Buying the Election & Gaming the People

One of the most important questions when it comes to Democracy is whether or not we are actually following the will of the people. Sometimes the will of the people can be obstructed through something like gerrymandering or some other systemic flaw, but perhaps the most poignant critique of all is the idea that the will of the people is so easily manipulated. It can be bought, lied to, manipulated, or manufactured.

The American election has given us a reason currently to ask this with the runaway success of candidate Bloomberg. Without many public appearances and just through his billions and media connections, the guy is having an enormous impact.

An impact that appears to be proportional to his spending:

Some of the other candidates are concerned and put off:

“Tomorrow night, for the first time, you’re going to be on a debate stage with the former mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, perhaps you’ve heard this. Two polls out today show that he’s your closest competition,” CNN’s Anderson Cooper said. “Right now, do you see him as the biggest threat to you, to getting the nomination?”

“This is what I do know and this I feel very strongly about,” Sanders said. “You know, Mr. Bloomberg has every right in the world to run for president of the United States. He’s an American citizen. But I don’t think he has the right to buy this election. … I think it’s a bit obscene that we have somebody who, by the way, chose not to contest in Iowa, in Nevada, in South Carolina, in New Hampshire where all of the candidates – we did town meetings, we were talking to thousands and thousands of people, working hard – he said, ‘I don’t have to do that. I’m worth $60 billion. I have more wealth than the bottom 125 million Americans. I’ll buy the presidency.’ That offends me very much.”

Moments later, Sanders was asked by an audience member, “If nominated, would you accept help from billionaires like Bloomberg and if not, why throw away something that can make a huge difference in winning 2020?”

Sanders repeatedly refused to answer the question.

The Daily Wire 

If it is the case that the American people can so easily be influenced and guided in the polls through message crafting and advertisements, we have a lot more problems than just this one time showing of Bloomberg. It means that many of our elections have solely been determined by the people who got out the most clever messaging to the most people.

It means that maybe even "Russian trolls" are capable of diabolically influencing the average American voter.

Traditionally, my response to the accusation of trolls winning the election has been one that is very much in good faith with the spirit of democracy: American people are able to see through lies and, moreover, the candidate that wins the election is the one that appeals most successfully to the will of the people by addressing their concerns and coming up with plans that they believe will positively benefit their life.

So, in a sense, there can be no meddling. Democracy is not open to meddling in the sense of being won through "trolling" or shallow advertisements because it is the people coming together to reach a consensus. The only meddling there ever could be would have to be direct.

The position of the Democrats appears to be one that suggests that the American people can and are manipulated, consent is totally manufactured, and the election is not about the consensus but about gaming the people. Politics becomes a game of deceiving good people.

In a sense, this is denying the agency of the people. It leads us to only one conclusion: Americans are easily fooled. This undermines the very basis of democracy -- if the electorate can be swindled so easily, why even have elections? Why have what really matters in the long-run determined by the fickle and malleable crowd?

People who advance these arguments do not actually believe in democracy but at the same time they accuse President Trump and the Russians of "undermining democracy."

Do we really have to believe that elections are really about charlatans practicing demagoguery? Does it all really not matter? Do we really have no foundation? Can we construct a system which would actually represent the people's will...? Do the people even have something that we can point to and indicate is their will..?

It's our duty not to our partisan politics, but to truth, to try to answer whether or not it is the case that our democracy is fundamentally invalid.

The Truth is In Between 

It is hard to say that the average American voter has no idea what they are doing. It's overly cynical and makes the average man, who we are all fighting and working for, seem incapable of distinguishing right from wrong, and he comes off as a complete rube. There's something utterly nihilistic and against the Christian spirit to suggest that people are incapable of knowing the truth.

Yet, it is ridiculous to suggest that people cannot be fooled, or that people cannot be manipulated into a completely disagreeable state. For we do know that there have been regimes that have practiced evil with a startling amount of consent from huge parts of the populace, and we also know that there were cultures that practiced cannibalism and torture as if it was a normal, everyday part of life.

