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Democracy is essentially populist, because elites fight for votes through media. Parties optimize their selection process for those more suited to deal with pub

Democracy is essentially populist, because elites fight for votes through media. Parties optimize their selection process for those more suited to deal with public opinion. Reaching as many votes as possible forces parties to draw their discourses around the lowest common denominator, which dumbs it down a lot. The competition is fierce, so small by small step parties push the boundaries. There's an inverse correlation between the results in the last election with the incentive to push the boundaries. So if you're losing by a wide gap, dumb it down and appeal to emotions even more. Then your competition is forced to react, hopefully not quick enough. I've been a consultant in a company for political parties for a brief period of time in my country, and the level of technification and specialization is on par, if not better, with the best marketing campaigns in the private sector. I laughed when I saw the scandal about cambridge Analytica. IDK in the US but in Spain microtargeting and segmented audiences were already being used by that time. It didn't feel right to me so I left before I made a year in it. It wasn't only my job, it was the people I had to speak with, the feeling after the meetings that we were in the hands of completely idiot sociopaths.

unfocussed_mike 5y ago
> Democracy is essentially populist, because elites fight for votes through media. Democracy is by no means essentially populist. It is when it is in its sickly stages, maybe. It's also by no means necessarily dependent on elites; again that is an indication of the failure of democracy (and the arrival of money as speech). It is very fair to say that few of the older democracies are keeping populism at bay -- India is failing at it, Britain has failed at it, Turkey has failed at it, etc.
- ThalesX 5y ago
  What are some examples of democracies that are keeping populism at bay? I live in a country that became democratic around when I was born. I don't feel that as a young democracy we're doing a particularly good job at keeping populism at bay; I'd go so far as to say we're failing at it.
  - iso1631 5y ago
    I don't get the feeling there's much populism in New Zealand, Finland or Denmark, all of which had Womens Suffrage at least somewhat before 1900. Sweden has been struggling with it recently, and Australia is pretty bad. Isle of Man does fine.
    - mardifoufs 5y ago
      I think you are confusing a lack of populism with homogeneity of thought/culture. Your examples are all pretty small countries with little cultural divides. Even NZ got pretty populist on immigration when the number of immigrants started to increase, and Denmark literally was the harshest on refugees; they literally sent them all back a few months ago now that they say Syria is safe enough. Sweden is another example where populism went through the roof seemingly out of the blue, considering its historically consensus/trust based democratic system, for reasons similar to almost every other country in Europe. If Sweden went that way, I'd think any country could. If anything, I think your examples prove why populism is inherent to truky democratic systems. To me, it's actually a sign of a well functioning, diverse society not only demographically but also ideologically. And that's imo pretty healthy - at least much more so than a permanent homogenous consensus. (And in a democracy if elected politicians don't align with voters under the pretext of not bending to populist demands, someone else will do it. The job of politicians in a democracy is to represent the electorate, not the opposite.)
      - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
        New Zealand surely has a decidedly non-little cultural divide. It manages to avoid populism despite extraordinary pressures.
  - deleted 5y ago
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- CaptArmchair 5y ago
  The problematic part about these discussions is defining what 'democracy' and 'populism' really is. Democracy is essentially shared, representative decision making based on a set of shared values and rules which every participant subscribes to. It's perfectly valid to promote your ideas and policies to your constituency with respect to the governing framework which is democracy. The mechanics may seem 'populist' e.g. campaigning, advertising, interviews,... but the fundamentals aren't challenged. Populism, however, does challenge those fundamentals. And it does so by using the governing rules and values within a democratic framework to challenge that framework itself. Examples of that is relentlessly attacking press and journalism itself, or antagonizing political adversaries, rather then challenging ideas and policies in a respectful public debate. The really insidious part are leveraging tactics that veil these as paramount to the sustainability of democracy. In that regard, democracy is innately flawed. It doesn't nor can't stop the rise of populists who push democracy out of the door. Ultimately, it's a social construct which people actually have to subscribe to. And if environmental circumstances change - e.g. economic recessions, social inequalities, existential threats,... - a critical mass within a population can grow which no longer is willing to subscribe to that construct. Or, worse, assumes that the alternative they subscribe to is democratic by nature when it is anything but democratic. History has an abundance of autocratic states who use 'democratic' or 'people' in their own naming e.g. the German Democratic Republic. Democracy is always at odds with the social-economic dynamics and the formation of cultural and economic elites which hold de facto power and have plenty incentives to leverage political power in order to retain a status quo. Democracy doesn't overcome that, and never will. However, what democracy does have going for itself is that it enshrines and protects an important set of fundamental freedoms and rights which apply to everyone regardless of their position in society.
  - js8 5y ago
