Electoral Politics 101
Lesson 1: Deception is the Cornerstone of Electoral Politics
Electoral politics is, at its heart, a transactional process. The basic transaction is that candidates promise to provide constituents with goods, if elected, and constituents choose between these offers and trade them for their electoral support. It seems simple enough, but there are several important complications within most electoral economies.
The greatest of these complications is that, in most instances, to win a majority of electoral support, candidates must appeal to constituents who have divergent, if not competing interests. For example, in the context of the current United States Presidential election, that means simultaneously appealing to immigrant Latino voters who favor immigration reform, and to non-immigrant voters who oppose immigration reform. It means simultaneously promising African American voters changes to institutional racism, while appealing to White voters who deny that institutional racism exists, and may even imagine that they are the victims of reverse racism.
This leads to the primary practice of political candidates during election campaigns.
They lie.
No, seriously, it's not just the ones you don't like.
As a general rule, politicians make simultaneous promises to competing constituencies that cannot all be true. If they make promises to two competing constituencies, they are necessarily lying to at least one of them. If this strategy works, both constituencies offer their electoral support, and they win elections. However, there is an obvious inherent weakness to this strategy - both constituencies must believe the politician, at least up to the point of their successful election. If either (or both) constituencies come to believe that the candidate is lying, they will no longer expect delivery of the promised goods, and will therefore seek those goods from other candidates. Unvarnished lying is thus unlikely to work, so politicians employ other tactics to mask their primary deceptions.
Tactic #1 is that politicians are vague.
Rarely do politicians provide clear, well-articulated positions on anything. They repeat vague slogans, which pundits refer to as "talking points", but rarely do they delve into the substance of their promises, let alone their plans for accomplishing same. Sometimes this is because they don't have a position or a plan, such as in the case of the entire Republican Party and its obsession with repealing Obamacare. Seriously, seven years in and they STILL haven't offered a single viable plan for the replacement, but are asking people to trust that they have one. Somewhere. Hilarious.
But I digress.
Within the context of an electoral campaign, politicians deftly avoid detailed descriptions or explanations of their promises to provide goods, because detailed plans can be examined, contested, and worse yet, held up as proof of fraud if they are not fulfilled after the election. And that latter problem is tied to the primary motivation of incumbent politicians - re-election. But that's another subject for a subsequent discussion.
They also use these vague statements to avoid being held accountable for conflicting promises during the course of a campaign. When constituency X accuses a candidate of making a promise to constituency Y that seems contradictory to promises previously made to constituency X, vague statements allow the candidate to say, "I never said that."
While being vague frees politicians from the responsibility of specific promises, it also means that they must find ways to convince their target constituencies to give electoral support in exchange for promises that they never explicitly make.
Tactic #2 is that politicians use innuendo and suggestion to imply promises.
Candidates make broad, vague statements and allow the constituents to unwittingly fill in the blanks. They appeal to what various constituencies want, without ever saying directly that is what they will give, by simply alluding to those issues. For example, on the Democratic side of the current election, both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton assert that institutional racism must end. This implies that they are promising to end institutional racism, but were either to win the Presidency, they could accurately say that they never made such a promise, which is just as well, since doing so would require the deconstruction and reconstruction of entire economic, political, judicial, educational, and cultural systems.
These primary forms of deception are overwhelmingly the norm for electoral politics, and are employed to some degree by virtually all candidates.
Within the current electoral cycle, there are only three outliers to this norm, whom I will name here, as this leads to at least one of the reasons for my personal preference in the Presidential contest.
1) Lindsey Graham. In Trinidadian parlance, Lindsey Graham "have no cover for he mout'." He spits out EXACTLY what he thinks, and more often than not, calls it exactly like it is. It's not surprising that he made an early exit from the Republican contest. He told the constituents the unvarnished truth about his party and about the other candidates, usually with scathing wit, reminiscent of the late Paul Lynde. Much of the GOP's constituency simply could not abide his break from Republican mythology, especially because at some level they knew he was telling the truth. The Republican establishment could abide his truth telling even less, so there was no way he was getting funding from any of the traditional backers.
2) Donald Trump. While Trump certainly is vague in his proclamations about making America great again, building a wall, and winning so much that we all get tired of winning, he also tells a lot of boldface lies, and a few unvarnished truths.
Trump's assertions about his financial worth, his refusal to settle lawsuits, the success of all his business ventures, and his commitment to Christian values are all demonstrably false. They are not just false in the usual he-said, she-said way, but in the "here's a court judgment to the contrary" way. This makes his ascendency among Republicans fascinating, because blatant lying generally gives voters reason to doubt the trustworthiness of any promises made by a candidate. Clearly, his constituents are drawn to some other promise, which is where Trump is more in the traditional innuendo and suggestion camp. I would argue that his primary implied promise is to restore the social order of White supremacy with de facto racial segregation and White domination. He hasn't said this directly, but White supremacists, including David Duke, have heard the innuendo loud and clear, and they are smelling what he's selling. That too is a subject worthy of its own discussion.
Even more interesting is that Trump, who routinely displays a pattern of pathological lying, also tells some hard truths. He has unrepentantly called out the Bush administration for inviting the US to dive headfirst into the cesspit that was the Iraq war. He has asserted that there were no weapons of mass destruction there, and that the Bush administration willfully misled the public in order to enter the war. These are all verifiable facts, but they are at odds with the official Republican Alternate Universe narrative. Trump remains unharmed by these offensive truths, which further suggests that the goods his constituents are seeking have little to do with Republican orthodoxy.
3) The third outlier to the typical strategy of election by deception is Bernie Sanders. As already noted, Sanders does imply a promise to fix the problem of institutional racism, which, if he is serious, would earn him the opposition of a much larger swath of the country than his promise to fix the rigged economy already has.
Notwithstanding that implied, and I believe impossible-to-fulfill promise, Sanders steps around the problem of appealing to multiple constituencies in a very different way than most politicians.
First, he identifies the majority of Americans as his target constituency - the middle class, working class, and the poor. In so doing, he draws on common economic ground, rather than the ethnic, religious, gender, and sexual markers of social fissure by which most other politicians identify their constituencies. The difference is that Bernie only has one constituency - we the people.
The remaining minority - the uber riche, the massive corporations, and banking institutions - he clearly marks as NOT his constituency. They are the enemy of his one and only constituency, and he therefore is not obligated to promise them a blessed thing. As a result, he has no dilemma, and no need to lie to either group.
It also means that Bernie has not had to shape, craft, and modify his message over and over, whether in Congress, or on the campaign trail. He has not been "pulled to the left/right" in his campaign rhetoric over the course of time. He is saying what he has always said, unlike traditional politicians who are engaged in the art of deception, and must therefore constantly rearrange their message to imply the promises that they think constituents want to hear.
Of course, that also means that the identified enemies and their allies, who include much of Congress, all the other candidates, and the corporate media, have no compunction about waging all out war on Bernie Sanders. The efforts to discredit, dismiss, and erase his remarkable gains and rapid advance from unknown to credible Presidential contender are to be expected. In a perverse way, these attacks even serve as endorsement of Bernie's commitment to his only constituency.
In summary, politicians lie, mostly by making vague statements to imply promises that they are unwilling or unable to fulfil, in order to gain the electoral support of constituents about whom they do not actually care.
Except one.
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