My view on the problem with politics today is that people have started to view it as sport, not selecting competent people to represent you for law making. I call it Political Face Painting. Like the guy who paints his face the colors of his favorite team when s/he goes to the game. That's cool, if you want to paint your face to go to a ball game, drink beer and scream your head off, great, no problem. But it seems like that mentality has crept into politics where you now have people paint their face red or blue and view it as a competition between parties. That will not end well in my view.
There is no "selection process." The only people eligible to participate in federal "democracy" are already rich, powerful, and well-connected. The voters then "choose," in primaries and elections, based mostly on who has the best marketing, which is again a function of wealth and power. Occasionally participants in this process will throw ordinary citizens a bone as part of the marketing, but even these gestures are largely emaciated and performative. There's not some solemn exercise of civic duty going on.
2,000 years ago people born into wealth and power fought amongst each other for leadership and control while the population simply learned to live with the results. The only thing that has changed since is that the process has been optimized: less bloodshed, less constant dramatic upheaval, the hills and valleys leveled a bit. This benefits everyone, including those on top. But let's not pretend we're engaged in some grand experiment for the betterment of mankind. We're living in a plutocracy. Always have, always will.
> 2,000 years ago people born into wealth and power fought amongst each other for leadership and control while the population simply learned to live with the results.
2,000 years ago even the plebeians had the right to vote.
>2,000 years ago even the plebeians had the right to vote
2,000 years ago they voted in meaningless elections while the emperor was nondemocratic. And before that when the elections weren't meaningless, the plebians of Rome could vote while anyone outside if Rome was barred.
The idea that politics is a function of wealth, power, and marketing is cheap cynicism.
Also, the idea that being rich is bad pervades your post. I see this idea expressed more and more commonly. The truth is that, unlike you, the populace doesn't view politics as class warfare. Middle class American does not feel that only a middle class politician can represent them. As far as I'm concerned, this is a good thing.
> Middle class American does not feel that only a middle class politician can represent them
I've been hearing about the destruction of the middle class from middle class Americans since the Clinton era. In many ways, they were right, as I can look at some of those same people 30 years later and see how housing and medical debt, wage stagnation and the restructuring of the economy post-2008 have put those once middle class Americans into the lower class.
Are middle class Americans given a choice between being represented by people from their social and economic strata, versus representation from upper classes? Most middle class Americans have to work, they don't have the time, money or connections for effective political campaigns, especially at the national level.
Clinton and Obama were both middle class presidents.
You're adopting this class warfare perspective and it's simply not how normal people look at things. To a man on the street, being rich is not bad, it doesn't mark one as an exploiter. Normal people have also not accepted this theory, oh-so-common on internet message boards, that rich people are responsible for everything bad.
> The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.
The problem with politics today is how they are covered. Nobody wants to watch how sausage is made, but they will watch the sausage factory burning down. All you hear about is conflict and partisanship, but if you look at polls you see that the vast majority of the country holds beliefs firmly in the middle of the political spectrum, most people are reasonable, and will not run over your BLM or MAGA lawn sign. Unfortunately that doesn’t make for good entertainment, so we are being forced to only see and talk about the extremely partisan positions and actions on both sides.
Matt Taibbi (and others) compare it to Pro Wrestling. Which is actually kind of a cool thing, and gets dumped on way too unfairly in general as an art form. But as a model for politics, oh god, please, no. The guy with the nuclear launch codes should not be the best entertainer.
> Matt Taibbi (and others) compare it to Pro Wrestling.
Kayfabe. And yeah, Hate Inc, was such a good book, I listened to it 3 times in 2 years and it's scary how closely this resembles most of the political theater that takes place around the World.
It's not just the US, though its the most visible, it's a systemic issue that is ultimately incredibly effective: it's the same formula that reality TV used but on steroids and for much higher stakes and with mentally sick participants (sociopaths willing to do anything for power and control).
As a long time channer, 4 and then 8 before things got incredibly violent, I highly recommend the Q: Into the Storm to see exactly what 'type of people' buy into these types of conspiracies.
Like most of the BS that went on chans, larping was always for the lulz, so whether it was John Titor, or the Time Traveler who predicted Bitcoin would destroy the Earth it's there for entertainment purposes to fill the void between the boring parts of life (think: something to read while waiting for a bus or taking an uber).
