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That is exactly what you should do. If your polls show you are losing and you believe them, then one of your only chances is to convince your opponents supporters that actually they are losing in the hope they decide not to turn out on the day, and to convince some people that maybe he is actually really bad. That's why biased polls are useful. Because the polls can influence what people actually do, that is why there is so much argument about them. So yes, you absolutely should lie and mock your opponents polls even if you are certain they are correct. If you can convince enough people that Trump is a threat to democracy then you can retrospectively make the fake polls true. It's a high risk tactic and does not have a great success rate, but if you are sure you losing, then it is worth a shot.
It isn't political malpractice, it is just politics. If they didn't try it would be malpractice. You can lie about your opponent being a communist or a Nazi why shouldn't you be able to lie about their poll numbers, and that them attacking the poll numbers shows they are a Nazi in the hope that convinces people?
It sounds like you are both condemning and condoning the lies, and I don’t think that works. Either those political operatives have a duty to win the election at the cost of honesty, or not. Either we get the politicians we deserve(condemnation) , or we all lie to each other by mutual consent.
And I don’t think the latter situation is desirable or stable. Politicians lie to people, who know they lie, so they become politically disaffected, so the politicians lie more brazenly to keep them engaged, but the people know they lie and trust them even less; At some point all communication between them becomes pointless. Why would you normalize lies and encourage this spiral?
I am neither confemning or condoning. There are incentives put in place by our actions, those incentives lead to where we are today. A principled political consultant gets out competed and replaced. Politicians who are truthful and humble are outcompeted buy those who are not.
Those are the outcomes of our actions as voters and our actions as voters are downstream of the psychological make up of humanity.
Whether that is good or bad is irrelevant really. It simply is.
There isn't anything any individual can do about it, its a massive coordination issue, and there is no-one outside of humanity that can coordinate a better outcome.
The good news is this equilibrium is still better than the alternatives. Political engagement ebbs and flows and people are always very good at tricking themselves into thinking this time it will be different. This time the politicans will be better.
We had terrible disengagement in the 70s and it came back. No reason to think it won't happen again. Our ability to fool ourselves is one of our greatest strengths.
I don’t understand what’s so hard about condemning lies. To be clear, you think that Trump’s, above average tendency to lie, is morally perfectly fine, even required of a politician.
I don’t accept the responsibility of ‘us voters’. I don’t vote for liars generally. Some politicians lie more than others, and in different countries, at different times, politicians’ lies are more or less normalized.
Lies are a social technology with a purpose. In and of themselves lies are neither good nor bad in my opinion.
Trump doesn't really lie more than your average politician but he does lie differently. More the lies your boastful uncle tells than the more crafted non lie lies politicians generally aim for.
At a population level it doesn't matter if some individuals don't vote for liars, if the majority do.
Murder and Rape are social technology with a purpose, still evil, no matter your goals.
Go back to the abyss! Fall into nothingness that awaits you and your master!
I prefer "back to the pit" for a more modern feel.
I'm sorry to make you feel old, but I'm not sure this qualifies as modern any more.
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I'm not sure we've had someone literally accused of being a minion of Satan before. So, that's a first. Also antagonistic and non-constructive. So don't do this.
Eh, as an atheist veteran of the great online flame wars of the past, I have been called a servant of Satan before. Just a demonstration that the more things change the more they stay the same I suppose.
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Killing is a social technology and not always evil. See soldiers in war, self-defense and executions etc. Murder is a subset of killing which is defined by not being just, so it isn't a social technology, its an anti-social technology almost by definition. Lies can be social or anti-social depending on purpose.
Likewise with rape, sex is a "technology" to propogate the species, rape is the anti-social version.
Gandalf knew the value of political lies to accomplish his vital tasks. Bilbo would not have been at Erebor, had Thorin know he wasn't a burglar for example. And Gandalf of course was literally on the side of the angels...
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When you say that politicians are not decent people and should never be trusted, that’s not condemnation, or normative in any way?
A society’s tolerance of lies, or politicians’ moral status in that society, are not all-or-nothing propositions.
For most people whether politicians are decent people personally is irrelevant. And never to trust them is just based upon their incentives and behaviors. They lie because we reward them for lying. But we can still be aware of that fact.
Thete is no point in condemning them. They are what we have chosen. Our politicians are downstream of our tolerance (and reward) of lies. They are a symptom not a cause.
If you want to get a more truthful and honest society that may be a worthy goal, and then you will get more truthful politicians. But you can't do it the other way round. Its the wrong way to look at it.
