All us WEIRD (western educated industrialized rich democratic) countries seem to spend a really embarrassing amount of time talking about the pointless minutiae surrounding our candidates for office and their personal lives.
We are also prone to backing very crap candidates based on personality, rhetoric, appearance ie: things that have nothing to do with being a good executive or legislator.
I think we should ban names from the election process and just have each party submit their ideas in writing and let people vote based on those submissions.
This is the idea behind direct ballot measures. Instead of working through representatives, just let people make actual decisions. Of course, there are problems with it. You wind up looking at a ballot with 10 different bond measures on it as if you’re in any position to decide on the budgets for 6 different agencies. And all the voter guides scream contradictory things at you from the pro/con positions, leaving you thinking “gee, maybe politician is actually a profession after all?”
Someday, we will vote for sentient AI candidates.
I think the big issue with this is we would fall prey to the BS spin some parties like to push. Based on their stated goals like focusing on the family, workers rights, smaller government, you’d think they are a great option. But once you start yo listen to the candidates talk what you find out is that their entire list of selling points are made up and not at all what they want to push.
While i agree some of the personal life stuff is ridiculous, looking at how some of these politicians act in society we aee exactly what they will be doing when “representing” all of us. If the candidate is a horrible person I’d hope that people qould recognize that they will not service the people fairly. But post pandemic we have seen that there is a lot of really crappy people out there who used to just keep quiet about their horrible views, today they are just lacking shame.
Hard disagree. It’s really easy for candidates to talk the talk on the campaign trail, and then do a 180 once they’re in office.
That being said, this doesn’t work if you let them use flowery speech and vague promises. If you had parties submit a platform of actually actionable decisions they would make (e.g. “decrease the federal minimum wage”), you’d be able to suss out what they actually want to do. It would also provide a rubric for re-election - how many of the things you wanted to do did you accomplish? Are there good reasons why you weren’t able to?
So what you’re asking for is the party politic talking points they already publish and never actually vote for? We already have a party that says one thing and have voted consistently against their entire published position for a good 40+ years. I don’t see much changing there.
I think a better solution is to hold politicians feet to the fire. When they have debates play the clip of them from a rally stating they want to X horrible thing or where they just negated their previous statement. “You claim to he for a working wage but lets play the clip from CSPAN where you are against increasing minimum wage and call people working in fast food ‘lazy and dumb’”.
Unfortunately a huge portion of voters dont care about actual facts and vote purely by ideology or religious views or are easily swept up in the propaganda l. We should be outlawing ads that are obvious false statements or try and bend the situation to look drastically different.
I’m asking for the individual candidates to lay out their specific political goals. The party can continue to publish its platform and planks.
Then people vote based on whether they want to see those goals met. When those politicians are up for re-election, it’s fairly easy for someone to tabulate whether or not those goals were met. If there are extenuating circumstances (overwhelming opposition, for example), then they can use that to defend themselves. This would help hold their feet to the fire.
As for voting ideologically, I attribute that mostly to FPTP - people feel as though they cannot do anything but vote ideologically because there are no real alternatives. That’s why RCV is extremely important.
When those politicians are up for re-election, it’s fairly easy for someone to tabulate whether or not those goals were met. If there are extenuating circumstances (overwhelming opposition, for example), then they can use that to defend themselves. This would help hold their feet to the fire.
Oddly it seems like little to no Republican voters recognize that Trump never passed anything of substance. They also seem to not understand how the economy actually works, see that during a booming economy Trump ran up one of the largest deficits. Trump sought to get rid of major safety nets which lower and middle class tend to use the most and tend to also be the redest counties.
If you tabulate up all the pros and cons for the Republican candiate, aside from normalizing hate, all of the perceived benefits are just voters not paying attention in their civics classes in highschool. I don’t think expecting voters to actually do their due diligence really works.
You’re not wrong. We have a representative democracy because the Founders thought the same way. I guess I prefer not to believe that it’s impossible for people to be well-informed enough to make a good decision on these things. I’ve certainly seen some new lows in the past 10 years.
Since the pandemic I’ve lost a lot of faith in humanity. Way too many people not giving a shit about others and now actively supporting hate. I’d like to think the problem is education, that by being informed on politics and having a real and strong epistemology we’d be shedding ourselves of all this garbage. Now, I just think a lot of people will always be horrible human beings.
I’ve certainly seen an uptick in anti-social behavior since Covid. Whether or not it’s because of the economic situation or being cooped up inside, it really seems to have done a number on some people.
