Modern Democracy has Become a Simulation
Top politicians and big money are experts in simulating democracy, and they do it well. Too well
Every four years, there is a certain period when I would like to live with my eyes and ears closed. The right to opt-out of total brainwashing should be one of the fundamental human rights guaranteed to its citizens by a democratic society. Regrettably, before any elections, this right is taken away from us.
Time has shown us that ads work, because why else do businesses use ads — which today are sometimes also called “promotion” — on such a massive scale. Over time advertisers have grasped that catching attention is even more valuable than the message itself, and this is what politicians have learned to take advantage of. While sometimes marketing and ad campaigns, which are aimed at promoting business, could offer us some positive emotions, political advertisers never take the trouble to make such effort. They believe that all are simpletons and aim their ads accordingly. Photoshopped portraits of “wanted” individuals are just scattered around the town or media channels, with the offered “bounty” — the promise that should reel in the electorate –presented beneath.
No subtlety, no “foreplay” — in politics, they go right to the main topic. You will give us your vote, and we will give you this or that. Just a regular commercial transaction, “business as usual.” Only we never get to read the fine print under this agreement — so we are left to doing the homework ourselves and need to guess what kind of “dowry” we would get from this election agreement.
I have sometimes thought about how the news media operates in this context, and have felt some hypocrisy. Usually, journalists do not spare politicians’ feelings, rather the other way around: they tend to forget that politicians are people too and assume a condescending and disrespectful stance towards them, as I repeatedly noticed during the year 2018 election period in Estonia. However, journalists mostly keep entirely mum about the sums paid by political parties to media organizations for publishing political ads. They ask no questions, seeing it as a regular business transaction or even an excellent business opportunity, which presents itself just twice in four years. Again — business as usual.
We, as a society, need to decide who or what controls us and moves the society forward — whether it is money or ideas. In an ideal situation, a political party should be a team of individuals whose objective is to find, support, and realize ideas that make society better and shape its development. Thus, elections should be a contest of ideas and a contest about who can put together the most collaborative team to represent the interests of people. All this is a splendid idea that we have been naively purchasing so far.
However, at the practical level, the matter of whether or not a political party can get to run the country is decided by the party’s advertising budget and their skills to channel attention. If a party does not get to be visible: it does not organize scandals or publish ads, it will not get many votes. At the same time, some other parties were quite successful in converting their scandal churning machinery into a vote-magnet. If one were to look for a correlation between the election results and the advertising budget of a political party, they would probably find it to be quite significant, which means that our elections are too much affected by money and the ability to create scandals.
This is, in turn, linked with another important topic, namely donations to political parties, which are certainly not made for charitable purposes. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Are we as a society willing to pay for it? Maybe political parties should only be funded from the state budget, the source of all public governance funding, because isn’t the objective of the party system to govern the state?
The modern party-based political system is not the only possible method of governing a democratic society. It is just the only one that we are currently aware of and have experienced besides dictatorship. Political parties should be funded from two sources only — the state budget and membership fees. Moreover, banning election ads would provide parties with some legal “hidden” income — not having to pay for ads could be seen as significant additional revenue.
Slightly digressing from the topic, I would like to point to the specific feature of election campaigns in the United States. Today we are in a situation where running an election campaign requires such a huge budget that it is only achievable by virtually selling oneself, or by being a person in the “buyer’s” role. In the US, major corporations have taken over the process of deciding who can run for office. By adjusting the funding flows, it is possible to select the preferred candidates and take the most suitable of them to the finals, leaving people a mere illusion of democracy and freedom of choice.
On the practical level, the only political decision people make is choosing who will make decisions on behalf of them. The candidates themselves are chosen by the business and financial elite. Is it really correct to call it democracy? I think it is more of a simulation of democracy.
As Estonia is coming from a communist or at least a socialist society, it is understandable that we have accepted the ideology of capitalism, and this has blinded us to the threats coming from the latter. In its ultimate form, capitalism is as totalitarian a system as is communism. The only difference being is that in one case, the entire society is controlled by who owns the power, i.e., the establishment, while in the other case — by who owns the funds, i.e., large business.
I am not contending that Estonia is facing any direct threat due to the power of capitalism and money, but at some point in time, we will need to make a choice of what type of society and policy we desire. Should choosing who is competent to run the country be taking place at the level of ideas, visions, and cooperativeness, or do we keep hoping naively that the power of money is altruistic?