Instead it was taken seriously by a cohort of the population who were entirely destroyed economically and disenfranchised since the Reagan era in the US (and abroad) and it shows the perils of how basic the current Human Condition is when a pervasive narrative that suits your desired reality eventually becomes your entire reality.
It also underscores the reasons why Social Media is and has been a major source for anxiety, depression and suicide: the Human mind is just not optimized for that much input, so when coupled with low intellect, wide-spread loneliness and a need to feel accepted at all costs due to a loss of community it's not hard to see how this all turns out.
Cullen Hoback was recently on Joe Rogan and it was super insightful to hear his views on the entire thing (seeing Hotwheels' drama was utter insanity as I checkedout entirely from channing after the mass shootings) after watching it in utter disbelief when this documentary came out detailing how this whole thing took place and who was involved.
There's some real value to this. I think a lot of folks on the left failed to understand that Trump is a heel, and were caught completely off-guard that every single scandal ("grab 'em by the pussy!") not only flopped, but energized his base. To this day, a lot of press seems focused on "orange man bad" without any recognition that they're supporting his political standing.
Can you explain why people would want a heel to make decisions about their lives and freedoms? I assume you’re implying that heels gain popularity through drawing emotion, but likely has an inverse correlation to being a good leader? Heels are self-obsessed generally, right?
Because the heel hurts "the other" - marginalized people - more than the average person who voted them in. They're willing to suffer a little, as long as the right people suffer _a lot_.
I'm not inclined to characterize people with radically different political views from mine... but I'd encourage you to read what Trump supporters say that they like about him and dislike about other leaders, and to take it with a lump of salt because you'll be reading the writing of his most fervent supporters and not his "median supporter." Also, I'd encourage you to read what the Trump-supporting press writes about him, and what they write about other leaders, because that's what the "median supporter" is probably consuming.
Also, something weird has happened in the wrestling world. Once upon a time, heels were booed, and faces were applauded. Today... heels are increasingly popular and faces are getting boos. I can't explain this.
>My view on the problem with politics today is that people have started to view it as sport
The average person is simply unable to evaluate competence, especially from news clips and "debates". The median voter is not a highly competitive white collar knowledge worker with a background in STEM necessary to evaluate complex topics with objectivity. Instead its the fry cook, the retail worker, the warehouse stocker, blue collar tradesman, liberal arts graduate, etc.
What really happened was that the pool of politically active citizens expanded, and now because of the shape of the normal distribution we are dealing with a sort of political endless summer - which media in particular are all too eager to take advantage of for political power.
> The median voter is not a highly competitive white collar knowledge worker with a background in STEM necessary to evaluate complex topics with objectivity
I'm more scared about highly competitive knowledge people with STEM degrees making political decisions. They might be naive enough to think they can engineer society to fit their whims with no unintended consequences.
Isn't that exactly what we have now, only people with less education? I don't think being a Lawyer, CEO, or Activist is any different when it comes to unintended consequences. I just look around and have to shake my head because the US Government is not comprised of the best people we have. They're all wealthy actors and most if not all get little to nothing accomplished except lining their own pockets.
It’s really not about STEM vs cook. Voters are stuck compressing a huge range of choices into a single vote which creates horrific incentives for politicians. You can piss off huge swaths of the population as long as you can just squeeze through enough voters it doesn’t matter. Toss in a little inequality in how much each vote counts and things get much much worse.
Consider what would happen if rather than voting for your favorite you subtracted points from the candidate you dislike the most. It’s not better but suddenly everyone wants to be an inoffensive centrist. Which just shows how much incentives influence the system.
> Consider what would happen if rather than voting for your favorite you subtracted points from the candidate you disliked the most.
Would that work? If there are only two candidates, then it’s equivalent to casting the inverse votes for. If there’s three candidates, and one is literally horrid, then would people give all of their negative votes to the horrid candidate in fear of destruction and leave very few votes to differentiate the top two? Or, would voters cast all negative votes for one of the top two and hope enough _other people_ downvote the horrible candidate?
Sorry, I know your comment wasn’t meant to be serious, but it’s an interesting thought experiment.
