In Denmark we have a fairly recent political party called Liberal Alliance. They were funded by billionaire, bank owner and businessman Lars Seier Christensen for almost 10 years and at their height achieved 7% of the votes and a spot in our government. At some point Lars Seiers brother founded a political party and Liberal Alliance fell out of favour with the billionaire.
In our very recent election Liberal Alliance was decimated and Lars Seiers brothers party was voted in and is now bigger than Liberal Alliance.
Now, I’m not suggesting anything that you will need a tinfoil hat for. There are a lot of reasons things went the way they did for these two political parties, and most of them could have happened without the easy access to money. I do, however, think it’s a worrying show of how just much influence, a single billionaire can have in a small democracy, compared to the average citizen.
Speaking of LA, according to Politiken,[0] their leadership believes their terrible showing in the polls is partly due to a lack of financial support by the Danish industry at large. Specifically, they mention that LA got 3 million DKK less in support this election compared to 2015.
So maybe money does work? Or perhaps the LA's leadership is focusing on exactly the wrong reasons?
I believe their main problem has not been funding, but rather a clash of very strong-willed individualistic people in the party, people who all desire to be The Man/Woman In Charge, above all.
That tends to create a lot of internal friction, which became very obvious as the election results rolled in, and they all started backtalking each other and pointing fingers.
Maybe it's obvious, but LA is a political party I intensely disagree with. In my perspective, if they want to stand a chance in the next election, they need to do some serious restructuring, otherwise the internal friction will end them.
Root of the problem is the lack of inclination/resources for average person to participate in the democracy as much as a focused entity, especially one who doesn’t need to worry about putting food on the table everyday.
Many people I’ve met are completely apathetic of their voting powers. They don’t want to read current events, research candidates, go to town meetings, and work to inform fellow voters. On the other hand, many people are also burned out from going to work, getting kids ready, making dinner, putting them to bed, working 80 hours a week, etc. And they may not have the cognitive abilities to analyze data to figure out what is true and false.
Democracy relies on having numerous “informed” voters, but what happens when the machine gets so complicated that there are not sufficient “informed” voters?
> Democracy relies on having numerous “informed” voters, but what happens when the machine gets so complicated that there are not sufficient “informed” voters?
Democracy relies on level headed people doing politics.
In Finland we have similar attempt happening just now.
"Movement Now" is just starting. It was created by multimillionaire (net worth $300 Million) member of the parliament after he was denied promised position in the cabinet.
Now, I’m not suggesting anything that you will need a tinfoil hat for.
We had (in Poland) at least one party which suddenly sprung into existence with decent poll results, was very pro big business and had pretty shady financing.
Fortunately they(especially their leader) were incompetent.
What I'm trying to say is that to me your account is not surprising at all.
Why is this a bad thing? Is the implicit assumption here that the electorate is primarily mindless, and that things like advertising or facebook or fake news or russian ad buying is all it takes to directly translate from dollars (or euro or rubles) to votes?
It seems to me to run counter to the democratic idea that an individual’s opinion matters. Either individuals are good at forming their own opinions from the world and voting is the practical realization of that into a government, or the electorate is an unthinking blob to be managed, as it will only vote for that for which it has been sufficiently inundated with propaganda, in which case the whole election is somewhat of a farce to begin with.
Why isn’t the will of the people (given an equal opportunity market for people to buy mass media advertising) respected more?
Everyone is susceptible to propaganda, including you and me. Democracy is based on information, so if you mess with that information, you can most definitely have a noticeable effect.
The propagandists exploit the asymmetry of resources and time between them and you. They can lie easily, they have all the time and money to craft careful lies. You don't have all the time and money and domain knowledge to figure out each and every one of their carefully crafted lies.
Not to mention other more sinister tactics like tracking you, finding out your biases and using them against you with targeted propaganda campaigns.
Sure, but isn’t that the nature of the beast? If propaganda works on everyone, and people get to vote, then what is the meaningful difference between propaganda and campaigning?
I really don’t see how this isn’t a system working as intended. Freedom of expression is freedom to spread propaganda.
Either the electorate is to be respected and their opinions held as valid regardless of their media consumption, or propaganda is too dangerous and effective and elections are just a farce. I’m not sure you can have it both ways.
> Why isn’t the will of the people (given an equal opportunity market for people to buy mass media advertising) respected more?
Because some people don’t like the implications of what the public wants. Around the west you’re seeing a dramatic shift in people becoming more conservative in certain fronts, especially on the points of immigration and nationalism. The folks who dominate the kinds of sites that write about that stuff can’t abide by that. So they have strong incentives to denounce that all as the product of sheep-like voters being influenced by propaganda.
While it is certainly problematic it doesn't change the fact that the fault is ultimately with the voters and their lack of critical thinking and evaluation skills which makes it effective.
The scenario is akin to computer security. Sure it is wrong for a hacker to manipulate flaws in the system enmasse but the underlying susceptibility to the bullshit is the root cause. Even if you stop that bad actor the root cause remains open to all with evil intent.
If I were to spend trillions on the worst political campaign - say "lets ban the anti-retrovials and give everyone AIDS" in a remotely sane electorate I would have essentially zero impact other than the massive reputational damage I would take. In a terrifyingly insane one where the worst casually proposed idea achieved 100% acceptance the entire populace would be dead without outside military intervention.
Fixing it is easier said than done but would involve education and deep investment in critical thinking.
What is special about this day and age? For reasons of manipulation of large numbers of people, this has always been true. He who controls the present controls the past, and he who controls the past controls the future.
An important note about Liberal Alliance is that they are not a liberal party in the American sense.
They claim to somewhere between classical liberal and libertarian, but they are in fact by-the-book Ayn Rand objectivists. However that label has some negative connotations (for good reason), so officially they stick to the claims of classical liberalism, libertarianism and individual freedom above all.
It's a very interesting party, and as their recent collapse has shown, a party of very strong-willed individualists.
Money is not magic. Yes it opens doors when it comes to political power, but it also paints a big fucking sign on the head of the spender, that this dude is the one to milk. They do get milked much more than they actually influence anything, the whole while having their heads inflated about their importance.
My advice, drop in onto their caucus and start talking something big. Dress smartly. Make an impression of you being a "big man."
Believe me, it works.
I was a complete nobody on a work visa in Canada, yet I crashed on nearly every caucus party Christy Clarke had over 6 years I was there, and was making sure to make big fuzz with my appearance every time.
In our very recent election Liberal Alliance was decimated and Lars Seiers brothers party was voted in and is now bigger than Liberal Alliance.
Now, I’m not suggesting anything that you will need a tinfoil hat for. There are a lot of reasons things went the way they did for these two political parties, and most of them could have happened without the easy access to money. I do, however, think it’s a worrying show of how just much influence, a single billionaire can have in a small democracy, compared to the average citizen.