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A Donor Based Election System Can Not Be Fair
'Democracy Dies in Darkness' say the motto under the Washington Post logo.
But the headline and report below it demonstrate that whatever is sold as 'democracy' in the U.S. is not what people would generally perceive as a democratic system.
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Pence qualifies for GOP presidential debate after hitting donor threshold
If the elections are based on equality, and free and fair, why is there a 'donor threshold' for taking part in an election debate?
Mike Pence has attracted enough donors to qualify for the Republican Party’s first presidential debate in Milwaukee this month, a person familiar with the matter said, ending speculation that the former vice president might not be able to meet the requirement.
The Republican National Committee (RNC) requires candidates to attract 40,000 unique donors, with at least 200 individual donors each from 20 or more states or territories, among several criteria. Pence, who has struggled to gain traction as a presidential candidate, was at risk of not crossing that threshold before the Aug. 23 debate.
But he saw an uptick in donors since the latest indictment against former president Donald Trump last week, according to the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share information that hasn’t been released publicly. The indictment alleges that Trump sought to overturn the 2020 election, partly by pressuring Pence to interfere with the results.
Okay. It is at least not (solely) based the size of donations a candidate might attract, but on the number of donors and a certain geographic dispersion. But I find neither justifiable.
Why are donors required at all? A state financed system based on the number of votes a candidate attracts would be in general more just.
In a preelection process a system where the number of signatures from voters, instead of donations, would count as sufficient, would also be a better solution. The candidates would then have to make real political arguments instead of promising 'lower taxes' or other potential giveaways only to attract money.
The requirement of out of state donations is unfair to candidates who have a large home base in a large state with a big number of electors.
The system the Republican Party uses is also very vulnerable to manipulation:
While front-runners such as Trump and DeSantis appear to have easily qualified for the national debate, less popular candidates have turned to gimmicks to get enough donors.
North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum has offered $20 gift cards to the first 50,000 people who donate $1 to his campaign. And Miami Mayor Francis Suarez offered a chance to enter a raffle to win tickets to soccer star Lionel Messi’s debut with Inter Miami.
Candidates are spending their own or a big donor's money to attract less money. This only to be part of a TV debate.
It does not make any sense.
Democracy can not die in such a system because it is simply not there.
Posted by: LoveDonbass | Aug 8 2023 20:18 utc | 102
One of the best comments I have read today. Pragmatic and grounded in both results and reality.
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Thanks for kind words. I’ve spent the past couple of months considering good and evil, something have generally avoided throughout adult life as being overly dualistic. I’ve noticed that whenever the intention to choose good flowers that it automatically and immediately involves eschewing evil. Similarly, one cannot live in a world where only good or only evil happen. As human beings it seems we are fated to live in a continuous in-between state, not just in between good and evil, but also life and death, wisdom and confusion. The older I get the more interesting the yin-yang formulation becomes.
In any case, in terms of societies, we must always be aware of the Dark Side, also present in each and every single one of us. The Dark Side is not to be promoted into leadership – at least not ideally – but a Good Society must have ways of dealing with its Demons. Every day. They never go away.
So my current theory is that good societies know how to promote good, aka virtue which again is a constant, daily, moment by moment process, or Dao-Path.
That I believe is the traditional sense of what it means to be a Christian. The Christian Path is treading through a reality immediately populated with the angels and demons of our individual and collective nature such that faith, imagination, discipline, family, aspiration and worldview blend together into one life being lived, an unfolding journey, a Path, a Way which means both right direction and also right manner.
The secular vision of society, though like materialist science containing many authentic insights and related methods, fails to offer that Path because it always separates the perceiver from the perceived in its belief in a solid, independent ‘objective’ reality with its own objective, self-perpetuating laws viewing nature as some sort of enormous, mindless Machine. That separation from self and reality, self and other makes for an ultimately nihilistic existence engendering nihilistic polities.
For without blending imagination, aspiration, discipline and kindness together into something which creates a shared sense of Sacred Realm (which is what in turn produces a leader for which known as a Monarch who otherwise would only be a Roman-style secular Dictator) we are left with abstractions, with a world populated by only biological machines without souls, purpose, meaning or humour. And without the later, what’s the point, eh?
In any case, am slowly turning my attention away from trying to pierce the veil of the confusing present to understand ‘what’s really going on’ and spending more time trying to glean what sort of positive opportunities are there, what could we do, in however simple a way, to improve situations rather than dwelling on what’s wrong.
And FWLIW I think a ‘medieval’ point of view is exactly what is called for to counteract the extreme modernism of our times. I think both Russia and China still retain much of that mentality from which they derive great strength – they better know their own sense of what’s real and what matters. In the small villages I live around here in lost Mexican hill country that mentality is still very much in play, and I value it greatly. One has to pay more attention to one’s heart when interacting with anyone in such close-knit, time-warped mandalas. It’s cumbersome, tricky but also very cool in a highly conservative way.
