Have you changed your vote?

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by Juniper

The trouble is, these politicians SAY this is the way things should be, then go and do the opposite. Doh.

That's because the truth is always unpalatable to some (regardless whch camp you're in) and because the soundbite media culture trims down anything any politician says into a devastating body blow to their campaign. They have to paint a picture that fits within fairly narrow confines.

Fundamental problems require fundamental solutions, big ideas. Unfortunately big ideas are about as dangerous a thing for a politician to express as one can possibly imagine. If what you have to say is logical and sensible, it matters not one jot. By the time the media have finished with the words that came out of your mouth, they've turned you into a dangerous communist, or a self-serving oligarch.

Individual people are pretty damn smart. Taken as a body, they make up the public and the public isn't smart, it's easily manipulated. It's easily manipulated, because it exists (by its nature) in the public sphere, and the public sphere is the media's demesne. The 24 hour news channel is King, in the realm where public opinion is formed. And the political world defers to it absolutely. It has to, It's not about the ideas, now. It's about navigating the path to the White house, trying to simultaneously inspire with change whilst reassuring with continuity.

This is the price of mass engagement in the public sphere. Big ideas get spun out into the media, where heavily biased news shows use them to create moral panic at the prospect of the other side's candidate winning. With each campaign team complicit in creating this destructive environment by throwing as much dirt as they can dig on the other (overtly or covertly taking said dirt to the public), they have effectively trapped themselves in very narrow pass. Too many concepts have become politically suicidal even to contemplate.

People don't want big ideas. We might think we do. We might even crave them. We want leaders who are capable of solving our most pressing national problems and leading us into stability and prosperity. The trouble is that requires big ideas. It requires political bravery. We don't like big ideas, we fight them. We don't like brave politicians, we don't elect them.

Unsurprisingly we (on both sides of the pond) have elected more and more craven and self-serving politicians and fewer and fewer brave politicians (or maybe I am being unfair) to high offices.