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chhotiiBack in the 18th century, I wouldn't have known jack shit about the people running for President of the United States. I would have known whom I liked and trusted in my local community. So I would have voted for the brightest among them to be an Elector, and they would have gone off to D.C. and chosen a president.
Now, thanks to technology, we have mass media. This tends to centralize things. Newspapers are regional, but they buy a lot of content from A.P. etc., and report on what other newspapers report on. Radio stations, likewise. We now have TV. We have cable TV with 500 channels. We have Internet and e-mails making rounds from friend to friend until it circles the globe.
Also, people move a lot more frequently, and farther, and have family spread all over the country.
Thus, now, I know a great deal about the people running for president, and I don't know jack shit about the people in politics at my local level. I have been bombarded with so much information about the 2 men who are really in the running for President that I'M QUITE SURE WHICH ONE I PREFER, THANK YOU VERY MUCH. On the other hand, barring any new and striking information that comes my way in the next couple of days, my decision process when I get to the polls and have to vote for local candidates will be: I don't know anything about these people, but I'm voting for the Democrats, straight-ticket, just because they are less likely to side with the Republican governor, Mitt Romney, whom I know I don't like because he supports George W. Bush. I was not prejudiced against Romney on account of party when he was elected in 2002-- I honestly looked at the stated positions of each candidate, and didn't vote for the Democrat-- and just look at what we got, just another mouthpiece for Bush on Beacon Hill! I am more politically aware and active than the average American, and I would be willing to put in the extra effort to learn about local candidates if it would do any good, but I feel burned by the Romney thing. Oh, I see, "Republican" is just shorthand for "will stand with Bush no matter how outrageous and idiotic Bush is being, when push comes to shove", huh? It will be a long time before I'm trusting enough to vote for anyone other than the leading non-Republican ever again; any other vote is a vote for the neoconservative agenda personified by Bush.
What a reversal from "all politics is local". Sounds more like "all politics is national" in my case. Pollsters have observed that the incidence of ticket-splitting is way, way down, so I think most people are acting like I am-- just jerking the straight-ticket lever in reaction to what they see about the prominent national politicians. Democrats and Republicans alike are doing this.
So you see, even when the people we vote for at a local level have names and faces and personalities and you could easily go talk to them in person, they are barely more than proxies for Bush and Kerry. Of course, members of the Electoral College have been just proxies for a long time; this whole rant just speaks to why there won't ever be any clamor for having the actual names of the actual electors cluttering up the ballot.
The Electoral College is dead. It is stinking and attracting flies and maggots. Let's bury it.
Now, thanks to technology, we have mass media. This tends to centralize things. Newspapers are regional, but they buy a lot of content from A.P. etc., and report on what other newspapers report on. Radio stations, likewise. We now have TV. We have cable TV with 500 channels. We have Internet and e-mails making rounds from friend to friend until it circles the globe.
Also, people move a lot more frequently, and farther, and have family spread all over the country.
Thus, now, I know a great deal about the people running for president, and I don't know jack shit about the people in politics at my local level. I have been bombarded with so much information about the 2 men who are really in the running for President that I'M QUITE SURE WHICH ONE I PREFER, THANK YOU VERY MUCH. On the other hand, barring any new and striking information that comes my way in the next couple of days, my decision process when I get to the polls and have to vote for local candidates will be: I don't know anything about these people, but I'm voting for the Democrats, straight-ticket, just because they are less likely to side with the Republican governor, Mitt Romney, whom I know I don't like because he supports George W. Bush. I was not prejudiced against Romney on account of party when he was elected in 2002-- I honestly looked at the stated positions of each candidate, and didn't vote for the Democrat-- and just look at what we got, just another mouthpiece for Bush on Beacon Hill! I am more politically aware and active than the average American, and I would be willing to put in the extra effort to learn about local candidates if it would do any good, but I feel burned by the Romney thing. Oh, I see, "Republican" is just shorthand for "will stand with Bush no matter how outrageous and idiotic Bush is being, when push comes to shove", huh? It will be a long time before I'm trusting enough to vote for anyone other than the leading non-Republican ever again; any other vote is a vote for the neoconservative agenda personified by Bush.
What a reversal from "all politics is local". Sounds more like "all politics is national" in my case. Pollsters have observed that the incidence of ticket-splitting is way, way down, so I think most people are acting like I am-- just jerking the straight-ticket lever in reaction to what they see about the prominent national politicians. Democrats and Republicans alike are doing this.
