That’s a very small group. The people who show up at Tea Party rallies with “Keep the government out of my Medicare” don’t care about facts, They’ve decided that Republicans are willing to give them dogma that they don’t have to think about and follow Republicans. And then make fun of the Democrats because they base some of their policies and actions on the observed universe. The 6,000 yearers for instance. The Catholic 6,000-yearers, whose dogma says the Pope is infallible, and use that to support banning gay marriage and conveniently ignore that the Pope says evolution is a reasonable explanation for the observed and that evolution doesn’t conflict with the allegories in the Old Testament. They are in search of being controlled. Plop them down in US in 2013 they are ardent Tea Partiers. Plop them down in Moscow in 1940 and they are ardent Stalinists. Plop them down in Beijing in 1960 they are ardent Maoists.

The perception of costs is mainly relative: relative to recent costs in the same country or region, and relative to budget. US governments and voters have approved rail lines with far higher cost per unit of service provided than comparable projects in Europe and Japan. Tokyo Metro is balking at spending $500 million per km on future lines; in San Francisco, Chinatown activists demanded the Central Subway no matter what, and in New York Second Avenue Subway is popular. Taxes for commuter rail lines and suburban light rail lines that cost more $50,000 per rider have passed ballot measures in California with the required two-thirds majority, or narrowly failed to achieve it while still commanding a solid majority. If CAHSR had asked for $5 billion instead of $10 billion, it would’ve gotten marginally more votes, and if it had asked for $30 billion it would’ve gotten marginally fewer, but voters don’t respond to absolute costs very sensitively.

These are the people I would describe as “not supporting the concept of democracy”. (Some of them, such as those in minority ethnic groups, vote for Obama, because the Republicans are a little too obviously hostile to them personally.) They are certainly a big part of what’s going on. These are people who don’t *care* what the facts are.

But there’s another group of Republican voters who simply don’t know what’s going on. When polled, they simply don’t have any of the facts right — they vote for Republicans because they have the policies of Democrats and Republicans completely swapped in their heads — and if somehow an actual fact gets into their head they will often quit the Republican Party. These are the group which needs to be targeted in order to dismantle the Republican Party. (The sycophants and followers will follow a winner when we have one.)

The political system in the US has its problems, but I have a hard time seeing the biggest problem as having too little democracy (or too much). When I think of my time living in Japan, the transportation system there was better in most respects, but democracy had little to do with it. The basic decision-making apparatus, the bureaucracy, was in place in Japan long before seriously democratic institutions even existed there, and while Japanese bureaucrats are technically accountable to elected politicians, in practice it’s really the other way around. I guess I would say the ends (the policy) do not necessarily justify the means (the policy-making process).

I think the problem in the US is more that an “everyone should be able to drive everywhere” consensus took hold, and has only recently begun to loosen its grip on everyone’s way of imagining transportation, from bureaucrats to politicians to voters. You have an argument here: the actual choices, illuminating the spatial and resource constraints we’re operating under, have not been properly presented. An underlying assumption has been we have unlimited cheap land for parking lots and roads, and unlimited cheap gasoline for driving any distance. Trains and buses are sort of an afterthought added onto the basic paradigm. These assumptions make a certain kind of sense in a country that has long been one of the world’s largest oil producers, and is one of the largest by land area. But this consensus is breaking down, because we don’t have enough oil for everyone to drive everywhere, and urban geometric constraints are coming into play, so not everyone wants to drive everywhere anymore.

Now, if we specifically take the California High Speed Rail project as an example, what happened? Whoever came up with the unrealistically low cost no doubt believed that voters would not support the project at its real cost, because voters don’t (yet) believe that high speed rail is worth the cost. So they lowballed it and got something passed.

Imagine if they were building the California portion of I5 today. It would probably cost more than $200 billion, but a huge majority wouldn’t hesitate to vote for it. The only thing most people would argue over is the route, not the cost.

The difference is merely that rail doesn’t have the popular support that roads have. But this is changing. 20 years ago, high speed rail was nowhere on anyone’s agenda in California, even though it would have been just as good an idea then as now. Anyway, now they’ve passed an under-budgeted project. Some day they will come up with all the money they need.

There are people in the world who are sycophants. There’s another group of people who want to be led, they don’t really care much about the philosophy, they just care that the powerful people are giving them the dogma to follow. There’s some overlap. Clinton’s indiscretions were cause for the whole world to stop and instigate the impeachment process. Senator Craig gets caught doing the same thing in the Minneapolis airport – after being recorded on CNN saying that what Mr. Clinton did was “Naughty naughty naughty” and stays in office. Eliot Spitzer has his fourth amendment rights violated ( when his bank reports transactions below the reportable threshold to the government, setting off an investigation ) and has to resign. Senator VItter does the same thing with some kinky bits thrown in for good measure and gets re-elected.
… you can’t deceive people who will swallow the agitprop and mindlessly repeat it…. they aren’t examining it for veracity. If they were in the USSR in 1950 they would be celebrating the completion of the last five year plan. If they were in China in 1960 they would be sending people off to be reeducated. …. if it was Germany in 1948 they would tell you they were just following orders and they didn’t know about what was going on over in the relocations camps…. In 2013 they are Teapartiers.
… Barney Frank was asked “what was the worst thing that happened during your time in Congress” or something like that. His answer was “Irangate”. Oliver North was just following orders. Oliver North is celebrated by TeaParty types…

Due to Duverger’s Law and the two-party system, the Democratic Party has ended up getting the votes of nearly everyone who actually supports the concept of democracy, across the spectrum — at least among those who pay attention. (The Republican Party gets an awful lot of votes from people who have simply been deceived — we know this from polling which shows that Republican voters don’t even know what their candidates are doing.) It’s a disturbing political situation. I can’t find any modern analogues, though there may have been some in South America.