I'm not sure I can pinpoint the exact moment the show jumped the shark, but it is difficult to disagree. However, I'd like to dig a little deeper into that survey.
First, let's point out the obvious. Um... Trump won, and 51% of respondents thought that Trump deserved "a lot" of the blame for dysfunction, and another 34% thought he deserved "some." Only 14% held him blameless. Trump likes to lie about having "won the popular vote," (and I like to remind you that "the popular vote" is a bullshit concept), but he did a lot better than 14%! In other words, something's wrong here.
Remember Trump bragging about how "presidential" he could be, and how easy it would be? Here's one of those clips.
Anyone who actually thought he was capable of being "presidential" was... well, they were exactly what Rex Tillerson called Trump. Was that comment "presidential?" Is anything I say "presidential?" No, but I'm just the peanut gallery. However, if you recall the first couple of months of Trump's Presidency, columnists would shower him with praise (golden words of praise!) and say that he was finally becoming "presidential" every time he read from a teleprompter.
Trump has been, in his first almost-year in office, exactly who and what he always was. He has, in Bob Corker's words, debased the nation, and apparently around 71% of the country feel debased.
What did people think they were getting? This is Trump. This is what he does. And of course, 86% understand that he deserves at least some of the blame. How much? We'll get to that. So, let's dig into the survey and talk about where the blame really should be placed for the fact that American politics are now a total shit-show.
I first have to point out "uncompetitive congressional elections." 35% of respondents thought that the phenomenon deserves "a lot" of the blame, and another 51% thought the phenomenon deserves "some." I made my earlier career by writing about how competitive elections are actually bad for democracy. Short version: in a close election, that means a lot of voters are necessarily not getting their way. That's... bad! The most simple, important point from my first book was that an election isn't like a market, so you can't just say that competition is good because, yay competition! (That's actually a common analogy in a lot of scholarship). Instead, an election is a way to hire or fire an employee. Flipping a coin (an election with uncertainty) is a terrible way to make hiring and firing decisions. If you have a good employee, renew that employee's contract. Deterministically! If you have a bad employee... fire his ass. Deterministically! So, no. Competitive elections are bad. (M'kay?). It's a lot more complicated than that because elections are complicated and it's a book that I'm summarizing flippantly, but you get the basic point.
Moving on, though. Take a look at the top and the bottom of the list. They... are backwards. Respondents blamed money first, and "average voters" last.
Look, this is hard. You have been inundated with the message that money has corrupted everything about politics, and it's so cool to sound cynical. This is actually the subject of scholarly research, though. We can study this. We do study this in political science. Do legislators who receive campaign contributions from Group X vote differently from legislators who don't receive campaign contributions from Group X? Yes. Problem: Of course Ted Cruz gets money from different people than Elizabeth Warren. They have nothing in common (aside from over 99% of their DNA...). The question is, what happens when two ideologically similar legislators, from similar constituencies, etc., face a vote, and one gets campaign contributions, and the other doesn't. Then do they vote differently? Nope. They pretty much vote the same way. Implication? It is really hard to buy influence, and measuring that influence is really hard. Only when a lot of specific conditions are met can campaign contributions buy policy influence, and measuring that influence is haaaaard. What can money buy? Access. Give a legislator money, and he'll talk to you, and it's pretty much as simple as that. The newest cool article on that was by Joshua Kalla & David Broockman-- "Campaign Contributions Facilitate Access to Congressional Offices-- A Randomized Field Experiment" (American Journal of Political Science Volume 60, Issue 3, pp 545-558). Basically, try to set up a meeting with congressional offices. Randomize whether or not you tell them that the meeting is with a campaign contributor, and see what happens. Yup. They are more likely to talk to you if you are a contributor. That doesn't mean they'll do anything for you, but they'll talk to you. Everything else about the influence of money is really hard to demonstrate. Chapter 8, in this book, co-authored with Matt Jarvis, attempts some econometric tricks, but it is really hard to tease out the influence of money. So, where should money be on that list? Pretty damned low, in my scholarly opinion.
In contrast, where should "average voters" be? Absolute top. Number 1, no question.
Donald Trump deserves a hell of a lot of blame for debasing our nation, as Bob Corker put it. Who let him? "Average voters." By voting for him. We have a dysfunctional Congress-- House and Senate. Here's the line I've been recycling for years. A group of lions is called "a pride." A group of crows is called "a murder." A group of assholes? "A Congress." Who elected those assholes? "Average voters." What about "the media?" Well, there are a lot of institutions in "the media," and I don't want to lump Roll Call in with Breitbart, or even the easily distracted, but not explicitly partisan network news shows. However, any media organization that promotes dysfunction does so because people pay attention to them. Specifically, people who vote. "Average voters." In the case of Breitbart, the audience isn't "average," but in the case of the worthless network news programs? Yup, "average."
Social media? Um... does "blogspot" count? Nope, nobody reads this damned thing. Phew! I'm safe! I'll read that as a general attack on shit like Facebook and Twitter, which play a central role in the dissemination of fake news (by the standard definition, rather than Trump's use of the term). I use neither Facebook nor Twitter. You know who does? Say it with me... "average... voters." If those same... "average voters" took the time to read real news sources rather than being lazy fuckin' bums, social media wouldn't be able to disseminate fake news.
Other than that, Obama? Insert laugh here. The two opposing parties? This brings up the question of party symmetry, for which I will reference Mann & Ornstein's book. This ain't symmetric. Party activists? That's hard to separate from the parties themselves... That can get really into the weeds, and I'm not even going to start on "political correctness" in this post.
At the end of the day, though, the forces doing the most damage are empowered by "average voters." If "average voters" hadn't voted for Donald Trump, Trump wouldn't be President, and he wouldn't be debasing the nation. If average voters didn't elect assholes to Congress, we wouldn't be staring at an alien monolith on Capitol Hill, saying, "my god, it's full of assholes!" If average voters read real newspapers instead of just whatever shit came across Facebook and Twitter, they wouldn't buy into whatever bullshit fake news stories circulate around. If average voters paid attention to real news stories rather than clickbait and inflammatory stories, the "serious" news organizations, such as they are, would do their jobs properly based on the market incentives provided to them by... "average voters."
And even if money could buy off politicians, attentive voters could fire their fuckin' asses if they didn't like the policies that resulted.
There isn't one problem in the political system that couldn't be fixed by "average voters" if those voters were capable of carrying out the duties required of them in a democracy, and there is not one problem in the political system today that does not have its roots in average voters' failures.
As H.L. Mencken wrote, "democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it, good and hard." According to the new Washington Post-University of Maryland poll, voters think they're getting it, good and hard. Yay, democracy!