The Exhausted Electorate : Why We Need More Data Driven Candidates.
While the sweeping oratory of Pres Obama was inspirational, emotionally uplifting and managed to bring a large amount of disparate elements in the country together, that is not what is needed in the 2020 election. There are more and more signs and comments that the electorate has grown tired of rhetoric and ‘feeling’ things, in large part because we’re exhausted. We’ve spent the last few years running on emotions; outrage, anger, bits of hope here and there, frustration, confusion as to how our country can be getting pulled back into the 1800s but most of all, a growing distrust of words. As Eliza Doolittle said in “My Fair Lady” , “Words, words, all I hear is words, don’t tell me, show me!”
Now, to be fair, Pres Obama is highly intelligent, and he loved deep diving into solutions, but that is not what rocketed him to the White House. His ability to get us to feel hope was infectious, and while hope is important what many of us are craving is substance, data, answers, plans…actual solutions to the many pressing problems ahead of us. We’re tired of the emotional pleas, the non answers, the rambling storytelling, just tell us HOW you’re going to fix things, how much it will cost, how we’re going to pay for it and let us decide based of facts, not what we feel.
As we all know, there has been an ongoing issue with anti-intellectualism in the States. We, as a nation, love our drama. We love “reality” TV, we love seeing the fights and the hate and the betrayals, we pay millions to watch wrestling, which thrives on manufactured rivalries, barely there story arcs and raw emotion. Our TV shows and movies tend to embrace action over intellect, drama over wisdom and do little to encourage the concept of rational conversations. That’s not to say I hate action movies, (I don’t) or take issue with convuluted story arcs, (depends on the story, some I love, others not so much). Our entertainment is a reflection of who we are, not the other way around.
When I watch shows made in other countries, such as BBC shows, there is a marked difference in the behavior of the characters, the settings and the pacing. It’s usually more deliberate and realistic, not over the top and overwrought. I think our choices in entertainment have driven how we view politics.
Politics, and your political choices, should be something you study, you research, you learn about and absorb. Not kneejerk reactions to the best slogan or stump speech. Emotional voting decisions is how we got to where we are now. A bitterly divided country, which cannot move in one direction for more than a few years because as soon as the other party takes over, it wants to undo everything the prior party has done. So here we sit, becoming more backwards, more divided and losing our standing in the world because we are a country whose citizens choose tantrums over talking. We feel it is more important to “own” the other side instead of solving a single issue.
The only way to break this cycle of entropy is to put forward and support candidates that deal in facts and data. If we continue to elect people simply based on our emotional reactions or what has become a tribal identity, red v blue, nothing will improve. We need people who are willing and able to take the time to research an issue, take input from multiple sides and distill those ideas into a workable format that the will be the most effective and get the most buy-in from fellow legislatures. You can be practical and still maintain your principles.
Of course, what would make this monumentally easier would be term limits for Congress, but that’s decades away from happening because we need a majority of our Congress people to be younger and less interested in politics as a career and more interested in politics as a means of solving problems.
