6 april

platforms and alienation

Once upon a time, to write an election program was an easy task. If you were about to write one was because you were or wanted to be a politician. And if you place yourself in such strange situation, it was because you wanted to do something. Increase taxes, decrease taxes, support minorities, keep the status quo or challenge it. Perhaps to figure out what to do had been a complex process. But to say so it isn’t. Just say what you want, and hope that people would vote for you. 

Yet that model does not quite work nowadays. Because what the government does it has become or less relevant, or less arguable. A great deal of a government work is to keep the state going to provide, or qualify, basic services. That is beyond the realm of elections. In most decent countries nobody elects the persons that run a hospital, or a school. So it does not make sense, not quite, to say that your party will have better schools. You know that the quality of the schools depend on the quality of the teachers, and the directors, and the staff of the school, and about a bunch more of variables, none of them determined by electoral politics. But you could (as many politicians do) mess up with the budget destined to education. You can say that you will increase it, or decrease, or even let it equal. Interestingly enough, you will not be saying what will you do. You are saying which kind of platform are you willing to create for other people to do stuff. 

One of the consequences of this not so recent development is that the normal citizen is more isolated from the political discussion. Before it was easier: the lefties will take money from the rich, and the righties will make the rich richer. Nowadays is harder to see it that clearly. Some lefties will increase the budget for education, in the hope that in about one generation there is social mobility by higher education, but some other lefties will decrease that same budget so that well off people does not get subsidized to study and the budgetary surplus can be allocated to debt relief. Now, which leftie is better? To decide you need to understand the impact of education along twenty years or the relevance of debt as a source of poverty… in order to decide your vote. Would you? Probably not, given that those questions are even today fiercely debated by economists, let alone politicians. 

But perhaps you could see which platform which party is choosing, and perhaps that informs your choice better. One party seems to believe that educators are crucial for the future, meanwhile the other put their money (literally) in the individual that after having made a mistake, learns and moves on. Now here there is a clear choice, isn’t it? And with it, comes the other consequence. Because the politicians are only deciding for platforms, the citizens are more important than ever. It is not so much about what the politician will do. It is much more which citizens and which initiatives will be deemed of support. 

So what it is then? Has politics become further alienated from the citizen, or it has become more relevant for the citizen? Has the growing complexity of the state alienated citizens from politics, or has the increasing participation of the citizen in her society made her more involved and more aware of the relevance of politics?  

Answers?