Quote:
Originally Posted by Cameron Swift
Reflecting on the trend towards nastiness in recent elections, I'm becoming disillusioned with the political process. My outlandish suggestion would be for each candidate to submit their platform to the elections body (here's what I'll do, here's what I won't do) They mail out a pamphlet to each household detailing the candidate's platforms a week before the election and then you go vote. No arguing, no campaigning, no attacking. Everyone just politely accepts the result and continues on with their life.
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I'd be all for it.
As I mentioned in the U.S. politics thread, Dan Carlin's most recent podcast covers this issue - the black/white morality, the hatred, the intense partisanship. A good point he raises, and one I've asked myself, is how representative the people who dominate political discourse - the journalists, party loyalists, bloggers, social media activists, and forum flame warriors - really are of the average citizen.
The most angry people dominate our politics. Our systems favour ideologues because of how our nomination process works and how few people participate. Moreover, public discourse today is driven by clicks, page-views, and re-tweets, and the more inflammatory the message the more clicks it gets. A friend who's a newspaper columnist has commented that his job is to have a strong or even extreme opinion, because people like to read columnists whose views they hate as much as ones they share.
So to me the bigger issue is finding a way for social discourse to be more representative of average people. Or at least rewiring our minds to able to put the furious rantings of 10 per cent of the population into context.