A healthy, educated populace that have a media actively trying to report the truth objectively, without spin, and who is open to dissent in its editorials and hasn't created a complex system of sacred cows by which they manipulate and dazzle the people can be expected to be a good electorate. These are people that won't be "gamed" or "bought," because they are interested in patiently hearing the candidates out, discovering the reality, and voting based on their principles but not based on prejudices and unproven absolutes that they are goaded to believe by overzealous personalities in the media.

We can actually achieve something like an organic community where man is not being relentlessly manipulated by the managerial class, and where man is free to come to his own conclusions which would then be reflected in an electoral process.

Yet, it seems to be that these circumstances are rare, and this is not due to the shortcomings of the people at the bottom, but because of the lust for power of the people at the top.

It is easy to then say that the truth really is in between with man, and even in the best of circumstances, there will be people who are being manipulated and lead around. This will either be due to their personal fault  (a lack of real interest or education), systematic failures of the government or media to do their job, or even from manipulation of the managerial classes.

Nobles, Elders, & Bishops to Guard Them

Every system needs a series of checks and balances. We should always have votes, of course, because it is important for the will of the people to be known to some degree, but we should also be weary of the fact that naked democracy does turn into mob rule, and that people are entirely capable of being manipulated. 

In the current American system, the checks and balances are the government being a balance on themselves, and perhaps the unspoken check of the 2nd amendment. There is no apparent check on the media and the machinations of billionaires and the mercantile class, and with the religious institutions becoming increasingly powerless, it appears that only libertine impulses have taken over among the people. 

The fact of the matter is that we need a more dynamic system that has more factors in play, ensuring greater stability and safeguarding the people not just from the government, but from a media and culture that is dominated by money and one-sided ideas, all originating in NYC or LA.

What ultimately is required is a system in which there are static forces to offset the massive cultural shifts, and this can actually come in the form of strengthened religion and cultural institutions -- namely, cultural institutions that act independent of those which are designed solely for monetary gain and cheap entertainment. In short, we need more active participation in our society by our elders and our Bishops, and it would behoove us to have a class of ennobled people that served as cultural icons of greater importance than celebrities. 

We should not be under the illusion that all of nobility was always noble, but we should remember that strict codes of honor being regularly enforced are vital to the well-being of the national spirit. 

Since we do not have these things, our culture boils and spills over, and the rights that our Constitution guaranteed us are under threat. The electorate is in a bad position to making serious decisions because it is hopelessly partisan and often voting for either their won direct financial benefit, or they are under the influence of a culture of nihilism and libertinism that should have no role in how any society is governed. 

This is certainly a low point for democracy, and even though it can be said that our electorate continues to have plenty of healthy actors in it, we are not in an enviable position at all. 

I will try to write more on the theme of democracy and culture through the course of the election and try to unpack these problems more. 

Indeed, Running Sanders Would Be Insane

Allow me to quote heavily from an article by Jonathan Chait that I truly felt puts  out the very best case against Bernie Sanders being the Democrat nominee. Chait may be a liberal, but he goes far more into depth on this than I ever could and provides some very compelling arguments that deserve to be shared far & wide:

In the field of political forecasting, almost nothing is a matter of certainty, and almost everything is a matter of probability. If Democrats nominate Bernie Sanders — who currently leads the field in Iowa and New Hampshire, and appears to be consolidating support among the party’s progressive wing, while its moderates remain splintered — his prospects against Donald Trump in November would be far from hopeless. Polarization has given any major party nominee a high enough floor of support that the term “unelectable” has no real place in the discussion. What’s more, every candidate in the race brings a suite of their own liabilities Trump could exploit.

That said, the totality of the evidence suggests Sanders is an extremely, perhaps uniquely, risky nominee. His vulnerabilities are enormous and untested. No party nomination, with the possible exception of Barry Goldwater in 1964, has put forth a presidential nominee with the level of downside risk exposure as a Sanders-led ticket would bring. To nominate Sanders would be insane.

Sanders has gleefully discarded the party’s conventional wisdom that it has to pick and choose where to push public opinion leftward, adopting a comprehensive left-wing agenda, some of which is popular, and some of which is decidedly not. Positions in the latter category include replacing all private health insurance with a government plan, banning fracking, letting prisoners vote, decriminalizing the border, giving free health care to undocumented immigrants, and eliminating ICE. (I am only listing Sanders positions that are intensely unpopular. I am not including positions, like national rent control and phasing out all nuclear energy, that I consider ill-advised but which probably won’t harm him much with voters.)

