Campaigning: Advertising, Political Theater and Education
There's always a campaign for some office going somewhere, and whenever I see how that is done, I get a little bit bitter. This might just be an issue on my part, as a moderately well read Marxist with material expectations of politics and its institution. Now, having read the title one might get the idea that this piece could become something along the lines of quotes often misattributed from one dubious historical figure to another about voters and their role in democracy, but I assure you it's not. Instead it's more of an observational piece this time, and maybe a little alternative suggestion to how to go about these things.
Campaigns in the Language of Advertising
Political campaigning in liberal democracies often face the problem of mobilizing voters in the first place. Not all potential voters care to keep track of what election is happening when and what options they can vote for. The natural language to use for mass mobilization is that of advertising, an industry that's best described as a "stochastic sales pitch", which may or may not be a scam. I'll leave the advertisement industry alone in this piece, I that's a bone I'm picking in another essay, which will probably turn out as a sort of companion piece to this one. No, instead I want to take a look at how this odd thing about the campaign ad.
The voters are often a central point of criticism for representative democracy, which, depending on your point of view, can be either a good or bad thing, I suppose. In a representative democracy, there is little incentive for the voter to strive for political education and a literacy, considering their influence is somewhat limited to choosing the boot they want to be squeezed by for the next legislative period. In a way, not engaging with the politics under these circumstances, whether or not that is the conscious reason, is somewhat sensible. On the part of the voter, of course there are better ways of dealing with this problem, but without having access to organizing, that's a difficult thing, and I'd rather not fault them for it. If it's a normalized phenomenon, it's probably not a collective individualized failing. We'll get back to that. Instead let's go back to the problem this creates on the part of campaigns.
Campaigns exist to convey a message to the voter, ostensibly about the work they intend to do. This will prove somewhat difficult in the case where a voter isn't really interested in the details anyway. This means that campaigns don't really need to run on descriptions of material policies. For parties with actual ideas about policies, this means their work goes mostly unseen. For those who are either unable to find sensible suggestions on policy, and those who would rather postpone the process to the very last moment, this is of course a kind of advantage. It reduces campaigns not to a step in political education, but into advertisements in the very literal sense, that is a promise of an improvement of life, after an action has been performed as collateral.
In the same way in which there are "mainstream" interests of the population in the form of a product that people feel is essential to be part of public life, be it as a way of participating in public discourse (smartphones, for example), or in the form of an experience that is assumed to have been had by people by default (the experience of a movie that has entered the popular Zeitgeist, for example), there are certain needs that the population is aware of. In the same way a new superfood product is advertised, promising something without the necessity of filling out the mechanisms by which it's supposed to work, beyond some hand-wavy marketing-speak, campaign ads take the form of vague promises that at best advertise an easy solution that might not actually be realistic, or effective. This where proposals like "build affordable housing to solve the housing crisis" come in, which always sound nice, but are quite expensive, and are liable to be absorbed into the existing capitalist structure.
Informed political discourse is then somewhat hampered by the fact that the individual has to educate themselves on the material plans of the parties vying for power. Of course that makes an exchange of opinions on the matter somewhat chaotic, if one doesn't happen to have all the documents at hand at all times. We don't usually notice how badly this way of marketing drives discourse, because normal conversations don't really center pieces of advertisements unless they attract certain kinds of attention that a political would usually like to avoid. Luckily, there are popular concepts that keep the discussions off the proactive political praxis (even on the somewhat primitive level of voting alone).
Secrets and Spectacles
Thinking of engaging in politics on the same level as consuming goods has some interesting side effect. Of course nobody should be pressured to vote one way or another, or even into discussing their vote, but it probably shouldn't be a social taboo either. However, one finds that even among people who are by all accounts friends outside of political settings, that is friends in a way, where their politics wouldn't interfere regardless of their vote, there is much secrecy around the crosses made. This throws up a wall of silence that appears to exist solely to protect the individual's rights to privacy - however, let's inspect what this law actually says within the framework of laws that already exist around it.