> The average person is simply unable to evaluate competence, especially from news clips and "debates". The median voter is not a highly competitive white collar knowledge worker with a background in STEM necessary to evaluate complex topics with objectivity. Instead its the fry cook, the retail worker, the warehouse stocker, blue collar tradesman, liberal arts graduate, etc.
The tradesmen likely know more about the logistical structure of a functioning society than most STEM employees, who too often live in ivory towers.
The restaurant staff often know more about human nature and behavior than the Psychiatrist who’s been trained to see all our flaws as chemical imbalances to be fixed.
Comments like yours are increasing the divide in this country, and are deeply problematic.
I agree with your point, but disagree with your point about psychiatrists. The ones I know are the first to tell you that the field of psychiatry is young, what we know about psychiatry is miniscule compared to what we don't know, and that reduction of behavior or disease to "chemical imbalances" is the result of simplistic marketing campaigns by drug manufacturers.
The issue is that people come to psychiatrists seeking help and, at the moment, the majority of tools in their toolbox to help their patients are the drugs derived from our study of the role of neurotransmitters in the brain. Giving medication that changes the levels of those chemicals to patients who are suffering is all that modern medicine can offer them outside of therapy and electromagnetic stimulation of the brain or nerves.
I feel like this article exposes a huge fallacy in how people think about politics in the US. Politics isn't a horse race. It's not about winning. It's about making the country a better place by enacting laws and making sure everything runs correctly.
If you win the election but make the country a worse place, you've still lost.
But people disagree about what makes the country "a better/worse place" and that disagreement leads to political parties and the need to win to promote policies they agree with. Just consider any wedge issue to see how this works, e.g. abortion and the fight over supreme court justices as a result.
The issue is the rhetoric these days is dominated by useful idiots online spouting talking points and propaganda to the point that "debates" are nothing more than whatever scores points (literally points = social media likes).
These days politics in the US is a ship without a captain visionary where two highly antagonistic teams of sailors fight for the right to steer the wheel, and when a sailor of one team gets to grab the wheel, he promptly appoints his cronies on all important posts, while the other team barricades the kitchen and sabotages whatever the first team tries to do. As you might expect, the ship's trajectory is rather unpredictable and it's a miracle it's staying afloat at all.
Politics is about making the country a better place FOR YOUR GROUP, whatever that group may be. There are many groups, with competing, incompatible definitions of "better." That's why "politics" exists in the first place. It's not a bunch of enlightened scholars competing to find the best solutions to hard problems, it's any number of tribes fighting to secure a piece of the pie for their people.
So yes, it's absolutely about winning. Losing means that your group suffers, and eventually that your group (ideologic, geographic, economic or, grimly, even ethnic) ceases to exist.
What does the median even mean in this context? The whole point of a median is taking the element that is greater than 50% of other elements in a strictly-ordered set, but since when have people or voters been strictly-ordered?
Some people care about climate change (or lack thereof) and others about women's rights (or lack thereof), so even if voters could be quantified, it would at least be a multi dimensional problem.
Same complaint here; definitely an odd type of average to be claiming in this case.
Having read/skimmed through, it sounds like median age is 50s, mode race is white, median education is no college. Unclear if that works out to largest demographic group in those dimensions but probably?
I was a little confused by the phrase. It seems like median only applied to age. Other than that white, no college degree, and not urban was just what was most common.
Kind of funny to think of peoples skin color on a sliding scale like a gradient and picking the median.
You could have the median for years of education… but yeah, I have no idea how you would calculate the median race or ethnicity.
And even if you could find the median, you can’t then just combine the medians for three completely separate characteristics and then say that is the median person.
Of those, the one that is most decoupled from the popular vote is the Senate. For that the best thing to do is to weight the stats inversely proportional to the state population. I think you'll find that the median voter in that case is a very 50-something very white person who really didn't go to college.
Right? How the hell would you find the median race? I guess you could try with skin tone, with half the people darker than the median and half the people lighter… but it wouldn’t make sense and would be useless for determining anything.
I don't understand why I would care about the median national voter. Shouldn't political parties focus on winning specific state-level races, both for congress and president? The national popular vote is meaningless.
Sure, but politicians running for national level positions (i.e. President) run a single campaign, and they have to select a single position set for that campaign (1).
