We need a better, smarter electorate. Now ... how?

Politics & Elections
1

Continuing the discussion from Some of you may disagree with my opinion about many Trump voters, and that's OK:

Okay. The Democrats need to do an exhaustive and ‘no holds barred’ post-mortem. They should, they must, and they will.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man

– George Bernard Shaw

But let’s say I’m unreasonable. What can we do to reduce the profound credulity of a painfully large number of American voters – so many of whom were obviously vulnerable to propaganda, misinformation, disinformation, fear-mongering, and other shades of textbook demagoguery?

Much like getting money out of politics, the entrenched interests that will resist any reasonable idea that we could possibly come up with are a given. IOW: granting that we may not succeed, what should we try?

Also, it’s okay to play satirist, offering up your nominees for the problems without necessarily having at hand any viable solutions.

TL;DR: if Democrats can’t reasonably reach today’s Republican voters where they are, then how can we subtly shift at least some of them back toward the middle where they might be persuadable??

F’rinstance…

[ONE:]
One party seeks to:

*Defund, disparage, demonize, and degrade public education, and
*Elevate the role of the church in civil society and public life
*Get young children Back To Work (think: “Oliver Twist”) [1]

Three guesses as to why.

And the first two guesses don’t count.

[1] This is significantly less important than the first two, IMHO, but the mere fact that it has recently been floated – particularly in red states – should tell you something about the party suggesting it.

[TWO:]
“We get the politicians we deserve.”

That’s an age-old saying. Why is it so true ? Because of blind partisanship and confirmation bias – feeding on a steady diet of what you already firmly believe. Most of them are lying to us. They’re not stupid, but many or most of them are evil. They know they’re lying to us. The problem is that most of US have no way of knowing that we’re being lied to. We’ve only heard our favorite side of the story.

But it shouldn’t be so easy to serially lie to us. Ever. And it certainly shouldn’t be so easy to lie to us when the stakes are so high (wars, impeachment, elections, pandemics – to name just a few important subjects).

“According to a follow-up survey by Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind, NPR and Sunday morning political talk shows are the most informative news outlets, while exposure to partisan sources, such as Fox News and MSNBC, has a negative impact on people’s current events knowledge.”

[A “negative impact” means that people who watched the partisan sources actually had less correct current event information than those who didn’t watch the news at all.]

“We expect that watching the news should help people learn, but the most popular of the national media sources – Fox, CNN, MSNBC – seem to be the least informative."

It’s hard to tease out how much is cause and how much is effect, but … as I used to say quite often … it’s best to get your news the way you should be getting your nutrition: from as wide a variety of sources as possible and from as close to the source (ie, with as little processing) as possible.

Thoughts? Magic bullet solutions? Finger-pointing??

2

Too late. There will be a long period of pain and suffering. Maybe two or three generations. Come back in a hundred years.

3

There’s a person in the Pittsburgh area who is looking to brainstorm educational outreach efforts to the population on economics and US government. This person seems highly motivated and I wish them well. I wouldn’t even know where to start with something like this.

4

While demand (the voters) is obviously at issue, so supply always is.

One thing to consider: Democrats – as a sweeping generalization – tend to try to understand the rules and work within them. Republicans – at the extreme – either seek to use money and influence to shift the rules in their favor, or – as in Trump I and Jan6 – outright break them.

Which is why I offer the Shaw quote.

What if we … didn’t … simply flagellate ourselves (as Democrats), but also did do our level best to play the long game, subtly shifting the landscape over years and decades. Republicans have always seemed to me to be better organized, have more think tanks, more media outlets (since the advent of Fox, at least), and probably more insidious social media influence.

They’ve found ways to identify their supporters, learned what language they speak, elided any sense of decency, propriety, or morality, and been as Machiavellian as any bunch in my lifetime.

And they make inroads at every level of government – Federal, State, and Local, aiming at the Judicial, the Executive, and the Legislative branches. They truly have a “whole of government” strategy that I don’t think the Democrats do.

IOW, their short-term tactics have been to win with little respect for the rules and norms, but their long-term strategy has been to change the rules over time. My comments about church, education, and ‘dumbing down the electorate’ speak to that.

