Dear Citizen, Can We Talk?

I think we can both admit that the world is totally screwed. There’s global warming, there’s social inequality, there’s terrorism, there’s surveillance. If aliens were looking at our planet now and they somehow got past the total weirdness of humanity, they’d be in somewhat of the similar state to someone watching the Donald Trump campaign and thinking that the entire republican race must be some kind of joke.

And I think we both agree who’s at fault here, right? It’s these guys:

The politicians. The people we’ve elected to make the tough decisions, to guard our interests, to move our respective countries forward in the world. Yes, you nod, it’s their fault.

You’re wrong.

Yup, I’m sorry to say it, but it’s not just the fault of the politicians. It’s our fault. It’s the fault of you and me and everyone we know. It’s the fault of the system we constructed, of the culture we created and of the PR campaigns that we still fall victim to.

And it matters because what happens in politics is what changes the world; not that coffee you SnapChatted a picture of, not that ill-advised joke you made at the pub last night and nothing to do with your job, your relationship or the video games you say you don’t/boast you play. And not that those things aren’t important, they are, but if someone has the power to declare that cats are the new national religion, that porridge is a health risk or that you shall be drafted, spied upon, imprisoned or killed by some expansive, evil law with enormous public support, you should be worried as hell.

So let me tell you what’s wrong with politics.

The Branding

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. — Eric Blair

Everything has a brand these days and the shampoo you use or the doughnuts you eat are only a tiny bit of it. Each politician has a brand; it might be of a truth teller, holding the government to account. It might be of a hard-working representative, labouring long after hours to make your life better. It doesn’t matter what the brand is, it matters that you’re buying into it.

Look at the brand of Bernie Sanders: Old, socialist, yet strangely hip. Incredibly reliable (he’s been on the same message for more than two decades!). What’s important to realize here is that, whether or not that’s actually how he is, it’s only a brand. It’s only what a bunch of marketing people and political strategists typing away on their spiffy laptops thought would be most likely to win votes.

The same goes for Clinton, for Trump, for Cruz. In Canada, where I live, the same goes for Justin Trudeau and Rona Ambrose, for Thomas Mulcair and, I’m sorry to say, for Elizabeth May.

And not that this is wrong, but this should be utterly unimportant! The brand of a politician should be something that doesn’t bother us nor shapes how we vote. It should be a matter of interest only when the real subjects are exhausted. It should be the domain of celebrity magazines and idle gossip and nothing else!

But it’s not. We vote on the brand of a politician, and that is wrong! Because the brand of a politician, as it shapes how we vote, it also shapes what they will do but in the wrong ways. You may think that your politician is on your side because of what their personality is branded as but in truth, you don’t know. You don’t know if they have your best interests at heart or if they’ll act the way you want them to because we have been so blinded by the marketing.

And yes, that is a problem, because you are affected by what they do. You might not care about politics right now but come tax-season, or when you’re put in prison for pirating that video or when you have to choose between Internet and food because the minimum wage is so damn low and the rent is so damn high, you will care like nothing else. And if what they do is not what they promised to do, not what made you vote for them, not what made you fall in love with their brand, then, I’m sorry to say, tough. This is what you voted for, this is what you’re getting.

Yes, I want politics where everything is decided based on policy, based on critical thinking and logic, based on something that actually makes sense, not something that just feels true. And you should want that too.

The Embarrassment

No, I’m not talking about Donald Trump, though, as a Canadian, I can tell you that you should be pretty embarrassed. I’m talking about the fear that all politicians have of being shown to be a fool.

If you’re heading to your local public library tomorrow, here’s something for you to do: get out a book titled The Wikileaks Files: The World According to US Empire. It explains, in painful detail, how US diplomacy acts behind the scenes. And it’s a safe bet to make that a lot of other countries act in the same self-serving, uncaring, totally unethical and, some might even say, evil way.

Enough of the books; let me explain the main thing. Politicians will do anything to not be made a fool of. If they make a mistake, they will cover up and deflect the blame until the cover-up becomes more sinister than the actual, likely innocuous, original deed.

No need to invoke conspiracy when stupidity explains so much

There’s nothing particularly unexpected about this; politicians are human beings and human beings don’t want to be embarrassed. The difference is that politicians have been elected to do good, to serve the people so if they are deceiving the people, it’s wrong.

This comes back to branding. If a politician is shown to be a fool, it’s the end of that politician’s career; No one will vote for them. So, as the voting public, we need to be more tolerant of mistakes and less tolerant of the spectacle that Question Period and periods similar in our various parliaments have become: public shaming and the chance to embarrass the government.

Because that’s what those moments have become: complex pieces of marketing designed to create sound bites which will make the current government less electable and another government sound so much awesomer.

This is wrong because again, it’s giving us a false view of politicians and what they’re doing. It makes us elect them based on how well they covered-up instead of what they actually managed to do.

It also paralyzes politicians from acting, from actually doing something amazing (like banning all new pipelines, stopping government spying or adding a guaranteed minimum annual income). This is unfortunate because if politicians can’t do awesome stuff, all they do is boring stuff so the public gets less interested and they have to be more heavily branded to get elected. Vicious circle.

And that brings me to:

The Priorities

The priority of every politician should be to improve the welfare of their country’s citizens and generally make the world more awesome. The priority of politicians has become to, in step form:

1. Get elected
2. Once elected, improve the welfare of their country’s citizens and generally make the world more awesome

What’s the problem? MPs and Reps are able to do awesomeness even if they’re not part of the government, so they shouldn’t waste their time on just trying to get elected. Yet now opposition politicians seem to be spending more and more of their time just branding themselves or embarrassing other politicians that nothing great happens. That’s a real waste of everyone’s time, and of the resources and lives of every citizen of the world.

Perpetual campaigning, the practice of always branding one’s self, even when not in an election, has resulted in a broken political system. We have a lot of politicians for a reason: to make amazing stuff happen. But when anywhere from one third to all of them are just trying to get re-elected next time, less gets done and the people suffer.