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Respected Politician - a contradiction in terms?
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
Is the modern apathy to voting and political life shown by the general populace a result of spin, or the fact that we don't have politicians we can respect?
Statesmen, giants of the profession, have been replaced with career politicians and civil servants who have not experienced life in the firing line, and who are thoroughly detached from reality of life and the results of the decisions they make.
Does this matter?
Would politics be more appealing if it meant something, and you respected the men and women who made the decisions?
Statesmen, giants of the profession, have been replaced with career politicians and civil servants who have not experienced life in the firing line, and who are thoroughly detached from reality of life and the results of the decisions they make.
Does this matter?
Would politics be more appealing if it meant something, and you respected the men and women who made the decisions?
0
Comments
The reason for voter apathy is a mixture of things. First and foremost, as with so many things, is sheer ignorance. The "I don't know and don't care" attitude that the public so readily embraces leaves so many voters with glazed eyes come the plebescite. And that, I controversially add, is the problem. Screw universal suffrage. If people can't prove themselves fit to hold an informed opion, then they shouldn't be allowed to vote. Knowledge should be rewarded. Anyway, enough stirring.
Another reason? Differentiation, or complete lack of it. Everyone is being dragged into the vortex that is centrist political manifestos. The realisation that the other party has some good ideas, so why not take them over to win some more support. This just means you have a party that spans the vast majority of the political spectrum, leaving it down to other factors.
The key deciding factor, therefore, is the party itself. The sheer ineptness of Tories in the UK, of the socialists in France, of pretty much every opposition party across Europe. Who's going to want to go out and vote for a tall bald man with the personality of a wet paper bag?
Ultimately, this means it's down to lack of respect for politicians, combined with ignorance. Give the electorate something they can enjoy, and they might get off their ass to find out more.
I have to say that I find appealing the idea of some acknowledgement that not all men are equal -- at least not in their mental faculties.
There are several options that spring to mind. One would be simply making attainment of the franchise conditional upon a non-trivial conscious act: national service and tax payment are two possibilites that just came to mind for me. Another option might be a "political knowledge" test to qualify for voting. Or perhaps the score on such a test could be used as a weighting factor in the vote -- e.g. if a person scored 50% on the test, his/her vote would count half as much as that of someone who had scored 100%.
However, does anyone have any suggestions as to how one might test the worth of someone's opinion, the extent of his/her knowledge? Constructing a reasonably objective test would be my prime concern: I would even go so far is to say that it would be a condition of my support for a system such as I have outlined above.
We should be educated (passive verb) or we should be educated (adjective)? That is, should someone (government, school, or other) educate us, or should we go out and educate our selves?
Who's responsibility is it to become all one can be? The individual's or the state's?
That said, a class that taught political and philosophical thought, the principles of rational analysis, that might be a good thing. Not giving people fish -- teaching them to fish for themselves. (Roll on H&MP!)
Rhetorical question?
Does it come as any surprise that I hold to the belief that the individual is responsible/accountable for their own actions/plight?
Ever read "Illusions" by Richard Bach? 45 minute read. Git yer morning "rah-rah"...
What you get without struggle, you place little value upon. What you gain through a long and difficult struggle, becomes precious to you. When you hand people their franchise, it is something which they might easily piss away, and not miss. When they must work for it, they guard it, treasure it.
Mac, if you keep taking these positions which are so similar to mine, you will age into the same curmudgeon as I... :eek:
In a country born on the will to be free, what can be more fundamental than the right to reap the rewards of what you sow?
If the vote was removed tomorrow from the population, would the outcry be on principle or on practice? In other words, would those people who don't know, don't care, and don't vote, protest for something that they didn't use anyway?
People like Churchill, Wilson & Heath would probably not make it today, because lets face it, they would hardly win a beauty competition. And I'm no mentioning their intelectual merits, as thats a different question than my present line of thinking.
