Comment by kjkjadksj
13 hours ago
Banning campaigning would go a long way. The state already mails out voter information containing a little stump speech of each registered candidate at least for Californian elections. Further advertisement is purely propaganda and leads to establishment victories over merit and a genuinely attractive platform.
File this under Lies Engineers Believe About Political Science.
Not 100% what OP proposed, but in my country political funding is extremely capped. Compared to US, campaigns here are tame to say the least. But overall it’s for the better IMO.
My criticism is of banning campaigning, it's a an engineers solution to a complex web of problems they don't understand.
Yes, severely capping funding, or even banning all private funding and giving all campaigns a fixed stipend off public money, is probably one of the most important things you can do for the health of a democracy.
It has nothing to do with what GP was suggesting of "banning campaigns" lol
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If you don’t understand that advertisement and public relations are merely propaganda, I’m not sure what to tell you beyond that. We think in terms of wholly different realities I guess. Nothing can convince you of my side and nothing can convince me against this conclusion that advertisement is fundamentally propaganda, and as long as we allow for it in politics we allow for the opportunity of malicious intent on the part of moneyed individuals.
Propaganda is definitionally just strategic spread of information. You shouldn't expect people to turn their brains off just because you've said propaganda. Any political speech done with forethought and intent is propaganda.
Suppose we allow only short published stump speeches and nothing else.
What prevents the green team from registering 200 yellow candidates who will all submit yellow-sounding platforms in order to split the vote?
Don’t we want to allow the public to judge candidates on more than their ability to write a single speech? Politics and representation is picking someone to perform tasks as our agent that go well beyond writing a single short speech with lots of lead time.
I think this would be pretty tricky to do. For example, I love the idea of limiting candidates to a little stump speech pamphlet that gets included in the voting materials.
But, what if instead of doing typical advertising, a candidate coordinates secretly with people outside your jurisdiction. Co-conspirators could spend months or years running stories about some issue—crime, homelessness, drugs, etc, that might even have some kernel of truth (but be wildly overblown). People in your society might jump in with their own stories related to the problem, legitimate stories of things that happened to them, but filtered up by “the algorithm.” Then, the malicious candidate can just reference the well-known (overblown) issues in their pamphlet. It’s perfect because they don’t even have to make or defend any specific claims, just gesture broadly at the fears that individuals have self-selected.
What do we ban? Getting your news from outside the jurisdiction? Discussing your experiences? Politicians meeting people outside jurisdiction? I don’t really see it…
I dunno. My gut feeling is that we just have to come to terms with the idea of democracy requiring some sort of media literacy. But then if people were good at identifying ads and ignoring them, they wouldn’t be used so widely.
Are stump speeches not propaganda? I don't see why the election system should privilege candidates whose political views are most compellingly expressed in quick little text blurbs.
That is how the system already works. Tv and social media soundbites are king, rather than substance.
I don’t think that’s true? There are exceptions, but Mike Johnson or Chuck Schumer aren’t successful because they’re getting really good zingers on social media.
I don't think that would do much in the current environment of media consolidation. Instead of direct campaigns we'd just see the issues of some candidates be more present in the media. Trumps stump says that illegal immigrants are the cause of all our issues and the media will be full of crimes by illegal immigrants, etc.
Being able to give a good speech is merit when the goal is to select a leader.
Strongly disagree, in the age of teleprompters and speech writers this is a major part of campaigns (because of TV) but hardly matters at all for actual governing. Our excessive focus on it is not helping us select better leaders.
I used to think that, before 2016. Apparently, incoherent rambling is also a successful strategy.
Harlan McCraney, Presidential Speechalist (2004) https://vimeo.com/90583017
Initial debates usually feature all serious candidates anyhow. Advertisement aka propaganda draws a line for me.
> Banning campaigning would go a long way.
With tongue in cheek, that qualifies you as the "people like Stalin" category. Not a good idea.
And allowing for infinite money to pay for propaganda is somehow not Stalinist?
If you're happy to accept almost literally everyone as Stalinist I suppose so. But if the word is going to mean anything then no, spending a lot on propaganda isn't Stalinist. It is routine governance. If you intend to organise people politically it is going to take a lot of propaganda.
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