    I really like your analysis. I think the fundamental reason why is democracy so vulnerable is that in practice, there is a lot of socioeconomic inequality in societies, and that really erodes the core democratic concept that everyone should participate equally in decision-making. So in very unequal societies with a semblance of democracy, like in South America (and it's slowly coming to USA as well), you get these right and left populist oscillations, as different classes (upper and lower) seek to gain all political power. I don't think anybody has figured out an effective way yet how to dampen these oscillations in a society, and equalize it, so it would return to the ideal democratic mode.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  > Britain has failed at it I don't see that (I live here). The UK has had a two-party system for at least 60 years. The Conservative Party is much the same as it was under Margaret Thatcher: xenophobic, opposed to public expenditure. The Labour Party is currently in the grip of people who admire Tony Blair's policies (interventionism, focus groups, and triangulation). Labour had a brief phase of mass-movement socialism under Jeremy Corbyn, who might be tagged "populist", but didn't deserve that tag. The current Conservative Party is led by a would-be populist; but the rest of the party doesn't seem to admire him very much. The only real populist much in evidence recently was Nigel Farage, who seems to spend more of his time in US TV studios than on UK TV. "India is failing, Britain has failed" makes it sound as if UK politics is dominated by pogroms, temple-burnings and riots - as if British society is in a worse state than Indian society. That's far from the truth.
  - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
    > I don't see that (I live here). I also live here. Brexit is evidence of a failure of democracy to contain populism. It is absolutely not in our national interest, is already harming us, was almost certainly bankrolled by dark money and foreign influence campaigns, used unlawful tactics and above all was driven by systematic populist xenophobia. As you live here you will also have received the leaflet that tried to show the threat of Turkey joining the EU (with a map that didn't mark out Turkey but did mark out Iraq and Syria) even though Turkey is no closer to achieving membership now than it ever was -- this was vile populist manipulation. Boris runs Number 10 as if it is unaccountable to parliament. He flings out bread-and-circuses distractions when his mendacious lying is exposed. He deliberately deployed a populist smear in parliament for which he won't apologise in parliament, and people around him rallied to support it as he doubled down. We are heading into a criminalisation of dissent and protest that even Maggie wouldn't have tried. We have a government implementing serious voter suppression based on untruths. And we have a populist leader of a government that is increasingly corrupt, who rode into power on a Brexit wave who does not believe the rules apply to him (and who has evidence to support it, given how many last-last-last-chances he's been given to "shape up") and a ruling party that appears to be swimming in Russian influence money in a manner so severe that our "special relationship" partner has openly rebuked us for it, and so damaging that our prime minister buried a report into it. Boris is engaging in Trumpian tactics and his party seem unable to do a thing about it; the frog is being boiled just the same way as it (still) is in the USA. We're in enormous trouble. (And what is really striking to me is that the bulk of the criticism I have typed above is apolitical; members of his own party have levelled essentially all of these criticisms).
pydry 5y ago
The level to which mainstream political parties obsess over marketing demonstrates just how desperately they want to "push" policies upon the populace that they've already decided upon rather than listen and adapt. This is probably because $$ and internal power struggle mostly decides policy, which is A) not democratic, and B) opens the door for political movements which represent policies outside of the elite overton window.
- qsort 5y ago
  I don't see how that is abnormal. "The level to which mainstream political parties obsess over marketing", as you put it, is certainly nauseating, however anybody who actively becomes involved with politics does so because he wants to "push" towards a specific direction. If I decide to join the X party as opposed to the Y party, this is supposedly because my mind is already set, and X policies align more with my set of preferences than Y policies. Failure to listen and adapt, if anything, tells more about how Western politicians are increasingly worse at being politicians, (i.e. at achieving tangible policy goals evaluated according to their own set of preferences).
  - pydry 5y ago
    I dont think thats true at all. Most politicians get into politics out of ambition and a desire for power and status. Dedicated activists are kind of rare as politicians. I can think of a few but not many, and they normally become politicians precisely because they're fighting for a popular cause that mainstream elites are suppressing.
    - qsort 5y ago
      They aren't mutually exclusive. There exists a multitude of political organizations. All of them want power and status (there's nothing wrong with that; up to a point, egoism is a virtue), but not all of them want the same things. So yeah, they want power and status because they are humans. They join party X as opposed to party Y because that's their preferred direction.
_xnmw 5y ago
Yep, and the corollary effect of living in a non-democratic country is that the political discourse is far more intelligent, because they're NOT trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Over the past few years I learned Russian and started watching Russian/Ukrainian popular TV and following political writers on all ends of the spectrum. Yes the media environment in Russia is far more authoritarian. But like a tightly-knit academic community, it is also far more intelligent. The nuance and the depth of discourse found on the average popular Russian political talk show (even state channels like Russia 1) is far beyond anything I have ever seen in America, with the exception of some independent podcasters and niche communities like Hacker News and academic think tanks. And the Russian elite lament this[1] because they cannot engage their American counterparts as peers, everything has to be rewritten in the language of CNN/Fox even during high-level state negotiations. [1] https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2022/01/20/anthony-blinken-and-the-intellectual-bankruptcy-of-the-biden-administration/ https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2022/01/20/anthony-blinken-and-t...