So you see, even when the people we vote for at a local level have names and faces and personalities and you could easily go talk to them in person, they are barely more than proxies for Bush and Kerry. Of course, members of the Electoral College have been just proxies for a long time; this whole rant just speaks to why there won't ever be any clamor for having the actual names of the actual electors cluttering up the ballot.
The Electoral College is dead. It is stinking and attracting flies and maggots. Let's bury it.
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loop
Date: 2004-10-30 12:23 pm (UTC)(BTW, wouldn't it be wonderful if Bush won the 2004 popular vote but lost the election? It's quite possible.)
As a general method of voting, I am sympathetic to your point (and I'm disappointed in Romney too), but it sounds like you're setting up a positive feedback loop. The more people vote (as you will now) based on party affiliation, the fewer independents there will be, and the more that any future candidate *must* adhere to the party line because he/she won't be able to win by appealing to independents.
The Massachusetts Republican Party has been trying for a long time now to make inroads into the dominance of the Democrats (who hold all of Massachusetts' US Congressional seats and a veto-proof 2/3 majority in the State House). Generally they did so by running moderates on social issues. But they were having no luck, except to get mostly-powerless governors elected, probably because too many people vote knee-jerk Democrat.
For instance, there was a local race in 2000 in which my mother and grandmother both voted for the Democratic candidate because he was the Democrat, not realizing that he was pro-life and his Republican opponent was pro-choice. So I can't blame the Mass. GOP for shifting tactics and allying themselves more with the national GOP, as disgusted as I am by the prospect. The other method wasn't working at all.
What makes matters worse, in my view, is that both political parties are ideologically impure. They are are not based on coherent principle, they are made up of (to my mind) bizarre alliances. In theory, this diversity might've allowed for new "third opinion" viewpoints to emerge (e.g. decriminalization of drugs and ending the "War on Drugs", change from the "third party payer" health care mess by decoupling health care from employment, taking an axe to the Department of Agriculture).
But instead, "there can only be at most two views". People stay "loyal" to their parties because they want to win (or maybe just can't see alternatives). One weird result of this is that policies and principles can shift drastically (such as the Bush administration, which once claimed to be in favor of fiscal conservatism and disinterested in nation-building) without many people changing loyalties. This creates even less consistency of principle, and causes those of us to do vote on principle and don't fit neatly into any party to become more and more disenchanted.
Re: loop
Date: 2004-10-30 04:53 pm (UTC)Agreed about the positive feedback loop. It is unfortunate. I'd love to re-design the whole electoral system of this country in a way that made third-party candidates viable-- I'd love to vote for the occasional Libertarian or Green, but as it is, I feel the need to use my vote against the Republican (as opposed to for the Democrat) on nearly every possible occasion, and voting for the 3rd party doesn't usually confer that. Thus we get the over-emphasis of the two parties which leads to this polarization, I think. Alas, I can't think of anything I, personally, can do to break this feedback loop without risking my own interests.
I do find the ideological impurity, the alliances and the flip-flops, in the major parties bizarre-- and how stable loyalties to a party remain in the face of all of that. I'll try to justify how far my own loyalties go here. My own primary loyalties are not to the Democratic party-- I'm not that comfortable with their platform-- but to the issues that I'm most concerned with. There are just 2 biggies.
1) I'm avidly anti-Republican in this election cycle because I'm furious with how badly Iraq has been handled, and want to kick them in the rear (admittedly, Democrats share some blame, but the bungling of Iraq was an effort spearheaded by the Republicans). Does this issue make me permanently loyal to the Democrats? Well, it would be hard to reverse the effect of these events on my party loyalty, because a) the mistakes that were made can't be un-made, and b) Iraq is now such a mess, I can't imagine anyone being able to do a good job handling it, so no matter how messy Iraq is under a Democratic administration, I'll still blame Bush for getting us into it in the first place. Of course, decades down the road, outrage over Iraq will fade as fresh outrages take its place, so I'll be critically watching what the Democrats get into too!
2) My top long-term issue is the environment. Reading the League of Conservation Voter's report, it's clear that the average Democrat in Congress votes much more pro-environment than the average Republican, and it has been this way for a while; the dichotomy on this issue is pretty stable. If the Republicans shifted towards being pro-environment and/or the Democrats shifted towards being anti-environment, then yes, my party loyalty would evaporate as the trend progressed. I don't forsee that happening, though-- Republicans seem pretty wedded to a) big corporate interests who would like to continue spewing their externalities all over the rest of us and b) fundamentalist Christians who seem to think that the state of the planet will be moot once the Second Coming occurs.