Indeed, people will not always develop to their full potential. I have no problem with the State teaching people to fish; I object to people being given fish indefinitely and without conditions.
The issue that arises, then, is whether one should accord electoral power in proportion to knowledge, understanding, responsibility. On the other hand, we might accord an equal share of power to all electors, regardless of how much each one actually knows about the subject, and purely on the basis of an accident of birthplace and surviving to age 18 in a country where infant mortality is virtually zero.
"It sounds like a good idea in principle, but ( theres always a but!) who would decide the questions to be asked? In the words of Lisa Simpson - "Who would police the police?"
Its all well and good saying there should be a test to see if we are knowledgable enough to vote, but what would be the cut off score. Some people perform well under test situations, some have stage fright, others can learn information parrot fashion without actually forming any real opinions of their own. I just feel that a system such as this would separate people rather than unite.
The actual quote is from the Roman satirist and poet Juvenal, who wrote, "Sed quis custiodet ipsos custiodes? Cauta est et ab illis incipit uxor." The entire sense of Juvenal's phrase has to do with husbands guarding their wives to stop them having affairs. "But who is to guard the guards themselves?" he asks. "Your wife is prudent and begins with them."
Precisely why I would prefer to a yes/no binary system a system under which voting power were accorded in proportion to knowledge and understanding. Not easy to test, I agree, but a fairer system than a simple cut-off at 50% or whatever.
To deal with your last point first: although information learned parrot-fashion is no indicator of understanding, it is still knowledge, and better than none. No matter how good one's reasoning capabilities, they are useless if one has no information on which to base one's reasoning. Reasoning in the political arena may be hard to test: knowledge of hard facts is not.
As for the issue of 'stage fright': perhaps not so important in an election as in an active executive branch of government (or, heaven forbid, the military), but those who freeze up under the slightest of pressure and are unable to make a decision are absolutely the last people I would want to have making critical decision. In any case, it's not as if a general election is a wholly unexpected event: one has quite some time to prepare, test or no test.
And why should that be a bad thing? The aim of our hypothetical system is precisely to ignore or reduce the impact of ill-informed or downright stupid opinions, leaving the intelligent, well-thought-out rational ones to hold sway. At least, that's how I understood the exercise.
Many people pick up the newspaper to get the sports scores, read about how some worthless celebrity has fucked up, and glance at the front page. How are you supposed to be able to make informed decisions about complicated affairs when you don't know anything about them?
A test for voting? How would that work? Even the most intelligent man would not be able to make the best decision for a given situation if he didn't have all the information. And if it tested knowledge of prior situations, there's no guarantee that it would help in a future situation.
A scary statistic on how uniformed the general population is.
Americans all over the country were polled on two questions, the first asking "Do you think Congress on the whole is doing a good job?", the second being "Do you think your representative is doing a good job?". One quarter answered yes to the first question, 75% answered yes to the second. :rolleyes:
We're not after the best possible decision. Hell, even I realize that's impossible to attain -- you know how dear to me Arrow's Possibility Theorem is.
That's called induction, and there's no logical reason for it to be true ever. You can watch a million apples fall from trees, but that's no logical guarantee of apple #1000001 falling rather than shooting off to the Moon, doing a loop-the-loop on the way.
Making extrapolations from past experience is all we mere humans can do! It may be non-logical, but it's all we have in elections or otherwise.
I agree that it would be much more efficient to have decision-making weighted in favor of the knowlegable (sp?) few.
My contention is that political decisions today are so complicated that they require knowlege in many varied areas. I'm a fan of the decsion by commitee approach. Have the best minds in every area come together and weigh the pros and cons, independant of what the rabble believes. So tests that judge general knowledge wouldn't really help that much, unless they spurred people to learn more.
And we all know how inclined the average person is to do this.
To understand US and UK policy towards the Middle East for example, you would have to have knowledge of the international financial exchange markets, multinational banking, economics, projection of military force, Muslim culture, military capabilities, etc.
