SinisterMotives

The glitz and spin are directed at freeloader and self-sufficient citizen alike. It's a rather broad stroke to link glitzy campaigns exclusively to the sort of vote buying you previously described.

wonderwench

Considering that ads are sound bites which consume a massive amount of campaign funding, the self-sufficient citizen is not the target audience. Real policy requires a more detailed forum. Debates, news articles and commentary are far better sources than ads for those who wish to be truly informed.

SinisterMotives

And I submit that it is the hard-working, self-reliant people who do not have time for much more than a 30-second sound bite - not the loafers who have all day to hang around at protests and rallies. You have described exactly that situation in your home state to me before.

wonderwench

No, what I have described is that hard-working people do not have time for the protesting and activism of those who sit on the steps of the state capital demanding more goodies.

SinisterMotives

I'm glad you cleared that up. For a minute there I thought you were implying that self-reliant citizens are somehow immune to the subtle psychological ploys - e.g., the appeals to one's sense of patriotism, images of waving flags, etc. - that are part and parcel of political ads.

wonderwench

Of course they are not immune to the emotional manipulation of ads. I would hope, however, that such ads are not the sole criteria upon which they make their voting choices.

SinisterMotives

So would I.

roachboy

i had forgotten about this thread until just now, and am amazed----this last exhange is entirely is nuts----you are making arguments for limiting the franchise arbitrarily--worse than that, you are indulging rhetoric to justify it on the order of "parasites", "freeloaders", even going so far as to say that people without whatever arbitrary standard you are invoking to define your fantasy of self-reliance have "no committment to the nation"etc.--all of which that sounds really uncomfortably like a elements in some dressed-up fascist tirade--this way of defining a petit bourgeois "us" as over against rootless "them" is dangerous--it echoes the kind of thinking that lead to the murder of 6 million "rootless cosmpolitans" during world war 2.

as if this is not already enough, you get even more ridiculous when you talk about the left---remember that the first group the fascists went after were people on the political left, those who could name what they were doing, those who could mobilize opposition---this kind of thinking has absolutely nothing to do with democracy, even in its shallow american shadow-version.

however many its drawbacks, the existing order does tolerate dissent--people like you would eliminate that it seems, and then compound it by disempowering politically everyone who does not meet your arbitrary understanding of "self-reliance"---even if--against their own interests--they were to agree with you politically.

i certainly hope that you have not derived this kind of stuff from conventional conservative ideology--i hope that somewhere they lay other kinds of sources for it--because this is really not ok.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

SinisterMotives

I've read this sentence over and over again, and for the life of me I cannot follow its logic. Are you saying that the brevity and/or cost of political ads somehow precludes their being targeted at gainfully employed voters?

powerclown

If America really is this malevolent, pseudo-Democratic, sinister Oligarchy exploiting the naive, ignorant working class as some would have it, how did it get to be the "world's only superpower™"? India (a democracy) has significantly more workers and can't compete with the US.

Is the hard work that created this superpower fueled by indivduals for the sake of themselves and their families, or for their government and its ideology?

And why is it that when a foreign country wants its military or intelligence services trained to the state of the art, they send them to the US (or Israel). When the King of Jordan was sick, they sent him to an American hospital. Top athletes from around the world are trained and treated in America. How many countries' elite (from all over the world, not just the West) are educated in America? Why do people from all over the globe come here to live, work and raise their children? Who makes the best damn hamburgers in the world? Where else in the world can you go skiing and surfing in the same day?! The phenomenon of Disneyland or Hollywood?

Can these things even be legitimately cited as examples of the success of Democracy? Or are they signs of its failure? Are such things frivolous and meaningless and examples of a weak, lazy society with too much time on its hands?

Which leads to this: How does one even evaluate the 'success' then of any ideology?

wonderwench

Think about the messages. The most successful vote buying is that aimed at those who are getting the goodies. That is where a large portion of the ad money is spent. There are ads aimed at scaring the bejebus out of those who pay the bills - but that is deemed "negative".

wonderwench

Huzzah! Huzzah!

The corollary to the logical phallacy that American Democracy is evil, despite the vast amount of benefits the rest of the world enjoys, is that Statism (in the form of Socialism or Communism) is theoretically superior, it's just that it has not been implemented properly yet.

Answer to your last question: the success of any ideology is analogous to the proof being in the pudding - the welfare of those it is supposed to serve - the people.

SinisterMotives

Excellent points, powerclown. America has accomplished much of which we can be rightly proud. I think the resentment towards America on the part of some progressive-minded people stems from the fact that, having achieved great things, our culture has subsequently stagnated into a sort of complacent hedonism rather than maintaining its progressive momentum in order to accomplish still greater things. I don't think the world is wrong in expecting better from us, having witnessed what we've achieved thus far.

SinisterMotives

To be quite honest, I haven't heard a political ad recently, much less analyzed one. However, you have just stated that some ads are indeed targeted at working people, which seems to contradict your previous statement that they are targeted exclusively at people of the entitlement mentality.

powerclown

Many rhetroical questions but what I meant was: Of all the Democracies in the world, why has the US-version of it been the most 'successful' ever? I myself haven't a clue...

wonderwench

I did not say they were targetted exclusively at entitlement recipients.

wonderwench

I think it is the combination the founding values, the Constitution and the design of our government that has made the U.S. a particularly fertile ground for Democracy . We also did not have the baggage of centuries of an aristocracy and rigid class system.