5

The problem isn’t a lack of knowledge or a lack of education. There are a lot of right wingers and conspiracy theorists who are very educated.

6

The Democrats don’t need all Trump voters. They only need some.

History is a game of inches. Elections, of late, are won or lost at the margins.

7

When do you think the next legitimate election will be?

8

Maybe we pass out educational economics pamphlets at medical marijuana dispensaries?

9

Given that 1/3 of eligible voters don’t show up at the polls, perhaps part of the answer requires thinking about why that is. Given that most eligible voters are in the working class (which is 50% women and significantly non- white) and the Democratic Party has not addressed working-class issues in a meaningful way since the New Deal, thinking through this may be useful.

When neither party addresses your concerns clearly and powerfully, staying home makes some sense. Telling people they are bad and stupid just reinforces the idea that you don’t speak for them.

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Specifically, what “working class issues” have Democrats failed to address?

11

Yeah I too want to know this.

12

Make it a requirement to pass a history and politics essay before you can vote? That’ll go over just swell. :roll_eyes:

Let me ask a hard, even trollish question: what if you’re totally and completely wrong? What if the people who voted for Trump are the smarter and better electorate? You don’t agree? Well, the people who voted for Trump don’t agree with you; so who gets to judge? Who’s privileged to stand as the final authority?

If democracy itself has one glaring flaw, it’s that the stupid, crazy and evil get a vote too. Democracy is intended, and designed as best people knew how, to produce freedom– which includes even the freedom to make ghastly mistakes. It is to be dearly hoped that the grown ups in the room will step forward to try to run things as well as possible, and in practice there’s some tendency for this to happen. But ultimately the Peepul have to approve; the alternative would be an oligarchy of vetted “experts” imposing their will on the great unwashed, something like traditional Chinese authoritarianism (see the figurative definition of “Mandarin”).

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Perhaps we could start on this with a quiz.
Quick test to determine class:
Please choose the answer that best describes your reaction to the question, “Is your boss an asshole?”
A) I AM the boss
B) I don’t have a “boss”'as such
C) The word “boss” is anachronistic
D) Sure acts like one
E) Hell, yes

That is to say, acting clearly, consistently, and strongly to redress the the power imbalance at work is something Democrats have avoided since the Wagner Act. They talk much more about the “middle class” than the working class, and run away from anything that sounds like Roosevelt or Truman when it comes to discussing the power of capital over labour. Playing with minimum wage and a lousy health care program is not nearly enough. Housing, taxation and wage increases that reduce economic inequality, real job policy, food security, peace, and much else are not on the Ds’ agenda.
Are Ds better than Rs on some issues? Of course. But what vision do they present to end isolation, power imbalances, and insecurity? Obviously, judging by election turnout and results, not nearly enough. But the Ds have never been a party of, by, and for the bulk of the population and it will not become one anytime soon.
The blunt fact is, Trump’s victory is proof the system is working as originally designed. As Tony Soprano defined it, “shit flows down. Money flows up.”

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The Dominion lawsuit against Fox (the one that resulted in Fox settling for $787,500,000.00) proved what most of us already new: that the RW media were shameless and unafraid in their willingness to bald-faced lie to their viewers … day after day, month after month … about perhaps The Most Consequential Event of Our Lifetimes.

ETA:

Anybody notice just how rarely Conservatives credibly fact check Liberals [1]? It’s almost as if the right lies infinitely more frequently than the left. Also – screaming “FAKE NEWS” at the top of your lungs isn’t fact checking. It’s actually meaningless.

You don’t think the RW media has, or could have, fact-checkers? Really?

One thing I’ve grown certain of over the years: if they didn’t have so many important facts so profoundly wrong, they would quite likely NOT hold the opinions that they do.

[1] Actually, it’s worse than that. Tucker Carlson tried to get a Fox News reporter, Jacqui Heinrich, fired simply for fact-checking Donald Trump.

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Except that the suit wasn’t over whether Fox was deceiving the electorate, it was a lawsuit for libel, for the accusation that Dominion was “in on the fix”; and Dominion was awarded punitive damages against an attack on their reputation, not on the truth in general.

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Go look at all the documents that were produced via Discovery. It matters not “what the lawsuit was about.” It matters what we learned as a result of the lawsuit.