- airstrike 5y ago
  I mean, leaving propaganda issues aside for a moment, you still have a sample size of two. I'm not sure that qualifies as data.
- deleted 5y ago
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- zozbot234 5y ago
  You know that the U.S. too (and the West more generally, of course) has "tightly-knit academic communities" to discuss things such as the concerns that might come up in high-level state negotiations? In fact, the broad community of "open source intelligence" almost invariably has a markedly better handle on those issues than high-profile parts of USG that ought to theoretically benefit from secrecy and non-public info - despite common claims to the contrary!
  - _xnmw 5y ago
    Yes exactly, that was my point. High quality political analysis is niche in the US, but it is more mainstream in Russia.
forinti 5y ago
I had a similar reaction to the Cambridge Analytica documentary. There was nothing new about adjusting discourse to a particular audience. It's just that there are new tools to identify groups of people and target them. I don't think much of Alexander Nix and I think he did a terrible job of defending himself. He just let himself be framed into a defensive position and didn't really question it.
- anamax 5y ago
  The problem with Cambridge Analytica is that the wrong people benefited. https://medium.com/@PatrickRuffini/the-medias-double-standard-on-privacy-and-cambridge-analytica-1e37ef0649da https://medium.com/@PatrickRuffini/the-medias-double-standar...
BongoMcCat 5y ago
You really should read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death Because what you are saying might be how it is today (especially in america), but it doesn't have to be like that. The book I mentioned tries to explain why, and I think it does a good job at it.
- iqanq 5y ago
  >Postman said that the contemporary world was better reflected by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement, rather than by Orwell's work, where they were oppressed by state control. In the covid era, we get both!
odiroot 5y ago
> Democracy is essentially populist, because elites fight for votes through media. Media are just well, a medium to deliver the "offer". The real fight is about handouts, especially the short-term ones. Pork barrelling is still effective at winning the elections.
alfiedotwtf 5y ago
Nice summary. I think old school they A/B tested using focus groups and so policy took a long time to get to Policy-Voter-Fit... but now that we have microtargeting, it's compressed these timelines by factors. You see this as politicians can announce something in the morning to then compeletly backflip by lunchtime. ... though I don't see this political hyperism letting up. In fact, I believe it will not only get even faster but will change from a passive targeting of ads to actively manipulating of content to individuals in order to slowly cause an action i.e make a politician or union member think a certain way, get a competitor's employee to perform a certain task etc.
heresie-dabord 5y ago
> Reaching as many votes as possible forces parties to draw their discourses around the lowest common denominator Education and social discourse have decayed such that even so-called elites are ignorant destroyers of civilisation. "'Tis the time's plague when madmen lead the blind." -- Shakespeare, "King Lear", Act 4 scene 1
zozbot234 5y ago
> Democracy is essentially populist, because elites fight for votes through media. That's not really what populism means. The essence of populism is deep distrust for deliberative mechanisms and, more generally, for any efforts at endowing political decision making with desirable qualities such as intellectual depth, moderation, nimble adaptation to circumstances, compromise among opposing views, etc. etc. Populism is, in many ways, a clear failure mode of politics.
- jessaustin 5y ago
  Your definition fits the circumstances of most places I've lived. (Not Singapore, which had its own particular democratic shortcomings...) Can you give us another example of a "democracy" that does not qualify as populist?
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
I don't see how any of this is democracy or stupid people's fault? Generally where it is worst is where democracy is weakest. There's a reasonable case to be made that anti-democratic propaganda led to World War II and more democracy was one of the safeguards put in place to prevent repeats.
- barry-cotter 5y ago
  Calling opinions you don’t like propaganda isn’t an argument. I have no idea if democracy leads to less war but given the number of countries the UK and US have invaded I kind of doubt it. England has had parliamentary supremacy since the Dutch invasion/Glorious Revolution and the US didn’t grow from 13 colonies to continent spanning without war.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    > I have no idea if democracy leads to less war The simple answer is yes, it does. "Democratic peace" is one of the most solid empirical results in International Relations. (Of course, "democratic" here has to be understood as including broadly liberal/freedom-promoting norms. Electoral politics on its own is beside the point.)
    - barry-cotter 5y ago
      Completely confounded by the US hegemony since WW2. In that period democracy and US client state are almost synonyms. Why would client states go to war against instructions from the imperial capital?
      - zozbot234 5y ago
        "Client state" is a confused notion - it misinterprets mutually beneficial cooperative attitudes as forced dependence. One of the best ways of disproving this notion is to look at what happens when the "hegemon" foolishly tries to enforce an "America First, our way or the highway" approach. To no one's surprise, the former "client states" suddenly start looking for alternative arrangements and banding together to counter the supposed "hegemon".
fleddr 5y ago
This might be true in the US, but it's not true in coalition/consensus democracies where you always need multiple parties to form a majority. There will still be some populists, but it's not mainstream. Populists will usually not rule, their points of view cannot be merged into a coalition agenda. I think most people in the US are completely unfamiliar with this type of politics. It's a type of politics where extremists do not win, and where centrism is the norm.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  You need multiple parties (for a rather different notion of "party"!) in the U.S. too. The Republicans and Democrats are "big tents" that aggregate many independent factions. If you can't enlist broad enough support, your policy initiatives will fail. With recent filibuster politics in the U.S. Senate, you might well need a super-majority in many cases for even mildly controversial things.
  - fleddr 5y ago
    I get what you're saying, but I still think there's meaningful differences. The country I'm in currently has a coalition of 4 parties, which still only barely gives a majority. During campaigns, none of these parties can carry out the extremely aggressive politics as seen in the US where you smear the other at any and all cost. Because if you do, you won't be part of the coming coalition. This dynamic means that campaigning largely means telling the story of your party, instead of mud slinging other parties. Blocking other parties for the sake of blocking the other party ("owning" them) in the senate or otherwise will be remembered. If you're unreasonable and childish, you won't be considered for the next coalition. Getting a majority and then intentionally undoing the progress from the previous coalition is also frowned upon. It's another red flag for a future coalition. So politics is building bridges and finding consensus amidst all players.
- spaniard89277 5y ago
  I'm from Spain, where there's a multi party parliament with coalitions.
ausbah 5y ago
it's hard for me to tell from the toke of your writing, but is this suppose to be a bad thing? data collection and targeted ads aren't great even in the context of politics, but that seems more like a societal wide issue. everything else sounds just like democracy
geysersam 5y ago
I don't agree this is an essential trait of democracy. A weak corrupt democracy perhaps. What incentives do politicians have to push policy down the electorates throats? Except that they belong to a privileged class or are bribed by lobbyists. In a well functioning democracy with more economic equality and less corporate influence this is much less the situation.
- ludamad 5y ago
  But what stops a well-functioning democracy from getting more corporate influence? Or woops-emergency-powers? I've come to realize any government is better than the alternative - until an extreme point. As a result they tend to be stable even when amassing corruption
ren_engineer 5y ago
those are all just symptoms of the real problem politics is more intense due to lower standards of living due to the drastic slowdown in technological innovation and more competition for finite resources due to globalization. Both sides are trying to find somebody to blame for that. Right tends to blame immigrants, left tends to blame the rich. Both are just scapegoating essentially, the oldest trick for leadership failure in human history. when people's lives are getting better and they are doing well they they don't really give a shit about politics. Very few revolutions happen during economic booms, they happen during depressions. People are upset right now because they can very clearly see they are working harder than their parents and grandparents for a lower quality of life. The other aspect of this is that it's relative, a lot of human happiness is based on who you compare yourself to. With social media everybody can see how the richest really live and it pisses them off. Ignorance is bliss to some degree
specialist 5y ago
> ...microtargeting and segmented audiences... Asking out loud: Is voter profiling basically k-means clustering? Given the USA's FPTP elections, k=2. (Per Duverger's Law.) Quick peek at wiki wrt Spain's govt, featuring a parliament and using plurality block voting, apparently yielding k=7. -- I've also participated in politics (campaigns). But I have zero idea how our consultants do their profiling and targeting. Closely guarded secrets. I recently read Jill Lepore's book If/Then about the history of Simulatics Corporation and their initial voter behavior modeling efforts and opinion polling. One of my takeaways is that Cambridge Analytica is just the 2016's iteration of the evergreen quixotic effort to model, predict, shape voting behavior. As you said, just like marketing. I couldn't find the initial research papers online. (I haven't yet made the pilgrimage to my uni's library.) Nor do I know how outfits like dataforprogress.org work. Would love to find a primer on this stuff. Because I have questions. What is a wedge issue, really? The stuff Karl Rove is famous for. Did he identify wedge issues? Or did he just recycle tropes and use advanced targeting? Or maybe it's case-by-case? Like racial animus is evergreen whereas angst over abortion became a fault-line over time. How malleable are the clusters? Ezra Klein in Why We Are Polarized argues there's some kind of feedback loop happening. People sorted, adopted the positions of their new cluster mates to align more closely, then became polarized. Lather, rinse, repeat. Can we do the opposite analysis? Identify unifying issues to counterbalance the wedge issues? Sorry, I could go on, but this is enough for now.
- spaniard89277 5y ago
  Well, I did voter profiling, and in my case I tried some clustering statistical methods, but IMO the best clustering involves a lot of human in the loop, keywords etc. It's a lot of cualitative work, I couldn't find any way to streamline clusters that made sense both in an operational level and understandable for non-tech/stats people. I was supposedly an assistant with the data pipeline but in the end was pretty much in charge of 90% of it's logic. Devs made the scrapers and some automated data adquisition, that got dumped into a data lake, I took the data from the data lake, I made a huge DB of voters with many columns (+30 don't remember exactly) from which I made a ruleset for initial clustering, based on conversations with creatives and operations and some of my own ideas, and that data got used for Ads people and operations people (basically, the ones that handle campaigns and volunteers). I know that devs eventually made a nice front-end for it, but it was basically ETL work, and instead of "buyer persona" it was kinda "voter persona". It was fairly sofisticated and honestly, it worked pretty well.

unfocussed_mike 5y ago

> Democracy is essentially populist, because elites fight for votes through media. Democracy is by no means essentially populist. It is when it is in its sickly stages, maybe. It's also by no means necessarily dependent on elites; again that is an indication of the failure of democracy (and the arrival of money as speech). It is very fair to say that few of the older democracies are keeping populism at bay -- India is failing at it, Britain has failed at it, Turkey has failed at it, etc.

ThalesX 5y ago
What are some examples of democracies that are keeping populism at bay? I live in a country that became democratic around when I was born. I don't feel that as a young democracy we're doing a particularly good job at keeping populism at bay; I'd go so far as to say we're failing at it.
- iso1631 5y ago
  I don't get the feeling there's much populism in New Zealand, Finland or Denmark, all of which had Womens Suffrage at least somewhat before 1900. Sweden has been struggling with it recently, and Australia is pretty bad. Isle of Man does fine.
  - mardifoufs 5y ago
    I think you are confusing a lack of populism with homogeneity of thought/culture. Your examples are all pretty small countries with little cultural divides. Even NZ got pretty populist on immigration when the number of immigrants started to increase, and Denmark literally was the harshest on refugees; they literally sent them all back a few months ago now that they say Syria is safe enough. Sweden is another example where populism went through the roof seemingly out of the blue, considering its historically consensus/trust based democratic system, for reasons similar to almost every other country in Europe. If Sweden went that way, I'd think any country could. If anything, I think your examples prove why populism is inherent to truky democratic systems. To me, it's actually a sign of a well functioning, diverse society not only demographically but also ideologically. And that's imo pretty healthy - at least much more so than a permanent homogenous consensus. (And in a democracy if elected politicians don't align with voters under the pretext of not bending to populist demands, someone else will do it. The job of politicians in a democracy is to represent the electorate, not the opposite.)
    - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
      New Zealand surely has a decidedly non-little cultural divide. It manages to avoid populism despite extraordinary pressures.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
CaptArmchair 5y ago
The problematic part about these discussions is defining what 'democracy' and 'populism' really is. Democracy is essentially shared, representative decision making based on a set of shared values and rules which every participant subscribes to. It's perfectly valid to promote your ideas and policies to your constituency with respect to the governing framework which is democracy. The mechanics may seem 'populist' e.g. campaigning, advertising, interviews,... but the fundamentals aren't challenged. Populism, however, does challenge those fundamentals. And it does so by using the governing rules and values within a democratic framework to challenge that framework itself. Examples of that is relentlessly attacking press and journalism itself, or antagonizing political adversaries, rather then challenging ideas and policies in a respectful public debate. The really insidious part are leveraging tactics that veil these as paramount to the sustainability of democracy. In that regard, democracy is innately flawed. It doesn't nor can't stop the rise of populists who push democracy out of the door. Ultimately, it's a social construct which people actually have to subscribe to. And if environmental circumstances change - e.g. economic recessions, social inequalities, existential threats,... - a critical mass within a population can grow which no longer is willing to subscribe to that construct. Or, worse, assumes that the alternative they subscribe to is democratic by nature when it is anything but democratic. History has an abundance of autocratic states who use 'democratic' or 'people' in their own naming e.g. the German Democratic Republic. Democracy is always at odds with the social-economic dynamics and the formation of cultural and economic elites which hold de facto power and have plenty incentives to leverage political power in order to retain a status quo. Democracy doesn't overcome that, and never will. However, what democracy does have going for itself is that it enshrines and protects an important set of fundamental freedoms and rights which apply to everyone regardless of their position in society.
- js8 5y ago
  I really like your analysis. I think the fundamental reason why is democracy so vulnerable is that in practice, there is a lot of socioeconomic inequality in societies, and that really erodes the core democratic concept that everyone should participate equally in decision-making. So in very unequal societies with a semblance of democracy, like in South America (and it's slowly coming to USA as well), you get these right and left populist oscillations, as different classes (upper and lower) seek to gain all political power. I don't think anybody has figured out an effective way yet how to dampen these oscillations in a society, and equalize it, so it would return to the ideal democratic mode.
denton-scratch 5y ago
> Britain has failed at it I don't see that (I live here). The UK has had a two-party system for at least 60 years. The Conservative Party is much the same as it was under Margaret Thatcher: xenophobic, opposed to public expenditure. The Labour Party is currently in the grip of people who admire Tony Blair's policies (interventionism, focus groups, and triangulation). Labour had a brief phase of mass-movement socialism under Jeremy Corbyn, who might be tagged "populist", but didn't deserve that tag. The current Conservative Party is led by a would-be populist; but the rest of the party doesn't seem to admire him very much. The only real populist much in evidence recently was Nigel Farage, who seems to spend more of his time in US TV studios than on UK TV. "India is failing, Britain has failed" makes it sound as if UK politics is dominated by pogroms, temple-burnings and riots - as if British society is in a worse state than Indian society. That's far from the truth.
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  > I don't see that (I live here). I also live here. Brexit is evidence of a failure of democracy to contain populism. It is absolutely not in our national interest, is already harming us, was almost certainly bankrolled by dark money and foreign influence campaigns, used unlawful tactics and above all was driven by systematic populist xenophobia. As you live here you will also have received the leaflet that tried to show the threat of Turkey joining the EU (with a map that didn't mark out Turkey but did mark out Iraq and Syria) even though Turkey is no closer to achieving membership now than it ever was -- this was vile populist manipulation. Boris runs Number 10 as if it is unaccountable to parliament. He flings out bread-and-circuses distractions when his mendacious lying is exposed. He deliberately deployed a populist smear in parliament for which he won't apologise in parliament, and people around him rallied to support it as he doubled down. We are heading into a criminalisation of dissent and protest that even Maggie wouldn't have tried. We have a government implementing serious voter suppression based on untruths. And we have a populist leader of a government that is increasingly corrupt, who rode into power on a Brexit wave who does not believe the rules apply to him (and who has evidence to support it, given how many last-last-last-chances he's been given to "shape up") and a ruling party that appears to be swimming in Russian influence money in a manner so severe that our "special relationship" partner has openly rebuked us for it, and so damaging that our prime minister buried a report into it. Boris is engaging in Trumpian tactics and his party seem unable to do a thing about it; the frog is being boiled just the same way as it (still) is in the USA. We're in enormous trouble. (And what is really striking to me is that the bulk of the criticism I have typed above is apolitical; members of his own party have levelled essentially all of these criticisms).