You argue for tolerating lies, which you say is upstream of politicians’ tendency to lie, so by that logic you cause lies. You defend the dishonesty of politicians even though you are clearly bothered by it. You choose to ignore your moral instincts for this sophistry.
I argue we DO tolerate lies in our current society. And not just in politics. And it is not clear that those lies are always a bad thing, or even if they are a bad thing that it is possible to change it. So in out current situation, yes it makes sense to tolerate lies. But that is independent of whether lies are moral or not.
Consider another profession not known for trustworthiness: the car salesman. They want to sell you the cheapest vehicle for the highest price. Why? Because they get commission. Why do they get commission? So that their incentives are aligned with the owners of the lot, to get most money for the least outlay.
Are there honest car salesmen? Sure. some. But in general the incentives they have, pushed by the people who have most to gain is going to mean honest salesmen are outcompeted by dishonest ones. So if your friend is going to buy a car, you should make sure he knows the car salesman and himself are in an adversarial relationship, and both sides have incentives to lie. You say, I only have the budget to pay X, he says he cannot possibly sell it for less than X +10. You both know, you can actually pay X+? and he will accept X + ?? and you negotiate around to find where X + ? and X + ?? overlap. You can imagine a world where they both rock up and you say I will pay X+3 and he says I will accept X + 2, but that is not this world. To get to that world, you would have to change people. That you want to keep as much money as possible and he wants to get as much commission as possible. The incentive to lie is is built in. It is part of our moral intuition as you call it. You both want to get the best deal for yourselves. Any actions which do not understand and recognize that (like say communism) are doomed to fail.
Is it wrong to lie to a car salesman about how much you are willing to pay to try to get a lower price? If it is, is it still wrong, if you know he is lying to you about what he can sell it for?
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for 95% of politicians if they did not lie they would immediately lose the next election, the average person is just not very intelligent and get swept up by charisma easily* so lying is a dominant strategy. And they can't just all agree to cooperate in the claimed prisoner's dilemma, there are a lot of people who want to be politicians who would happily lie and win anyway. The most obvious lie politicians tell is that they personally support policies because they have good effects, when those policies are actually ones that they think will get them elected. Trump probably doesn't actually like medicare and social security, and doesn't actually think abortion should be left up to the states. Kamala is not proud of being a border prosecutor.
*originally phrased as 'stupid and gullible', which I think is literally true but just saying that seems antagonistic
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This assumes you can endlessly exploit the public trust forever. Arguably, the last election should have put to lie that assumption. I loathe to see your reply that the Democrats just need to lie better, as opposed to artlessly denying everything with shameless compulsive lies (Kamala was never border tsar!). The problem being, there are no more artful lies to be told. You cannot lie better when you are caught red handed in the act, which is where the Democrats routine denial of reality has landed them.
I find their lack of interest in running on issues to be telling. They don’t really seem to think their ideas have the potential to be winning issues for them. They just don’t seem interested in saying what they want and have used the same playbook for decades. Most of their campaign seems to be calling republicans various forms of evil and telling us they’ll prevent republicans from doing bad things. They don’t care to talk about their ideas and rarely have big plans they want to accomplish, and when they do, they’re often talking about how their ideas are “nonpartisan” or in the case of Obamacare, that the idea came from republicans.
My first advice to democrats is find a vision of a future you want to build that people would actually want to live in. And not only start talking about it, but start trying to actually build it.
Adam Curtis’ documentary Hypernormalisation is my recommendation to you: https://youtube.com/watch?v=to72IJzQT5k?si=zvQm4rUCploqAEtw
TL;DR: no such positive vision can exist any more, because there is simply nothing aspirational left inside democratic Western political philosophy that hasn’t already been tried and failed.
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What if the problem with that is the "and"? That is, what if the future Dem elites want to build is one the majority of the population wouldn't want?
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Not just Democrats, this is politics and we get the politicians we deserve. We vote for liars and the ruthless, so we get more liars. Nothing to do with Democrats vs Republicans.
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Counterpoint, voters respond to authenticity.
Kamala could have come out in early October and said something like this: "I have bad news to report. Our internal polls say that we're losing to Donald Trump. I know I'm not the perfect candidate. But I promise to do better. We still have a chance to win this election. Give me your vote and I promise to do my best to govern for all Americans."
That would have played incredibly well. It would have galvanized her base while also reaching across the aisle. And it would have given credibility to the idea that the Democrats represent normalcy and humility, and not just a different brand of crazy.