Not every one of these unpopular stances is unique to Sanders. Some have won the endorsement of rival candidates, and many of them have been endorsed by Elizabeth Warren, Sanders’s closest rival. In fact, Sanders seem to have overtaken Warren in part because she spent most of 2019 closing the ideological gap between the two candidates, which made Democratic Party elites justifiably skeptical about her electability, thereby kneecapping her viability as a trans-factional candidate. Sanders probably wasn’t trying to undermine Warren by luring her into adopting all his policies, but it has worked out quite well for him, and poorly for her.

But Warren at least tries to couch her positions in a framework of reforming and revitalizing capitalism that is intended to reassure ideologically skeptical voters. Sanders combines unpopular program specifics in the unpopular packaging of “socialism.” The socialist label has grown less unpopular, a trend that has attracted so much media attention that many people have gotten the impression “socialism” is actually popular, which is absolutely not the case.

Compounding those vulnerabilities is a long history of radical associations. Sanders campaigned for the Socialist Workers’ Party and praised communist regimes. Obviously, Republicans call every Democratic nominee a “socialist.” But it’s one thing to have the label thrown at you by the opposition, another for it to be embraced willingly, and yet another thing altogether to have a web of creepy associations that make it child’s play for the opposition to paint your program as radical and dangerous. Viewing these attacks in isolation, and asking whether voters will care about Bernie’s views on the Cold War, misses the way they will be used as a stand-in to discredit his entire worldview. Nobody “cared” how Michael Dukakis looked in a tank, and probably not many voters cared about Mitt Romney’s dismissive remarks about the 47 percent, but both reinforced larger attack narratives. Vintage video of Bernie palling around with Soviet communists will make for an almost insultingly easy way for Republicans to communicate the idea that his plans to expand government are radical.

Sanders has never faced an electorate where these vulnerabilities could be used against him. Nor, for that matter, has he had to defend some of his bizarre youthful musings (such as his theory that sexual repression causes breast cancer) or the suspicious finances surrounding his wife’s college. Democrats are rightfully concerned about attacks on Hunter Biden’s nepotistic role at Burisma, but Sanders is going to have to defend equally questionable deals, like the $500,000 his wife’s university paid for a woodworking program run by his stepdaughter.

 It is interesting to think of some of these more scandalous moments of Bernie Sanders -- both of them are really compelling. The nepotism toward his family and potentially using his politics to get big windfalls for them is very damning and is so easy to spin into an anti-Socialist message. It feeds directly into the idea that the whole system is a fraud because the leadership themselves are not satisfied with just a regular life and a regular income, and they will gladly take advantage of their political connections to enrich themselves.

Moreover, the video of Sanders with the Soviets is a bit off putting... but what I found even more strange were his meetings with Sandinistas and talking about how they are radically misunderstood and saying to a CBS reporter (and journalists in general) you are worms. Let's also remember that punching the press is something that Trump gets into trouble for regularly.

While he can mount a defense of this that is appealing to his own base, there is really no way that this will appeal to moderates -- even to many moderate Democrats. Maybe if there was no Venezuela to point to right in this moment and the only socialist reference point was Sweden, it wouldn't be so bad, but that doesn't describe now.

But the truly compelling part of the article is below:

But Hillary Clinton’s surprising defeat created an opportunity for the party’s left to promote an alternative theory for how the party could and should compete. It deemed Donald Trump’s win a sign that capitalism had created such distress that voters were now rejecting conventional politicians altogether and open to radical alternatives who might promise to smash the failing system. Indeed, by this reasoning, Democrats would do better, not worse, by nominating more left-wing candidates, who could distance themselves more credibly from the discredited Establishment.

Yet this theory has had two clear tests, and failed both of them spectacularly. Numerous activists and intellectuals in the Sanders orbit held up Jeremy Corbyn as proof of concept for his viability. Anticipating a Corbyn victory, they argued over and over that Corbyn was showing how socialism would attract and mobilize, not repel, voters. Corbyn is more extreme than Sanders, but Sanders enthusiasts themselves drew a connection between the two, and his massive defeat obviously casts serious doubt on the model he was supposed to vindicate.

