Polidicks: Electoral Dysfunction

Electoral Dysfunction

I hate liberals. I also hate Liberals. I hate Democrats. I hate Republicans and conservatives and Libertarians and communists and authoritarians and, well, you get the idea.

My personal values overlap with a few of those groups, but I struggle to identify myself as part of them. I will take the attendant guilt or credit being one of eight billion humans, or for being a single person, but I resent being considered guilty of being a Democrat because I’ve voted for Democrats. I’ve also voted for Independents and Libertarians and Republicans. I don’t identify with anarchists, but that’s because I’m much too soft and selfish to be one.

My eighteen-year-old will tell you that makes me the worst of all of them: the moderate.

I don’t identify with that group either.

I can be one, or I can be one of eight-point-five billion.

You can’t describe a person by describing the group to which they belong. There is no homogeneous group of humans that agree 100% on everything. You can’t find two individuals who agree 100% on everything. There were identical twins from Australia who went a little viral this year for finishing each other’s sentences and I’ll bet they don’t agree 100% on everything. One of them probably hates raisins in their oatmeal cookies, and one of them is probably reasonable about it.

I have two kids, and I was present for both births. I know that mom and I don’t agree on what that day was like.

That’s an extreme example, but when we talk about politics we are talking about life and death. Unless you don’t think politics is life and death, and there’s something else you and I don’t agree on.

Any time anyone has discussed Minnesota Twins Fans, or New York residents, or fly fisherman, or domestic abusers, or any group you could possibly imagine, that group is not real. It can’t be, because there is no way to define a group of humans other than simplifying and then ignoring how different the individual members are.

You can describe a specific group, say Black/Hispanic, queer, cis, 30-to-40-year-old Los Angelenos who passed the AP History test and graduated from Garfield High. They won’t be homogeneous enough to agree on everything.

Media has created a whole landscape filled with straw men, and they set them up to make a point in 1000 words.^[1]The smartest among them could easily write 10,000 words of the same article to make a more careful and thoughtful point, but who would read that? Few of us. (I’d rather write it. Hence, this pile of words. Thanks for reading!)

Even once I learned about it, I fall to the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. We read a magazine and when we have specific knowledge of a topic, we find misstatements and mischaracterizations. Then we move to the next article and treat it as pure fact.

This is best stated in Erwin Knoll’s “Law of Media Accuracy”:

“Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge.”*

We like stories, and will always value a good, but dramatized, story above a fully true but non-dramatic telling. It’s no wonder that as humans get better at telling stories, they become less factually accurate. Stories about a group, especially one that we are invested in, that story will, without fail, be dramatized.

Stories need to simplify concepts so that a group to represents the people in that group. We can’t be accurate with big issues because that means there are nuances that will divide the group. We can’t be accurate with small issues because someone in that group won’t care at all about a particular issue. I know a non-voter who only cared about one issue (low taxes) and felt confident the voters in suburban Texas would stay conservative. He couldn’t be bothered to worry about any of the other issues, so he never even considered making his way to the polls. Born in another country, he took time and effort to become a naturalized citizen, yet doesn’t believe in voting against aggressive deportation tactics even when they occasionally sweep up actual citizens. Go figure.

I don’t actually hate Liberals, or Republicans, or the “woke mob” or wannabe fascists. I don’t hate them because they don’t exist. They are groups created by people telling stories. People like me. And I’ve already established that you can’t trust anything you read.