SinisterMotives

The short answer: We started out with a huge abundance of natural resources and land area, which allowed us to accept large numbers of immigrants of every race into the country. Such a diverse talent pool operating in a climate of unlimited opportunity was bound to pull a few tricks out of its collective hat.

SinisterMotives

That's the only way I could get the following sentence to parse. But no biggy.

powerclown

That's the best argument for Democracy Ive heard all day...

Zeld2.0

I posted this a while back in another thread that was basically addressing the difference in nation building of democracy and what the U.S.'s version is

Yes that's a long read but IMO that is why America is so unique in democracy versus all others and why it works here, but not necessarily everywhere.

powerclown

Interesting stuff Zeld.

Personal Freedom or Security & Order. It seems to me one of the reasons for the success of Democracy is its liberal allowance of relative personal freedom and the inclusion of most of its citizenry in its workings. Seems to me that the ideologies that underestimate the importance of personal freedoms (civil rights) and concern for the individual are the ones that are struggling today. Complicated issue!

Zeld2.0

It is indeed a complicated issue.

I remember though one way to look at it - the power of government vs. power of people.

It is like a graph with a line from the bottom left to the top right. The power of the people is towards the bottom, the power of the government to the top. As the power of the government increases, the point on the line goes up towards government, which decreases the power of the people.

But in the end, the thing is, once the government recieves more power, it will never relinquish it.

roachboy

zeld--i am not sure about that last bit--it seems that the relative power of the state is greatly influenced by whether and how people organize themselves, what kind of political action they take, and how that action is assimilated, be it through law or through shifting the general frame of reference. if you look at the history of any country, you'll find that line too wavering, like all others do. the problem is that people have to be able to organize themselves, to understand that acting collectively is the only way to get social power in the present context--which is why the suspicion being cast upon collective action these days is something to fight---if people understand themselves as isolated individuals only, then, sadly, what you say in the last lines of your post, maybe well turn out to be true---but it is not inevitable.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

John Henry

I did too, but didn't get round to commenting on them. Exactly who is the President of Africa these days?

__________________
"No one was behaving from very Buddhist motives. Then, thought Pigsy, he was hardly a Buddha, nor was he a monkey. Presently, he was a pig spirit changed into a little girl pretending to be a little boy to be offered to a water monster. It was all very simple to a pig spirit."

SinisterMotives

This is correct. Collective action goes against the grain in a society whose self-image is based upon a "wild west" ideal of rugged individualism. That image may have been valid when the US was a sparsely populated nation with vast frontiers where one could run away from civilization and be a nation unto oneself. In the modern world, everything is more intricately interrelated, and there is nowhere left to escape that essential fact. No matter where you go or what you do, government is there to be reckoned with, and that reckoning requires strength in numbers.

powerclown

And just to add this thought to the gist of the last few posts:

Supposing that individuals do organize themselves to the extent that they overthrow the ruling class...Wouldn't the next generation of the Governed (in this theoretical system of organized, proactive individuals) be predisposed to overthrowing their Governors, as the latter had done before them?

SinisterMotives

The underdog is always predisposed to upset a hiearchical class structure. I think that is why the Founders scrupulously avoided a system of government based on privilege and class. Unfortunately, individualism is easily corrupted into egoism - a mindset that values competition over cooperation. Egoists are never content to be merely equal with their fellow men; thus they seek to establish a class hierarchy at every opportunity. The only way I see to prevent an endless succession of revolutions is to return to a proper valuation of the idea that all people are created equal.

roachboy

a bit disconnected, one point from the other, so i'll use numbers to seperate them....

1. the founders dreamed about a country not founded on class and inherited privilege, and that was a nice dream--but as people of their times, not prophets, they had no way of knowing that capitalism would come and would sweep their world aside--which is has in its entirety--there is no point in refering to them as guides for understanding contemporary realities.

btw tocqueville (sorry but he keeps coming to mind these days)---who saw this happening already in the 1830s---argued in democracy in america that the single most important bit of law that prevented an economic aristocracy from forming was inheritance tax--he has a quite extended demonstration of this argument in the book, which i find interesting not only in itself buyt also in that lts of conservatives throw cliffnotes version of tocqueville around these day, clearly without having read him.
note that the right has been agitating for the repeal of inheritance tax for nigh some time now. i wonder if they understand the implications of their acts.

tocqueville also said something like the problem with talking to americans is that you have to flatter them in a manner worse than what you would have to indulge in with the worst kind of courtier, talking up the virtues us to the skies before you can say anything of substance. in that too, he seems to have been prescient.

2. it is not a foregone conclusion that revolution breeds more revolution, that revolutionary violence breeds only more--that is a myth constructed to reassure those who benefit from the existing order of things---what seem fundamental are the political views that would influence any such action, what kind of vision of the future was shaped it, and how the actors themselves, hopefully using that vision of the future to check themselves, dealt with violence once it came.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite