Brainless politics

Here we are again, heading for an election that has some real importance in our future.  The candidates, such as they are, have clearly decided that voters will vote on the basis of which candidate can generate the most emotional environment.  In the debates and the speeches, it's clear that the goal is to emotionally activate voters, to get them excited and angry, to get them suspicious and thoughtless.

The whole operation reminds me of a basic trick in stage magic.  You get the audience to watch the wrong hand, while the unwatched hand pulls the trick off.  In politics the illusion engendered is not sleight-of-hand, it's emotional discombobulation.  Excited and angry voters don't think.  They react.  They are not weighing policies and considering outcomes, they are choosing a personal champion with whom they identify, and whom they trust to be bigger, meaner, louder and more aggressive than their opponent.

Where is the thoughtful consideration of policies?  Economic plans?  Foreign relations?  Immigration policies?  Social security assets?

Of course you know the answer.  There is none.  None at all.  The political parties have read you and the rest of us correctly.  We don't understand all these policy thingies, but we know who we like and who we hate.  Thoughtful voters are not really predictable nor are they easily controlled, if they can be controlled at all.  Emotional voters are a piece of cake, easily manipulated with colorful language and over-the-top speeches. Emotional voters can be whipped into a frenzy and have the illusion that their vote is based on good thinking and good values.

What a laugh.  We don't really care about those things.  We like to be excited, to take part in a real soap-opera battle based on bad language, racial and sexual slurs, incitement to violence and distrust of the only political process in the history of the world that has ever even briefly been successful.

Don't vote your heart.  Vote with your mind.  If you don't know the policies of a candidate, don't vote for them.  How hard is that?