You're right that the game theory is more complicated than it would be in a national popular vote contest, but I suspect that the optimal position isn't all that far off from where it would be in a single nationwide Hotelling game.
(1) Mostly, at least, I know they can of course run different ads and given different speeches in different states, flip flop, etc, but their reputation and messaging is inevitably going to bleed across state lines / time quite a bit.
I mean, it's possible that the optimal position isn't all that far off, but I would need to see that actually demonstrated before I start caring about the national median. It's not like the relevant demographics aren't available for swing voters in swing states - the campaigns already look at those.
I always thought of America as a very weird place, but every time, upon closer inspection, the "weirdness" revealed itself very superficial.
The basic reality of America is much more boring than the fancy hipster media tends to portray. They invented a virtual reality for themselves, and are living in it.
My political theory of America is that it is much more boring, and straightforward predictable politically, than any popular media portrayal.
And it is so because most media portrayals are partisan, created much to the ends of the respective party drawing it. A wishful thinking picture of reality.
> Yeah, it turns out most cultures aren't accurately described by popular stereotypes and mass media, and people are pretty much normal everywhere.
Yap, over past few decades the people running the popular media started to drink their own coolaid, and these popular media portraits went on to live their own lives fully detached from the reality.
When people on the TV now tell of American elections being totally unpredictable, it's hard to not to notice how the popular sentiment is actually very accurate at predicting the outcome. US elections are basically the anger-meter.
The typical voter didn't take a class in statistics. I know I didn't.
As far as I know, 99.999999..% of the voters are not at the median, so it escapes me why anyone should be concerned with the person in the middle.
Also, what if the number of voters is even? Then there is no median voter, it's just an abstraction.
What is a median in multiple dimensions, anyway? Couldn't it easily be far away from any individual? There was a thing that's probably been on HN multiple times about how virtually nobody is "normal" in, say, five or more characteristics at once.
Also, I'd like to point out: "Median" is relative to the scale you're plotting against. You can't combine multiple scales and treat them as one. The median voter may be white on the scale of race, may be 50 on the scale of age, may not be college educated on the scale of education, but that doesn't mean half the voting population is white, over 50, and not college educated. If you naively combine the statistics for instance, you wind up with that representing ~26% of voters (.74 * .56 *.63).
I mean, the title is often the most important part of a post. It's a boiled down version of what the creator wants to present to the world. In this case, it's a very badly boiled down idea.
You might argue that targeting a representative/"median" voter may a bit more effective than targeting the the average/mean voter, who (as you may observe) has one testicle and one breast, very unclear opinions on anything that matters, and is even more unreal than any randomly sampled person
That doesn't in any way mean the title is wrong. Any group will look like a minority if you narrow it down enough, regardless of how close that group is to the average of the population.
By analogy, it's accurate to say that the US median household income is $67,521, even though the number of people who make exactly that many dollars per year is probably quite small.
Technically, you can define a median for ordinal data, like age and household income. Median for categorical data like college education and race is mostly nonsensical, except maybe you could say that a median only exists if there is a category that has more than 50% of population. I still think the title is misleading.
Who cares about the voters? Please the donors and the media barons and the Knights of Influence, and let them render all such worries irrelevant.
The only reason to think of the voters is as a bugbear to keep your own folks in line. If their behavior gets too egregious the voters might wake up and realize "ants don't need to serve grasshoppers" and then there's all sorts of fuss.
> Democrats today could improve their performance enormously if every staffer’s computer monitor had a Post-It stuck to it that said “the median voter is a 50-something white person who didn’t go to college and lives in an unfashionable suburb.
The Blues should steal The Reds "theme song"? Aside from being a marketing / identity mistake, this won't be true much longer. The demographic trends seem to favor The Blues. That is, the country is getting less white and more like the demos that tradionally favor The Reds. Mind you, of course, not every one of these will go Red, but unless there's some sort of crazy inversion, time favors Team Red.
Yes. And those are whites becoming a minority, sooner rather than later. Will all of that growth go Blue? Probably not. But all of it doesn't, just more than go Red.
Will some collective demo switch sides entirely? That too seems unlikely unless there's some other traumatic event.
While it's true, no one can predict the future. As things are, odds favor the Blue.
