of what they pay in taxes, that cannot be easily ignored. I am sure that fiscally conservative politicians see this as an advantage to their cause, though they are unlikely to publicly say so.
Someone else said that elsewhere in the thread, and I disagreed there, too... it's funny how people can look at the same situation and come to completely opposite conclusions. But to me it looks as though the entire system is designed to hide how much people pay in taxes. Almost everybody pays via automatic withholding so they never see the money in the first place; the defaults are designed so that people over-withhold by a small amount and get a refund; and even that's not enough so we have some taxes that are partially "paid by the employer" to even hide it from a deduction line on the paycheck. As I said in the other thread, if "we" wanted to make sure voters couldn't ignore their tax burden, we'd end automatic withholding.
You have a point - it could be worse, but automatic withholding is not likely to go away, because the government needs the cash flow, and even most fiscally conservative politicians tacitly recognize this.
I think the the emotional impact is important: preparing a return is still burdensome, even if not as bad as it could be, and that adds to and reinforces the pile of negative emotions associated with taxation.
Automatic withholding is also really important for taxpayers, as few people are fiscally responsible enough to save up the money throughout the year on their own. People end up living paycheck to paycheck regardless as to whether they're earning 20k/yr, 50k/yr, or 100k/yr, so sudden expense of several thousand dollars, even one they knew was coming, would be seriously damaging to their financial stability.
I've tried telling people to save even just $50/mo. until they've built up a three month cushion, and they insist they can't afford that. You wanna try convincing them to also set aside a few hundred bucks a month for taxes?
If people were perfectly rational, this might be the case, but I don't think receiving a statement has the same emotional impact, and is not as attention-grabbing and drawn-out, as going through the process of preparing a return - especially if, as for many people, you get a refund.
My guess is that relatively few people, of those who currently prepare their own returns, would invest as much time and effort into verifying an IRS-prepared return as they do in preparing one. I would also guess that a majority of swing voters prepare their own returns (I know, that's a fair amount of supposition on my part...)
Well in US there are like 2 levels of government, the state gvt and the federal one. Some people think the federal gvt is despotic and abuses the powers granted by the constitution.
The irony is that the state governments are way more corrupt and despotic. Almost all the "police brutality" news you hear isn't DEA agents or FBI. It's municipal law enforcement.
In my opinion, this is typically the position of the party with the least amount of power. Those that have lost seats are often advocates of "states' rights".
Why is there so much distrust towards the government, police, and military in US ? Isn't the US the oldest democracy ?
Society is built on trust - once that doesn't exist then nothing gets done.