Yeah, but I think that while we are inclined to use induction to make decisions, it's not always inevitable. Decisions should be made given the best information at the time. Having a set policy is good to guide some decisions, but it can lead to terrible errors.
People do not have to understand the ins and outs of the political process to understand what policies will make them happier. If the aim of a government is to maximise the happiness of the people then a democracy with universal suffrage is the only way.....
It is very dangerous to think that because some are more intelligent that they know what is best for others.....
Ever read "Profiles In Courage", by JFK?
Jist is that politicians must have the moral courage to do what they believe is best for the sheep, because the sheep are too damned stupid to know what is best for themselves.
Rule by the self-styled supremist/elitest is more the province of the left in the US... the right is more be responsible for yourself.
Although we are most frequently on opposite sides of the fence, I will agree with you on this one, Toadborg...
Nearly, but not quite:
The party that gains power will be the one that makes promises that are the most attractive to most of the electors.
The party that retains power will be the one under whose rule events that are most attractive to most of the electors actually come to pass, whether or not they were a direct and immediate result of the promises earlier given having been enacted.
I never suggested that a mere IQ test should be used to guage adequacy to wield a full vote. There are issues of factual knowledge and reasoning capability to be considered as well.
Let me phrase opposition to universal suffrage in the following terms: why should someone be accorded voting power on a par with any other citizen purely on the basis of (a) accidental location of birth, (b) accidental nationality of parents, (c) surviving to an aribitrary age, (d) staying on the good side of the law for that length of time? Only one of those is even close to being a conscious act!
Thanks for that, you learn a new thing every day, no sarcasm intended
They don't freeze under pressure, but experience anxiety of sitting an exam. I'm sure there are a lot of people out there who actually knew the correct answer to a question, but failed due to not responding well in an exam.
I still don't feel that the top 10% or so of the population should or could make our decisions for us. Who is that sure they would get in this elite band? I'm not, but I still feel that I am an intelligent and well informed individual who is concious of the choices I make on election day. Who would feel comfortable in passing their descision making over to a nameless faceless group just because a test said they knew more than what you did - sorry not me
I agree. You'll notice that I have expressed a preference for a 'sliding scale' with voting power accorded in proportion to score, rather than a simple, "Okay, if you scored 75% or more you get one vote, otherwise go home." Also, I agree that any such test needs to be made as objective as possible, a difficult aim to achieve. Once those criteria were met I would be fairly comfortable with supporting such a system of restricted franchise.
(Everyone: please, please note the qualifiers before attacking me on this. I don't have the energy to fend off attacks directed at positions I have already excluded.)
By the way, Toadborg, do you think that voting should be compulsory? If not with the present system, would you support it if boxes for "Abstain" and "None of the above" were provided?
You're welcome. If ever you have the opportunity, I recommend picking up a good dictionary of quotations. It's a very useful thing to have (especially when one hangs out in politics forums) -- as someone once said, a quote is one man's wit and all mankind's wisdom.
I'm not entirely sure that I see the difference. The person who, although knowledgable, suffers 'exam fright' seems to me to be 'freezing under pressure.'
(Don't take this to mean that I think written examination is the best way of testing knowledge and understanding -- I know it isn't, just as the lecture isn't the best way of communicating information. Regrettably, it's often the only practical way.)
(Incidentally, that reminds me: "People are like gases: they are always less than ideal, especially under high pressure.")
I didn't say that now, did I? :: smiles sweety ::
Well, in essence that's what you do do on election day -- you pass power into the hands of a group of unelected (and, therefore, publically unaccountable) advisors who happen to tag along with the elected (accountable) officials for whom you nominally voted. In a system of proportional representation it gets worse: there you vote for the party, and the actual parliamentary deputies are chosen by a small committee within the party itself.
In any case, I refer you to my above response to Toadborg about my preference for a 'sliding scale' over a simple 'yes/no' system.