pydry 5y ago

The level to which mainstream political parties obsess over marketing demonstrates just how desperately they want to "push" policies upon the populace that they've already decided upon rather than listen and adapt. This is probably because $$ and internal power struggle mostly decides policy, which is A) not democratic, and B) opens the door for political movements which represent policies outside of the elite overton window.

qsort 5y ago
I don't see how that is abnormal. "The level to which mainstream political parties obsess over marketing", as you put it, is certainly nauseating, however anybody who actively becomes involved with politics does so because he wants to "push" towards a specific direction. If I decide to join the X party as opposed to the Y party, this is supposedly because my mind is already set, and X policies align more with my set of preferences than Y policies. Failure to listen and adapt, if anything, tells more about how Western politicians are increasingly worse at being politicians, (i.e. at achieving tangible policy goals evaluated according to their own set of preferences).
- pydry 5y ago
  I dont think thats true at all. Most politicians get into politics out of ambition and a desire for power and status. Dedicated activists are kind of rare as politicians. I can think of a few but not many, and they normally become politicians precisely because they're fighting for a popular cause that mainstream elites are suppressing.
  - qsort 5y ago
    They aren't mutually exclusive. There exists a multitude of political organizations. All of them want power and status (there's nothing wrong with that; up to a point, egoism is a virtue), but not all of them want the same things. So yeah, they want power and status because they are humans. They join party X as opposed to party Y because that's their preferred direction.

_xnmw 5y ago

Yep, and the corollary effect of living in a non-democratic country is that the political discourse is far more intelligent, because they're NOT trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Over the past few years I learned Russian and started watching Russian/Ukrainian popular TV and following political writers on all ends of the spectrum. Yes the media environment in Russia is far more authoritarian. But like a tightly-knit academic community, it is also far more intelligent. The nuance and the depth of discourse found on the average popular Russian political talk show (even state channels like Russia 1) is far beyond anything I have ever seen in America, with the exception of some independent podcasters and niche communities like Hacker News and academic think tanks. And the Russian elite lament this[1] because they cannot engage their American counterparts as peers, everything has to be rewritten in the language of CNN/Fox even during high-level state negotiations. [1] https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2022/01/20/anthony-blinken-and-the-intellectual-bankruptcy-of-the-biden-administration/ https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2022/01/20/anthony-blinken-and-t...

airstrike 5y ago
I mean, leaving propaganda issues aside for a moment, you still have a sample size of two. I'm not sure that qualifies as data.
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zozbot234 5y ago
You know that the U.S. too (and the West more generally, of course) has "tightly-knit academic communities" to discuss things such as the concerns that might come up in high-level state negotiations? In fact, the broad community of "open source intelligence" almost invariably has a markedly better handle on those issues than high-profile parts of USG that ought to theoretically benefit from secrecy and non-public info - despite common claims to the contrary!
- _xnmw 5y ago
  Yes exactly, that was my point. High quality political analysis is niche in the US, but it is more mainstream in Russia.