A second example, closer to home, is even more relevant. In the months leading up to the 2018 midterm elections, the Democratic Party was the subject of bitter and widespread criticism from its left wing. The party’s strategy was to flip the House by recruiting moderate candidates who would avoid controversial left-wing positions and instead focus attention on Trump’s agenda, especially his effort to eliminate Obamacare. The left predicted the strategy would fail — only an inspiring progressive agenda could mobilize enough voters to win back the House.

“Their theory of the case is to recruit old white guys who are longtime Establishment insiders who will run on a boring agenda Democrats would have run on 20 years ago,” complained Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “The DCCC is doing it wrong,” insisted Democracy for America’s Neil Sroka. “In district after district, the national party is throwing its weight behind candidates who are out of step with the national mood,” proclaimed a long piece in the left-wing Intercept attacking the party’s House recruitment strategy, “The DCCC’s failure to understand the shifting progressive electorate is costing the party.” Zephyr Teachout was quoted saying, “Their strategy is stupid in the first place and bad for democracy, but then it’s really stupid because they have 26-year-olds sitting around who don’t know anything about the real world deciding which candidates should win.”

Ryan Cooper, a socialist columnist, cited the Intercept piece to ruminate just why the Democrats would advance such an obviously doomed strategy. “Their naked self-interest and bourgeoise ideology is camouflaged behind a technocratic facade of just doing ‘what it takes to win’ — but it’s a facade they generally believe wholeheartedly.” The Democratic plan was obviously doomed to fail, so perhaps their motivation was actually to enrich themselves and advance neoliberalism, while claiming it was a good strategy to win the House.

As we now know, it was a good strategy to win the House. Democrats flipped 40 seats. Tellingly, while progressives managed to nominate several candidates in red districts — Kara Eastman in Nebraska, Richard Ojeda in West Virginia, and many others — any one of whose victory they would have cited as proof that left-wing candidates can win Trump districts, not a single one of them prevailed in November. Our Revolution went 0–22, Justice Democrats went 0–16, and Brand New Congress went 0–6.* The failed technocratic 26-year-old bourgeoise shills who were doing it wrong somehow accounted for 100 percent of the party’s House gains.

Had Democrats failed to win back the House, their left-wing critics would have claimed vindication. Instead, the entire debate sank below the surface without a trace. Indeed, what happened instead was something peculiar. The leftists chose to focus on a handful of left-wing candidates, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who defeated center-left Democrats in deep-blue districts. The conservative media strategically elevated her in a bid to make AOC and her squad the party’s face. The mutual interest of the two sides made AOC the narrative center of the election. The fact that the party had just run a field experiment between two factions, and the moderate faction prevailed conclusively, was forgotten.

Intelligencer 

It's amazing to see how this trope of Socialist progress in America is completely destroyed with these observations, especially on the heals of AOC making stupid remarks about how the Democrats really aren't left. Like the pushes for the normalization of homosexuality and transgenderism in the 2010s was just moderate thing that happened, and like Obamacare was not also potentially a radical step in a new direction.

Jonathan Chait is also completely right: the debate did just kind of slink off into some corner. None of the candidates have seem to have gotten the memo on this one, either, because every single one of them has attempted to stay relevant by going to the hard left of Biden, as if Biden is bumbling because he isn't flexing hard as a far left socialist and he is totally out of the current meta.

I think it can be argued that, because of online culture and echo chambers, many people feel like the populace is more representative of their own opinions than they think. Everybody is biased to seeing some glimmer of hope that there is a popular thrust in the direction that they want. Moreover, the sort of people who give their opinions on the internet tend to not be too representative of Joe Sixpack or Tanner Marijuana-Occasional-Partaker. Many people do not sit with their eyes glued to the political poop chute and are not really big into nuanced arguments for Socialism -- for that matter, they are not big into nuanced arguments for any third position of any kind.

At the end of the day, the candidate has to appeal to a broad swathe of Americans while motivating their base. Sanders can motivate his base, but his weird meanderings into the far left will completely doom him just as how any praise for race realists or rubbing-of-shoulders with, say, an apartheidist or the BNP would destroy Trump.