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.
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.
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.
But we are far enough out that “cabin fever” would have passed. What we are seeing are people’s true colors, they just don’t have any shame to hide it anymore.
I’m not blaming it on cabin fever or anything like that. I think people are just angry.
i agree people are angry. After hearing so many people talk about the issues they are angry about it becomes very obvious they are ignorant on the topics. But it’s not just ignorant, its a fundamental world view issue.
Look at the economy. People want to blame Dems for inflation. The US is doing the best of first world countries to combat it but no one seems to get that. You ask these same people what would fix the problem and they look to either kick out immigrants or “stick it to foreign countries.” Well the immigrants arent taking high paying jobs and neither are foreign countries. So either you really dont get how things work, or you’re kind of racist/xenophobic. And after the past years of issues where people are just generally being assholes to one another, i tend to want to believe this is really just deep levels of hate we kept hidden before. Trump didnt make people hate more, he just made it socially acceptable.
If I’m wrong and its just ignorance on how the world works and people voted poorly… doesn’t really solve much.
It’s both. It’s always both. People are afraid and angry and hungry, and that brings fascism like flies to shit. I really don’t want to believe that people were always this hateful, and that it’s mostly because times are tough for everyone. Doesn’t help that you have Fox News and their cronies whipping everyone into a frenzy about every little thing.
Oh well. Now we’ll see them put their plan into action and hope that they somehow self-implode before they do too much damage.