Chicanery

Only one link for today: this article from Newsweek/MSNBC gives some insight into why the Democrats lose elections despite having far superior ideas (and, indirectly, why Fox News has soared to the top of the ratings). It's about how your brain makes political decisions and how to frame an argument.

Here are my thoughts: it's really, really sad that political decisions need to be marketed. This kind of crap is why I'm not that interested in going into politics, even though at first glance it would seem like it's right up my alley.

However, more importantly, the marketing of political arguments will directly lead to the downfall of the democratic process. To show how, first let me lay out a couple of axioms: first of all, people will never make completely rational decisions. This has been proven beyond a doubt in economics and many other arenas. Second, not everyone will have access to all available information - some people will have an information advantage.

Taking these two givens, we can se how the presentation of information is of paramount importance. People at large won't do the necessary research and dispassionate analysis to have a true opinion on the issues, so they think what they are told to think. If (using an example from the article) a couple Arabs buying AK-47s could incite people to vote for more gun laws, without considering the benefits and drawbacks, they can easily be manipulated to vote along with the political interests of those with the information advantage. Since this is a situation exacerbated by the one-way medium of television (as Al Gore points out in An Assault on Reason), a medium that is accessible only to the super-rich, we have a small coalition of people ruling the majority. Call that what you want, but it ain't democracy.

This is a problem that isn't going to go away anytime soon under our current system. Saying "we just need to educate the population and give them the power to make informed decisions" is NOT a solution, for the simple reason that it is impossible. The only solution is to impose vast restrictions on the ability of big businesses to have political influence and limit the role of money in the political process. Of course, that presents a Catch-22: how do you get this political machine of wealth and power that so easily can manipulate popular opinion to make rules that will limit its ability to do exactly that?

My head hurts.

One more thing I thought when I read that article: Imagine if Al Gore had given the response outlined in the lead-in to the article... think the last seven years might have been a little different?