Call Trump what you will, but he played the media like Hendrix. They took the troll-bait and reported every outrageous soundbite gleefully, all in pursuit of a few clicks and ad-bucks. Meanwhile, Trump gained more and more of a platform and eventually established a cult of personality.
Given all the barefaced lies told during the Brexit campaign and the US campaign it does lead to questions about democracy, i.e. should the average man on the street really decide?
To be sure I'm not advocating Communism but perhaps up until 20 years ago the lack of social media helped contain outright lies and extreme views, perhaps with people asking the intellectual(s) in their social circles about candidates. There was also the social engineering aspect of TV soaps (e.g. featuring gay characters to make homosexuality more accepted). Social media has done away with that and allows anyone to broadcast to the world.
The media report the lies and it's impractical to research everything politicians say. Even if someone reports that the lie was a lie, by then the damage is done. Trump played this game all the way through. He knew what he said would be reported far more than the accuracy of the statements.
This result raises a lot of questions, few of which I suspect will be answered and will lead to even fewer changes I imagine.
I've never been in favor of democracy. We live in a world where specialization is a requirement to function. Politics really shouldn't be any different.
I know a lot about cybersecurity. When it comes to encryption, cyber warfare, anything cryptocurrency, you want me voting because believe me, I know more than 99.9% of the US population on those topics. It's an informed vote.
But for education, immagration, healthcare, gun law, it'd be dishonest to say I'm informed. And people who think it's my duty to be informed are being unrealistic. The number of significant issues make being fully informed a full time job. I'm not ashamed to not know what Aleppo is. I recognize that it's important and would like to yeild my vote to someone who knows more than I do.
There are other topics like energy and drugs where I would consider myself well informed, but perhaps just well informed enough to want something stupid. Should I be voting on those topics? Honestly probably not.
Hence we should form alliances with people who we judge to be experts in their respective fields, and pursue a shared platform. Oh wait, we just invented the political party system.
>> should the average man on the street really decide? <<
As opposed to who? We had only land owning white males voting early in the Republic. They were educated and well acquainted with the issues. They voted their interests, which was those of land owning white males.
Limit the election to whatever group you prefer, and they will vote for their own interests.
Well that's the question isn't it. Power corrupts. It is and always has been the way. At the moment democracy is the fairest system we have. But it doesn't contain any safeguards against electing extreme, populist candidates who may be damaging to their country and wider world.
I wonder if a parliamentary system functions as something of a safeguard against this. In a parliamentary system, a hypothetical Trump party might have been able to get a sizable number of seats, but probably not an outright majority (since many of the people who voted for him hated his guts, they just didn't think they had a better alternative), so he wouldn't be able to control the government without forming a coalition with another party that could act as a moderating influence.
> Given all the barefaced lies told during the Brexit campaign and the US campaign it does lead to questions about democracy, i.e. should the average man on the street really decide?
I think (I hope) that the problem isn't the average man, but rather our system of democracy itself. Currently, there is not any reason to do the hard work it requires to become informed, because with millions of other voters (not to mention the winner-takes-all electoral college) your vote literally does not matter. Contrast that situation with a twelve person jury, where the jurors spend weeks and sometimes months to decide, gathering every bit of relevant information, and letting each side argue in as fair a way as possible. Then the jurors spend days in discussions with their peers, often agonizing over their decisions. These are regular people, who usually make good decisions, because they know that their decision matters. Contrast this with the voter who gets all of their information from a limited number of biased sources and then makes their voting decision on a whim, and who can blame them when there is no probability of their vote changing the outcome? Elections ought to be more like juries, with a smaller number of voters randomly selected from the population and then thoroughly educated on the issues.
> should the average man on the street really decide?
I've always thought the issue was how big the street was. I trust the average man on the street in my town. I would be _very_ suspect of elites running a city of 50k.
But at scale... Personally I have no fucking clue how India runs itself.
I would trust something like the United States of New England to elect good, representative leaders. Maybe that's where we'll end up in 100 years.
It's not the media, it's the Republican Party. They had a tumour growing inside them and they failed to take strong action early enough to cut it out. Once Trump was the candidate for a mainstream party with an electoral machine full of people who live to serve the machine, it was too late for the Party leadership to get rid of him. The party machine went into automatic. At that point, for a Republican to reject him would be to admit that their beloved party was deeply flawed and capable of making a terrible mistake. That's a big challenge if you deeply believe in your party. If they can be wrong about this, what else could they be wrong about?
That wasn't enough though. Trump representing a mainstream party implicitly made him a viable choice to vote for beyond the Republican core. If he's the Republican candidate, he must be a valid choice that can be taken seriously, right? He can't be a joke.
Finally a big problem here in the U.K. with Brexit was people assuming the vote would fail and not bothering to vote remain. I wonder how big a factor that was in this case especially as Hilary was ahead in the polls for so long.
Many previously Democrat voters switched to Trump, but without a heavy base of reliable Republican voters the swing voters that supposedly decide elections, on their own, wouldn't have decided anything.
Comedians appear to have been more perceptive about Trump's appeal and Clinton's weaknesses than the media: Scott Adams and Dave Chappelle both made some salient pints this cycle. Mainstream media:0; reclusive comics:2.
