@Miguel de Icaza, via twitter
Over the past months I've observed what is clearly too much of the debate between the two top candidates for the US Democrat party.
What amazes me is the low quality of their arguments. I've just heard the words good and bad, one to many times. Perhaps for the 100th time too !
I've seen pathetic videos, heard pathetic podcasts, and now I see this:
Seriously ? That's the you people can do ? Is that an appeal to logic or emotion ?
Let's be clear: I don't support either candidate. But still I'd like to put some things back in place.
Point A: Fierce contest among peers reveals a latent need to split the party
Unless the differences between the viewpoints of the candidates can be bridged, there is not reason in fighting the common opponent alongside. Therefore such fierce combat is meaningless and reveals a certain degree of hypocrisy.
Let me conjure up some reasons that a malicious mind such as mine could conceivably make believe that the contest is indeed meaningful:
- Winner takes all. That is to say that the winner will bring to power all his followers and crew, completely sweeping away the opposition. This is clearly not beneficial for a democracy. Even if the leader is chosen by the majority, the minorities deserve a representation. In fact in a very advanced society, they would deserve a proportional representation.
- There are debts to be paid. In which I imply that the funders of each campaign expect to be paid back, and are not supporting a candidate out of the goodness of their heart. This applies to both large individuals who dish out millions, but also the unpaid staffers (commonly but inaptly called volunteers) of each candidate which hope to get hired when it's all over and their leader has won.
- The opposition is completely immoral and/or deceiving and so on. This would make clear that a quarter of the Americans are either too gullible or immoral, deceiving and so on.
Point B: Stating that a certain candidate relies too much on his assistants is disingenuous
A candidate is basically a human being. Thinking that [s]he can write his speeches alone and be precise/correct/inspiring while flying all over the country and medically quenching his/her need for sleep is absurd.
As always the human mind tries to oversimplify things. Not everything that Obama and Hillary say come from their own mind and their own mouths.
We need to embrace the idea the leader of a country is not a person but a well tuned collective. Shedding light on these collectives should help restore the idea of democracy. The only roadblock I see ahead, is that this will cost the candidate who will accept that a buttload of votes.
Point C: Hacking democracy + Resilience via distributed decision making
In a federated system such as the United States of America, it should not matter (much) who the top leader is.
If the system functioned in a healthy manner and people tried to do their jobs instead of hijacking institutions for their personal reasons, it wouldn't matter if the top leader was predisposed to making mistakes. The damage would be amortized by the decision entities.
In a modern democracy, for each important vector of politics, there are ministries and comities and other distributed decision making or decision supporting entities. Each such entity depending on it's role and power may suggest, advise or make a decision. Provided that each such collective entity does it's job well the overall outcome should be satisfying.
Reflections on the region
Here in Greece (and most other places I look at) this is almost never the case. The members of these collectives try to manipulate each other and play chess, calculating moves ahead and forcing eventual outcomes before the game has began.
Overall this almost never ends up being beneficial for the country.
One such recent example was the election process for the leader of the PASOK party which was at the time and is the 2nd most powerful in the country. Towards the election day the debate had degenerated in the lines of "Venizelos is most likely to win against the leader of the leading party", which was suggested even though Venizelos was overly (statistically) considered to be less integral as a personality.
Venizelos is very much like Hillary in that respect, and lost the fight after all.