Author's Note: I live in the
USA. If you live in a different country, the details may vary, but the basic premise will undoubtedly remain true.
There is no majority.
Confused? Let me explain: there is no possible way for anyone to figure out what a majority is thinking. Even if there was, there's no way our government could (or, for that matter, would) act on it. Polls are meaningless; nearly three-fourths of people called for polls hang up the phone, if they aren't screening their calls in the first place. Polls on websites are inherently biased, because the majority of the people who visit a website share the opinions of the management. Phone polls can be biased as well; one can focus the calls on a specific area or
carefully word the poll question.
Even in actual elections, there's no majority involved. Voter turnout for the
last presidential election was less than fifty percent; there goes your majority right there. And hey, the
candidate who got the most votes didn't take office anyway. The only thing we know about the majority here is that they don't know about the issues and don't really give a shit.
Can you blame them? Could anyone here say that
Gore would have done a noticeably better job than
Bush as
President? Sure, he wouldn't have done worse, but better?!
We don't elect our judicial branch, and they have
recently shown how they have more power than any other branch of the government. The Justices of the
Supreme Court are human beings with their own opinions, not perfectly objective observers. They work their own beliefs into any verdict; how can they not?
We don't really elect the President, either. Most people forget that the members of the
Electoral College are human beings and not mere numbers chosen for each state. They are actually free to vote however they want. Oh, sure, they don't do this very often (in the last presidential election, there was only one Electoral College deviance: one of the D.C. electors, a Democrat, abstained from the vote), but they really can do whatever the fuck they want.
We elect
Senators and
Congressmen, but what options do we have in these elections? Usually it's between two equally dickheaded morons who need to wear name tags or you can't tell them apart, certainly not by their opinions on the "issues." They never talk about the real issues; they only discuss
petty bullshit. When was the last time a legislator seriously pushed for
national healthcare?
Abortion regulations? A
revolutionary tax policy in either direction? Any real change? I mean while they were an actual representative here; I'm not talking about
campaign promises. You haven't. By skirting around these issues, they try to retain as many votes as possible without pissing anyone off. In doing so, they end up being the same damn person as their opponent. Since they're doing the same things on the issues, the only
"campaigning" that they can do turns into personal attacks. You could always "waste" your vote on a
third party, but the only way a third-party candidate will get elected is if he's
a celebrity or if the incumbent is
really incompetent and the opposing party can't come up with anyone.
And, let's face it, anything an elected official does that the public really wants is entirely coincidental. They
look out for number one first, last, and only. I have yet to find a politician who is an exception to this rule. Any major politician needs to get TV time. In order to get TV time, they need rich people to give them money. In order to get money, they need to
prostitute their ideals out to the highest bidder. They become puppets of what are essentially their corporate sponsors. The only time that this doesn't happen is if a candidate is independently wealthy, in which case he's working from self-interest anyway.
There is no majority. If there is one, its views are almost completely irrelevant. The majority viewpoint (whatever it may be) is impossible to find and wouldn't make a difference if it could be found.