We’ve all heard it a million times: “No, we can’t deliver that because it’s just too expensive”; or “No, we can’t do that because it just isn’t feasible”.
Politicians have been gaslighting us for far too long.
At the most fundamental level, politicians are elected to represent the interests of the electorate, but the reality is that this is no longer the case. When Americans are asked what their priorities are, a vast majority—regardless of political leanings or affiliations—will say the same things: Affordability, good healthcare, good jobs, a living wage, good infrastructure, a good economy, and so forth.
These are things that any good government should deliver. And yet, despite the relentless pleading of its people, the American government has steadfastly refused to do just that.
We’re told that these things are too complicated to deliver. That there simply isn’t enough money to ensure Americans actually live the “American Dream”. That delivering these basic needs would destroy the free market.
The list of ways in which our politicians gaslight us is never-ending.
And yet, every election cycle, those same politicians come back to you, asking for your vote, paying you lip service about all the things they’re going to change. And every cycle, it’s the same story; the same gaslighting.
So why are we so afraid to say it? Why are we so afraid to take a chance on a new Representative or a new Senator?
Why do we keep believing it?
Gaslighting. That’s why.
Gaslighting, Inc.
Take healthcare for example: We all know that it isn’t affordable; it provides barely any services without out-of-pocket costs; and the outcomes are usually anything but good. Despite this, politicians will insist that everything is fine and that the “free market” will address these concerns.
That is a steaming pile of bullshit.
For one, the health insurance free market is a myth. Insurance companies don’t compete with each other on price. In fact, they don’t really compete with each other on anything. The system has been engineered that way and the illusion of free market choice is just that: an illusion.
But Mr. or Mrs. Politician will gaslight you just the same and assure you that there’s nothing they can do about it. The truth is that they won’t do anything about it because they need their corporate donors to keep writing those campaign checks.
Living wage? Same story. Good infrastructure? Same story. Affordability? Same. Story.
Take the living wage issue: The argument is that raising the minimum wage will put Main St. out of business. That’s just asinine and there are solutions to this problem such as structuring protections for businesses under a certain employee count or revenue, while simultaneously providing incentives for these same small businesses to provide higher wages.
On good infrastructure: “Oh, it’ll cost too much. We can’t do that to the deficit!” But we can add billions to the debt to drop bombs on kids? To give corporations more tax breaks?
But we somehow can’t find money to repair crumbling bridges and roads?
Every time a new politician comes along and pushes back on this, the establishment jumps to protect themselves. Attack ads get put on TV. The word socialism gets thrown around. Doomer narratives are scripted, rehearsed and rolled out on the nightly cable news.
Gaslighting you is big business, because if they can keep doing it, then the same broken system that favors certain groups can continue to exist, and those very same groups can continue to cash in.
So how do we fix this?
It all starts with us.
The first step to fixing this is fixing our understanding of our current situation. You don’t need to be a political scientist major or an economist major to know that things are just flat-out broken, all you have to do is look around.
To fix the gaslighting, we must all default to skepticism; and we can reach that default position by doing a few things differently:
First, always discount lip-service for what it is. When a politician is trying to sell you on their job performance, it isn’t enough for them to just tell you that things are getting better, they need to prove it.
We all need to continuously ask ourselves some simple questions: Are my wages actually improving? Was I able to stop living paycheck-to-paycheck? Is my healthcare actually getting any better or more affordable? Will my kids have a better future than I did with this person in charge?
But it isn’t enough to just ask ourselves these questions. We’ve all been doing that for far too long.
Instead, if the answer to any of these questions is a hard no, then the only person who needs to be blamed is that politician. It is literally their job to improve these things, and if none of it is improving, then they’re simply just not doing their job, no matter what they say to you.
Second, it’s time that we learn that we can and should demand better.
We need to stop thinking about politicians as these all-powerful figures that somehow hold our lives in the palms of their hands because precisely the opposite is true. Whatever power they do wield is at our express consent. It isn’t their power; it’s our power.
If they’re using that power to enrich themselves or other already rich people and corporations at our expense, then we can certainly do better. We must do better.
When a new political candidate offers us this, we need to take them up on it, not keep the old politicians around who we already know are not doing their job. Expecting a better living wage isn’t socialism, it’s pragmatism. Expecting affordable and effective healthcare isn’t criminal, it’s the least we should demand of our government.
Not living paycheck-to-paycheck is the only way to get to liberty and freedom.
That’s why we should never embrace the bare-minimum politician. We can and should have better politicians. We can and should have a better, more responsive government. We can and should spend our tax dollars on improving the lives of every American.
But to get to those goals, we have to change the system that props up the status quo, and the only way to do that is to change the people that make up that system.
Because if we continue to buy the gaslighting, then we’ll all continue living in a broken system, being told ad nauseum that things are just impossible, or too expensive, or that things will work themselves out—even though you know they never will.