But the party was so buried in its own echo chamber that they played the "Trump is Hitler" card instead. It's hard to say they didn't deserve the outcome they got.
Counter-counterpoint, big donors respond to expectations of power. The more Trump is ahead, the better bet it is for the wealthy to give him money over Harris.
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They do not. They respond (sometimes!) to the carefully curated appearance of authenticity. Because they can't tell the difference. And that is much easier to fake than having actual authentic politicians. Your idea shows weakness and would not have galvanized her base it would have done the opposite. Why support a loser?
Believe me, we get the politicians and the political processes we do because they work (at getting people to vote for them, not necessarily at governing). People didn't vote for Trump because he was humble because he isn't and he doesn't even try to be! Trump understands that. Trump played the Harris is a lunatic communist card and he won. Not because of that, but it didn't make a negative difference and it made him look strong to his supporters.
Despite what feel good movies and shows might tell you, decades of working in politics have taught me that being a humble, truthful candidate is not a positive. It is a negative. And so that is why we get the politicians we do. Because there are very few people who vote for that. They vote for the people who attack their opponents and look strong doing it. And that should not be a surprise, we have to have a whole plethora of rules here to try and get a space where people will simply not attack their opponents, and there are not many like it, and quite often we fail at that even here. That is the norm.
For what it is worth, I wish you were right. I likely would not have burned out in the political arena to the extent I did.
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Yes, and repeatedly doing so will make anyone who has more than a goldfish memory despise you as an amoral sociopathic gaslighting liar who can be trusted only to manipulate everyone around him to serve the current party line.
As I said, politics. Political aides are not there to be moral, they are there to win elections (or try). I can assure that in my time in politics whether working for left or right wing parties never were they particularly interested in the truth of whatever campaign slogans or claims we were working on, just whether they could be made to stick.
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This is a very commonly stated model, often even just implicitly taken for granted, but I've yet to encounter anyone who's actually produced evidence that elections and polls work this way, rather than the opposite, which also seems perfectly cromulent. I'd say it's political malpractice on the part of both Republicans and Democrats to push polls biased in their own favor under the assumption that they'll help their chances without actually doing the hard work to prove to some standard that they're actually helping themselves rather than hurting.
Personally, I'd also say that, given that Democrats are supposed to be better than the Republicans, I find the notion that we'd stoop to the level of lying through our teeth to the electorate in order to manipulate them into voting for our side to be less acceptable. If such dishonest manipulation is just accepted by the party, that calls into question every other claim that's been made about how we're meaningfully better than the other side.
Personally, I'd also say that, given that Democrats are supposed to be better than the Republicans,
And here is a great example of a political success. There is very little difference between Democrat politicians and Republican ones when it comes to being a "better" person. So if they have managed to convince you there is (and of course many Republicans will believe the opposite), then people like me have been successful.
To be clear, we get the politicians we do, because we deserve them, the lies, the obfuscations, the techniques to divide, work. We vote for the people that use them successfully. Never trust a politician, left or right. In my decades in politics there are perhaps a handful I would say were actual decent people.
Do you think that this was always the case? If not, why not? I could see an argument for the professionalisation of politics intensifying the incentives for winning and the consequences of failure, compared to when politicians were expected to be independently accomplished and wealthy.
The increase in wealth controlled by the US government is probably a factor. A senator has influence over billions of dollars. Very few individuals will have that level of influence outside of it. One with a professional machine behind them, to be organized will outcompete those without generally. Even Trump benefited from thousands of workers for the Republican party in each state for ads, flyers, get out the vote etc. Though it's possible we'll move into a more celebrity based era going forward. Social media is a significant amplifier, for at least the getting elected part of the job.
But politicians believing one thing and doing another is as old as politics itself. Power attracts the ruthless and ambitious.
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Yes I think, there is a clear incentive driven change. Part of it is also an increase in wealth and power, a senator today has influence over huge amounts of money, power and prestige. It would be surprising if that did not attract the ruthlessly ambitious. It does have benefits, I think many politicians today are actually very competent. Just not very honest.
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That's an even more cynical attitude than I tend to take on, but I can't really argue against that. I suppose it's true that there's a sucker born every minute, and some people and parties are extremely good at taking advantage of it.
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Could you share?
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To be fair, if you're looking for a party that's going to be "meaningfully better" than their rivals, you're going to have a bad time. If they help you achieve your political goals, back them, there's nothing more to it than that.
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