Last essay I introduced this whole Person A, Person B scheme, which I think is a little too clinical for the tone I want to go for, so I'm going to name these from now on, so enter Garfield and Odie. Garfield would like to know how many Furbies are in Odie's secret collection, but Odie feels uncomfortable about sharing it. Odie can tell Garfield "Why do you need to know?" and "I'd rather not say". Garfield can now try to coerce Odie into telling him after all. He can offer Odie money to tell him, or he can threaten Odie. The former is okay, the latter is illegal. Garfield could also try to break into Odie's secret collection and checking for himself, which is also clearly illegal. It might be an edge-case for Garfield to hire somebody to find out for him, in some way. Now, imagine Garfield was asking something more transient, something one couldn't check oneself. Then, hiring somebody to find out will lead Garfield into the same issue that maybe Odie just isn't keen on sharing. Such a transient thing might be what somebody voted for. So there are already laws in place that protects this privacy, along with the protection against discrimination on the basis of political views. Why write this again? I'm not sure of the reasoning, since most countries have this law and at some point they will have just copied it from existing systems they modeled themselves after. The effect of this however, is a kind of theater that paints ones political modes of operation as something particularly private.
However, the voters aren't the only ones playing a coordinated theater. Politicians have to pick up where their campaign left off, when they're interacting with the people, which is of course where they have to inevitably reckon with the way the stochastic aspect of their campaign has been inevitably laid out. Since they don't have actual data on their policy plans, it's kind of a gamble to bring them in at this point. Any concrete policy proposal will find its detractors, be it because the proposal diverts resources from another issue that a potential voter might find important as well, or because it seems unfair or ineffective. Sticking to about the same level of identifying the problems and maybe even the perceived sources, if one was trying to cultivate the image of an educated politician is the smart way to play it. After all, the way representative democracies are designed, there are no consequences for bad policies, once the official has found themselves in office, so best wait to introduce potentially alienating elements until then.
Of course this isn't great for the people, as what little influence they have on the politics that will dictate their quality of life in the best of times, and whether they go to war in the worst of times, but it also actively hampers the work of politicians. Let's cast Garfield as a politician this time. He has some cool ideas, but some of those don't really fall on the party line. Odie is a voter, who doesn't know Garfield very well, but knows what party he is in. Odie doesn't read political theory, and is mostly informed by the efforts of government bodies, i.e. campaign ads and media reporting on the contents. That means Odie enters the interaction, assuming Garfield follows the party line, as it's projected. Garfield now describes some of his cool ideas, but he now faces a problem: If he doesn't mention that those are his own ideas and that the party might not stand behind them, he's fully leaning into the lying politician stereotype. If he mentions that those are ideas that he would advocate for, but do not follow the party line, then he wouldn't necessarily reserve a vote for his party, only for himself. In some systems no distinctions between party and candidate vote are made, which then means that Odie's vote is contingent on Garfield actually turning out as the candidate for that race. If it isn't, then while Garfield might have secured a vote for himself, but for actual majorities, the party vote is technically more important. Garfield's best approach here then is to build a parasocial relationship with Odie. Yes, I'm saying that Garfield will have to become an influencer.
Education vs Democratic Follies
At this point, I'm sure all of us would want to save Garfield from that awful, awful fate. The most immediate point here is of course the strengthening of political education in the body of the people, however disadvantageous it might be to the ruling capitalist classes in the short term. Current power structures however live off the somewhat lacking education, which let's things go on as they are. A political education would make a population prone to organizing around demands that aren't met by whatever governing body is in place. This alone is widely considered a good thing, even by liberals and conservatives, even though whenever they talk about it, it tends to take on some frankly disquieting undertones. Such organizing on larger levels however will invariably push those officials who are neglecting their duties out of their functions. First in spirit, and then in terms of their offices. Marxists like to base a number of their criticisms framing class dynamics as inherently oppressive and absolutist in two of the minor features inherent in their structure. One is the stratification of the dominating class, that is the effect through which the two classes set one another apart to the point where the idea that they are entitled to vastly different material conditions is accepted dogma. The other is calcification of both classes. Once proletarian, always proletarian. At least for the vast majority of people. This is true even down through the generations. Considering that money is very rarely not tied up in political power, having a wider public made up of an organizing proletariat is an active threat to the their "way of life" as it were.
So it's either politicians that slowly morph into your favourite Youtuber, or saying goodbye to the class divide - and a little bit more studying fundamentals in school, but that's probably not the worst thing in the world. I've probably made my position clear. I don't interact with campaign ads beyond taking notice of which parties are running in my local area, and in the cases where it's necessary, I hold with the antifascists. However, I dream of a future where a political campaign needs to display more competency than knowing what everybody else already knows.