forinti 5y ago

I had a similar reaction to the Cambridge Analytica documentary. There was nothing new about adjusting discourse to a particular audience. It's just that there are new tools to identify groups of people and target them. I don't think much of Alexander Nix and I think he did a terrible job of defending himself. He just let himself be framed into a defensive position and didn't really question it.

anamax 5y ago
The problem with Cambridge Analytica is that the wrong people benefited. https://medium.com/@PatrickRuffini/the-medias-double-standard-on-privacy-and-cambridge-analytica-1e37ef0649da https://medium.com/@PatrickRuffini/the-medias-double-standar...

BongoMcCat 5y ago

You really should read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death Because what you are saying might be how it is today (especially in america), but it doesn't have to be like that. The book I mentioned tries to explain why, and I think it does a good job at it.

iqanq 5y ago
>Postman said that the contemporary world was better reflected by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement, rather than by Orwell's work, where they were oppressed by state control. In the covid era, we get both!

odiroot 5y ago

> Democracy is essentially populist, because elites fight for votes through media. Media are just well, a medium to deliver the "offer". The real fight is about handouts, especially the short-term ones. Pork barrelling is still effective at winning the elections.

alfiedotwtf 5y ago

Nice summary. I think old school they A/B tested using focus groups and so policy took a long time to get to Policy-Voter-Fit... but now that we have microtargeting, it's compressed these timelines by factors. You see this as politicians can announce something in the morning to then compeletly backflip by lunchtime. ... though I don't see this political hyperism letting up. In fact, I believe it will not only get even faster but will change from a passive targeting of ads to actively manipulating of content to individuals in order to slowly cause an action i.e make a politician or union member think a certain way, get a competitor's employee to perform a certain task etc.

heresie-dabord 5y ago

> Reaching as many votes as possible forces parties to draw their discourses around the lowest common denominator Education and social discourse have decayed such that even so-called elites are ignorant destroyers of civilisation. "'Tis the time's plague when madmen lead the blind." -- Shakespeare, "King Lear", Act 4 scene 1

zozbot234 5y ago

> Democracy is essentially populist, because elites fight for votes through media. That's not really what populism means. The essence of populism is deep distrust for deliberative mechanisms and, more generally, for any efforts at endowing political decision making with desirable qualities such as intellectual depth, moderation, nimble adaptation to circumstances, compromise among opposing views, etc. etc. Populism is, in many ways, a clear failure mode of politics.

jessaustin 5y ago
Your definition fits the circumstances of most places I've lived. (Not Singapore, which had its own particular democratic shortcomings...) Can you give us another example of a "democracy" that does not qualify as populist?

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

I don't see how any of this is democracy or stupid people's fault? Generally where it is worst is where democracy is weakest. There's a reasonable case to be made that anti-democratic propaganda led to World War II and more democracy was one of the safeguards put in place to prevent repeats.

barry-cotter 5y ago
Calling opinions you don’t like propaganda isn’t an argument. I have no idea if democracy leads to less war but given the number of countries the UK and US have invaded I kind of doubt it. England has had parliamentary supremacy since the Dutch invasion/Glorious Revolution and the US didn’t grow from 13 colonies to continent spanning without war.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > I have no idea if democracy leads to less war The simple answer is yes, it does. "Democratic peace" is one of the most solid empirical results in International Relations. (Of course, "democratic" here has to be understood as including broadly liberal/freedom-promoting norms. Electoral politics on its own is beside the point.)
  - barry-cotter 5y ago
    Completely confounded by the US hegemony since WW2. In that period democracy and US client state are almost synonyms. Why would client states go to war against instructions from the imperial capital?
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      "Client state" is a confused notion - it misinterprets mutually beneficial cooperative attitudes as forced dependence. One of the best ways of disproving this notion is to look at what happens when the "hegemon" foolishly tries to enforce an "America First, our way or the highway" approach. To no one's surprise, the former "client states" suddenly start looking for alternative arrangements and banding together to counter the supposed "hegemon".

fleddr 5y ago

This might be true in the US, but it's not true in coalition/consensus democracies where you always need multiple parties to form a majority. There will still be some populists, but it's not mainstream. Populists will usually not rule, their points of view cannot be merged into a coalition agenda. I think most people in the US are completely unfamiliar with this type of politics. It's a type of politics where extremists do not win, and where centrism is the norm.

