Thu, 13. October 2016
Democracy and Cognitive Dissonance
Drawn out over the whole year, it's down to just two principal candidates now. With four more weeks still to go, I watch the tedious election campaign in America with both fascination and despair.
The fascination is there every four years, when the the leadership of the Western World comes up for grabs and the US goes through its utterly bizarre circus of primaries, with its diverse state-by-state methods of collegiate voting systems which no-one outside the US will ever understand.
After months of continuous campaigning, with candidates slagging off their own political friends, they end up with a drawn out public beauty contest, to select delegates to go on to vote at a party convention - after which the nominated candidates becomes friends with their party colleagues again.
Then the two go through yet another spectacle, facing each other off for about five months, culminating with the electors again in November. A final outcome? No. It's yet another vote for collegiate delegates, who later go on to a convention to elect a President. What a distortion of democracy!
That's the fascination.
The despair sets in when the candidates present their credentials. The first criteria is to be rich. Immensely rich. The second criteria is to be religious. Exceedingly and prominently so. The third criteria is to put up credible policy platforms and the fourth is to convince the voters of their leadership credibility. So often, they pass the first two and fail the rest.
TRUMP: "I can't believe I am a politician" - the only thing we agree on, Don!
— Roger Powell (@Ggreybeard) October 10, 2016
When it comes to Donald Trump that is where I, like many have struggled for words. How did this travesty ever get to lead a party which now barely supports him?
However, I came across this piece in a totally unrelated article, which condenses it down to three paragraphs:
"To a neutral observer (at least as neutral as anyone can be given the impact the US president has on the whole world), Trump’s rise has been baffling. Trump appears to be a sociopathic, predatory conman whose hiding-in-plain-sight brazenness and questionable sexual history has more than a shade of the Jimmy Saville about it. His evident emotional, intellectual and political shortcomings threaten a dangerously volatile presidency, and this could have all manner of devastating consequences given the power of the office (like, you know, commanding the US armed forces).
However, if you’ve spent the past eight years and more watching Fox News and listening to US talk radio, it will have seeped into your subconscious that America is changing for the worse, you are the main loser from that change, and that the current political establishment, embodied by one Hillary Clinton, is creating that change. I’m generalising of course, but you can see the incentive is now there to vote Trump: If you believe the current system is the problem, you have the incentive to vote for the one guy who appears to be from outside it and is talking very loudly about destroying it.
The rest — the ability to ignore facts about Trump and believe lies told by Trump — is an unparalleled epidemic of cognitive dissonance, and will be studied by psychologists and political scientists for generations to come should, as the polls suggest, Clinton limp pathetically to victory."
I fervently hope that she does, because I cannot imagine living in a world with a psychotic, marauding and opportunistic maniac as leader of the free West.
What is the cure for cognitive dissonance?