So, I have some problems with our political process (wow, big surprise, I bet you didn’t know that!). Here’s my take on what’s essentially wrong with the process of getting elected in any large democratic country today:
The essential problem of a politician is to get the majority of people who vote to vote for them. These voters rarely have any idea what happens with a politician after they elect him or her. The post-election political process is too complex and frankly too mundane for most voters to pay attention to. Even saying “that politician did or did not vote for this bill” doesn’t really cover the whole picture, because the bill is often some 80-page monster with six amendments that don’t even have anything to do with the bill. We are a “government of laws not a government of men,” but the system that we have for creating laws, as practically implemented, is pretty screwed and far too complex to comprehend. So, the public generally has no real understanding of the political process.
So let’s rephrase the politician’s problem: You have a vast number of people. You have to get these people to agree that you should be in charge. They actually have no idea what you’re going to be in charge of, or how your job will work. If you tried to explain it, they wouldn’t be interested. And on top of all this, you have to get your message through a medium over which you have no control (the news media)–a medium which is primarily in the business of entertainment.
So the trick is to get an understandable and entertaining message through that will cause people to vote for you.
So what’s understandable? The problems that people encounter every day in their regular lives. What’s entertaining? Anecdotes, theatricality, fights. And what gets votes? Getting people to agree with you.
Voila, it’s election season. The competition is who can put on the best performance and most convincingly state a case to solve everyday problems–whether or not they have anything to do with government–in a way that people agree with. (This is why Communism was so successful–its proponents were great performers who convincingly promised to solve the biggest problem facing the majority of people in the soon-to-be-Communist country–a problem that everybody agreed was there.)
Then there’s other things to put into play. What words can you use that will cause people to empathize with you? What image should you build of yourself that people will admire?
And then the counterattack comes. If you’ve built an image, the opposition has to give evidence that it’s invalid. If you’re using certain words, the opposition should make fun of them, and not use those words. Pretty simple.
That is “getting elected.” Nowhere in there is anything about your provable validity as a leader. You only have to get others to agree that you should be in charge. You don’t have to prove anything. Proof is not entertainment, and so won’t make it through the news media. Claims, promises, grand speeches, slander, stories about your life–these things are agreeable, understandable entertainment, and are the only effective items in a successful political campaign.
-Max
P.S. And for all you intellectuals out there, unless you read every bill they voted on and researched all the campaign funding of every candidate, what you’re getting is just another “more refined” form of agreeable, understandable entertainment–the kind that the campaign managers know will resonate with you.
Max Kanat-Alexander 