Originally posted in a politics thread

[feotakahari]

There’s this thing that happens with video games, where a developer makes a game that’s good, but follows up with a game that tries to “appeal to a wider audience” and ends up kinda stinking. If you buy the game, they decide it’s working, and their next game will “appeal to a wider audience” even more. If you don’t buy the game, they decide their games are too niche, and they should make something completely different that “appeals to a wider audience.”

Video games can at least survive on niche support. Politicians can’t. They need to be more popular than every other politician in the same election as them. So I imagine the pressure to “appeal to a wider audience” is even worse.

(You could say this is how republicanism is supposed to work—by majority compromise. In that viewpoint, we don’t need better politicians. We need better voters to compromise with.)

Comments

[random_thought_depository]

Politicians can survive on certain types of niche support. Most obviously, if it's geographically concentrated; most elected officials don't have to be popular in their entire country, they just have to be popular in the district they represent. This is basically what pork is all about; elected officials angling to get the best deal for their administrative territory, knowing that this will make them popular among the people who elect them even if it makes them unpopular with everyone else. Federalist systems structurally encourage dependence on geographically concentrated niche support and it's part of the system working as intended (the expectation is that factionalism will often divide along geographic lines and elected officials represent their factions).

Politicians can also potentially get some mileage out of supporting the "pet cause" of a small but passionate and/or well-organized minority on an issue that most people are more-or-less apathetic about. The politician gains a small constituency of passionate and/or highly organized supporters (the sort of constituency that often "punches above its weight" in politics) while losing little or nothing.

And this is all assuming fairly egalitarian politics, when real politics usually isn't very egalitarian. Even in a democracy a politician can often get a lot of mileage out of niche support if the niche demographic they're appealing to is rich people. More broadly, in politics and war (and war is a form of politics) small, concentrated, organized groups with lots of resources tend to win and big, diffuse, unorganized, resource-poor groups tend to lose. In fact, big, diffuse, unorganized, resource-poor groups tend to lose so hard they don't register as actors; they tend to appear in history as the battleground and the spoils that small, concentrated, organized, resource-rich groups fight over. I think this explains a lot about why the history of civilization reads the way it does.

There's a War Nerd essay (https://pando.com/2014/11/27/a-war-nerd-thanksgiving-all-you-drunks-be-thankful-youre-not-in-kuwait/) where he says something about the '80s right-wing turn that resonates with thoughts I've had on it - I don't want to quote the whole thing, you can skim through the essay until you find the paragraph where he talks about the "sullen majority," it's a little less than half-way through. I think he's right about what happened, and I think 2016 was a smaller scale repeat of the same process. But what I think is more interesting in this context, why I brought that up here, is this gave me the thought that a lot of what Steven Pinker calls the decline of violence was a "good" version of that process.

In politics and war small, concentrated, organized groups with lots of resources tend to win, and this is why for most of its history most of human civilization was ruled by small more-or-less closed cliques who inherited their political power and social status from their older relatives. In politics and war big, diffuse, unorganized, resource-poor groups tend to lose, and this is why for most of the history of human civilization the average inhabitant of human civilization was horrifically oppressed under one or several layers of exploitation and/or persecution. There were always people who disliked slavery; they were called slaves. There were always people who disliked sexism; they were called women. There were always people who disliked oligarchy; they were called poor people, peasants, commoners, proletarians, the working class, etc.. There were always people who disliked homophobia; they were called gays. There were always people who disliked religious persecution; they were called religious minorities. There were always people who disliked racism; they were called racial/ethnic minorities. There were always people who disliked corporal-punishment-heavy authoritarian parenting; they were called children. Etc. But these were big, diffuse, unorganized, resource-poor groups, so for most of the history of civilization they lost so hard that their suppression didn't even really register as a fight; they were the battleground and spoils that the small oligarchic cliques fought over. Politically, they were more-or-less an inert mass … until some clever people figured out how to organize them effectively, and then Cthulhu started to swim left.

[wingedcatgirl]

If we're gonna be using "most popular" as our frame of reference for how the country is run, can it at least be "enact most popular policies" instead of "elect most popular politicians"?