zozbot234 5y ago
You need multiple parties (for a rather different notion of "party"!) in the U.S. too. The Republicans and Democrats are "big tents" that aggregate many independent factions. If you can't enlist broad enough support, your policy initiatives will fail. With recent filibuster politics in the U.S. Senate, you might well need a super-majority in many cases for even mildly controversial things.
- fleddr 5y ago
  I get what you're saying, but I still think there's meaningful differences. The country I'm in currently has a coalition of 4 parties, which still only barely gives a majority. During campaigns, none of these parties can carry out the extremely aggressive politics as seen in the US where you smear the other at any and all cost. Because if you do, you won't be part of the coming coalition. This dynamic means that campaigning largely means telling the story of your party, instead of mud slinging other parties. Blocking other parties for the sake of blocking the other party ("owning" them) in the senate or otherwise will be remembered. If you're unreasonable and childish, you won't be considered for the next coalition. Getting a majority and then intentionally undoing the progress from the previous coalition is also frowned upon. It's another red flag for a future coalition. So politics is building bridges and finding consensus amidst all players.
spaniard89277 5y ago
I'm from Spain, where there's a multi party parliament with coalitions.

ausbah 5y ago

it's hard for me to tell from the toke of your writing, but is this suppose to be a bad thing? data collection and targeted ads aren't great even in the context of politics, but that seems more like a societal wide issue. everything else sounds just like democracy

geysersam 5y ago

I don't agree this is an essential trait of democracy. A weak corrupt democracy perhaps. What incentives do politicians have to push policy down the electorates throats? Except that they belong to a privileged class or are bribed by lobbyists. In a well functioning democracy with more economic equality and less corporate influence this is much less the situation.

ludamad 5y ago
But what stops a well-functioning democracy from getting more corporate influence? Or woops-emergency-powers? I've come to realize any government is better than the alternative - until an extreme point. As a result they tend to be stable even when amassing corruption

ren_engineer 5y ago

those are all just symptoms of the real problem politics is more intense due to lower standards of living due to the drastic slowdown in technological innovation and more competition for finite resources due to globalization. Both sides are trying to find somebody to blame for that. Right tends to blame immigrants, left tends to blame the rich. Both are just scapegoating essentially, the oldest trick for leadership failure in human history. when people's lives are getting better and they are doing well they they don't really give a shit about politics. Very few revolutions happen during economic booms, they happen during depressions. People are upset right now because they can very clearly see they are working harder than their parents and grandparents for a lower quality of life. The other aspect of this is that it's relative, a lot of human happiness is based on who you compare yourself to. With social media everybody can see how the richest really live and it pisses them off. Ignorance is bliss to some degree

specialist 5y ago

> ...microtargeting and segmented audiences... Asking out loud: Is voter profiling basically k-means clustering? Given the USA's FPTP elections, k=2. (Per Duverger's Law.) Quick peek at wiki wrt Spain's govt, featuring a parliament and using plurality block voting, apparently yielding k=7. -- I've also participated in politics (campaigns). But I have zero idea how our consultants do their profiling and targeting. Closely guarded secrets. I recently read Jill Lepore's book If/Then about the history of Simulatics Corporation and their initial voter behavior modeling efforts and opinion polling. One of my takeaways is that Cambridge Analytica is just the 2016's iteration of the evergreen quixotic effort to model, predict, shape voting behavior. As you said, just like marketing. I couldn't find the initial research papers online. (I haven't yet made the pilgrimage to my uni's library.) Nor do I know how outfits like dataforprogress.org work. Would love to find a primer on this stuff. Because I have questions. What is a wedge issue, really? The stuff Karl Rove is famous for. Did he identify wedge issues? Or did he just recycle tropes and use advanced targeting? Or maybe it's case-by-case? Like racial animus is evergreen whereas angst over abortion became a fault-line over time. How malleable are the clusters? Ezra Klein in Why We Are Polarized argues there's some kind of feedback loop happening. People sorted, adopted the positions of their new cluster mates to align more closely, then became polarized. Lather, rinse, repeat. Can we do the opposite analysis? Identify unifying issues to counterbalance the wedge issues? Sorry, I could go on, but this is enough for now.

spaniard89277 5y ago
Well, I did voter profiling, and in my case I tried some clustering statistical methods, but IMO the best clustering involves a lot of human in the loop, keywords etc. It's a lot of cualitative work, I couldn't find any way to streamline clusters that made sense both in an operational level and understandable for non-tech/stats people. I was supposedly an assistant with the data pipeline but in the end was pretty much in charge of 90% of it's logic. Devs made the scrapers and some automated data adquisition, that got dumped into a data lake, I took the data from the data lake, I made a huge DB of voters with many columns (+30 don't remember exactly) from which I made a ruleset for initial clustering, based on conversations with creatives and operations and some of my own ideas, and that data got used for Ads people and operations people (basically, the ones that handle campaigns and volunteers). I know that devs eventually made a nice front-end for it, but it was basically ETL work, and instead of "buyer persona" it was kinda "voter persona". It was fairly sofisticated and honestly, it worked pretty well.