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And millions of Fox viewers will say “well, okay so Fox was wrong about that” and continue to believe everything Fox says because they’re against the left wing deep state socialist conspiracy :roll_eyes:

You’re expecting Flat Earthers to be convinced by evidence and logic. :unamused:

18

I’m not arguing with them, here. I’m (stuck) arguing with you here.

Fox wasn’t ‘wrong.’ They were lying. It’s inarguable if you look at the Discovery documents.

Fox didn’t cover the Dominion suit. In fact, Howie Kurtz, their media reporter, was told not to cover it at all, lest he be fired.

I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make, but you’re unwittingly making mine. I should thank you :wink:

19

Improve how we vote.

Largely copy and pasted from an earlier thread, with some clarifications:

The main thing is to hire people the way that you actually hire people.

To take an example, let’s imagine that your company is hiring a new lawyer. How do they do it? They gather together all of the plumbers, IT geeks, housewives, HR reps, and etc. in or related to the company, to hold a popularity contest. We want the people to be able to choose between the candidates, so we give them each some money to hire a PR firm, and they’ll go do things like cut ads, take interviews from comedians, and assemble to shout ludicrous escalating promises at each other on stage. There’s no requirements to apply. There’s no conditions for success past popularity.

No company does that. It would be dumb. No one, with an intention of hiring well, would ever choose that method.

Instead, what companies do is they put out a request for people with particular skills and credentials. A disinterested HR person looks through very simple forms that largely list things the person has learned and had experience doing, and approves a few of the best to go forward. The candidates are called in and lawyers and skeptical sorts to get into a room with the candidate and put the screws to him, to verify his personality, experience, and field knowledge. You’re going to employ a 3rd party to perform a background check on him. As the output of that process, maybe he’s accepted.

Maybe there’s some better hiring method that we haven’t discovered yet but, to my knowledge, this latter methodology is the current gold standard and wildly superior to the popularity contest.

Personally, I advocate a system of bottom-up placement. You issue duty summons to citizens, regularly. Many of those will go to jury duty. If they’re accepted for a jury then they’ll all spend time together in debate on a serious topic (the court case) and, consequently, they’ll get a sense for each other and who seems like a reasonable and reliable person. If they don’t get accepted for jury duty then you send them to perform some other community service - picking up litter, painting fences, or whatever. After they’re done performing that work, and seeing who was doing the work diligently and who was slacking off, you make them sit together and ask questions of each other that are meant to get to the bottom of which people are smart person who try to do diligent research and answer problems honestly. That’s explicitly stated as the goal of their discussion.

These groups, after having served their time, will do two rounds of voting. First, they will vote to remove anyone that they feel does not positively add to the output of the group. Once those people are removed, they will vote to send one of their number to work as part of the government hiring apparatus for a term.

That person will be randomly added to a new hiring panel.

The hiring panels will 1) review requests for positions by X local government (anything from judges to governors), 2) decide the offering wage, 3) post ads and perform headhunting, 4) review resumes, 5) hold interviews, 6) check references, 7) hire background check companies, and 8) hire folk (generally) or approve them for an election. They interview the candidates like they’re normal job applicants and decide who to hire. For the top level candidates like Governor or Secretary of State, they act like a primary committee, headhunting and recommending a few options who will be elected by the general public at large.

There’s no way to run for office outside of going through a hiring committee. It fully replaces the primary process.

In all cases, candidates apply for the jobs like they’re jobs. You send in a resume and either you get called in or you don’t. Or, alternately, you’ll get a call from the hiring panel asking if you’d be interested in switching careers.

Ultimately, there’s no politics to it. You just get professionals doing their job, hired by apolitical panels, based on proper, in-person vetting.

You do that and all the partisan and stupid bullshit will largely cease. We’ll just have good, professional people doing an honest and capable job of trying to manage all of our public institutions.

It’s less entertaining, to be sure, but your kids will eat nutritious food at school.

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F) We are a team. She has to go to all the meetings. I trained her in this field, her title is now lead. I suspect I make more $ than she does. And I would not be happy in her job.

Grand bosses, are all good people as well. I had one boss that was an asshole, but that was 35 years ago. Another boss that walked a pretty fine line. Went over the edge once for sure. Everyone else I consider a friend.