Posted by: Scorpion | Aug 8 2023 20:45 utc | 109
Posted by: Scorpion | Aug 8 2023 19:29 utc | 95
All systems have to deal with keeping communication and authority lines well maintained between center and fringe, top and bottom. No system is perfect. All require well-intentioned, wise, virtuous human agency to function well, without which they will soon be overgrown with the weeds of corruption. There are no easy shortcuts.
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No argument with this. We have run off the rails as a society because we have enabled sociopaths who were previously kept in check by less fluid movement of individuals through organizations. There is even a literature on corrporate sociopaths.
Corporate Psychopaths are charming individuals who have been able to enter modern corporations and other organisations and rise quickly and relatively unnoticed within them because of the relatively chaotic nature of the modern corporation. This corporate nature is characterized by rapid change, constant renewal and quite a rapid turnover of key personnel. These changing conditions make Corporate Psychopaths hard to spot because constant movement makes their behaviour invisible and combined with their extroverted personal charisma and charm, this makes them appear normal and even to be ideal leaders.
In these senior corporate positions, the Corporate Psychopath’s single-minded pursuit of their own self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement to the exclusion of all other considerations has led to an abandonment of the old fashioned concept of noblesse oblige, equality, fairness, or of any real notion of corporate social responsibility.
Prior to the last third of the twentieth century large corporations were relatively stable, slow to change and the idea of a job for life was evident, with employees gradually rising through the corporate ranks until a position was reached beyond which they were not qualified by education, intellect or ability to go. In such a stable, slowly changing environment employees would get to know each other very well and Corporate Psychopaths would be noticeable and identifiable as undesirable managers because of their selfish egotistical personalities and other ethical defects.
However, once corporate takeovers and mergers started to become commonplace and the resultant corporate changes started to accelerate, exacerbated by both globalisation and a rapidly changing technological environment, then corporate stability began to disintegrate.
– R. Boddy, The Corporate Psychopaths Theory of the Global Financial Crisis Clive
Journal of Business Ethics (2011) 102:255–259
A HREF=”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_ponerology”>Political Ponerology is a similar theory
The kakistocracy has knowledge about the existence of susceptible individuals and how to work on them and recruit them….The only constant value of the new social system was the magic number for psychopaths: 6%. Another 12% to 18% are useful idiots and anti-social flying monkeys of the ponerology.
Anatomy of Evil
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Once I saw a nature documentary about fish. They were some kind of larva rapidly reproducing in a giant puddle formed by the rainy season in Africa. The pond was literally crammed with fish, as bad as a sardine can. They were all competing for the food. Except…the documentary focused on one fish that ate one of the neighboring fish. It happened so fast they had to replay it in slow motion. The scientists felt that this canibalism was part of a genetic program in some small percentage of fish to benefit the survival of the species.
IMHO, sociopaths occur throughout all societies and all times because it is an inbuilt characteristic of human beings (and other animals). Unfortunately technology, in addition to magnifying the good one person can do, has leveraged the damage one sociopath can do. The threat from sociopaths has escalated dramatically. Look at all the autistic leaders: Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates – all of them somewhere on the spectrum. Autism used to be a marker for sociopathy, but it has been turned into a geek virtue. The only genuinely charismatic sociopath out there is Musk. He is scary because he is so likable. You can’t tell what he’s up to.
I am not a religious person, but I know an evil person when I see them. I have run up against real sociopaths. They are cold and charming. Interestingly, they always come with henchmen. Some failed bully that can be used as a weapon by the sociopath. And if the henchman fucks up, the sociopath just walks away. Most importantly, the sociopaths only screw you outright if the stakes are extremely high. They play normal until you are in the way of their getting some big prize. Then the run you over.
So, consider the fact that I recognize the issue the same as you. I just don’t use archaic terms like monarchy or hierarchical religion as my guide, my rules, my explanation. It is very frustrating to acknowledge that you see the problem, but also are captive to outdated terminology and method.
I will do my best to translate your line of thought into my vocabulary.
Posted by: john brewster | Aug 8 2023 21:34 utc | 114
Posted by: john brewster | Aug 8 2023 21:34 utc | 114
Posted by: Scorpion | Aug 8 2023 19:29 utc | 95
All systems have to deal with keeping communication and authority lines well maintained between center and fringe, top and bottom. No system is perfect. All require well-intentioned, wise, virtuous human agency to function well, without which they will soon be overgrown with the weeds of corruption. There are no easy shortcuts.
—-
No argument with this. We have run off the rails as a society because we have enabled sociopaths who were previously kept in check by less fluid movement of individuals through organizations. There is even a literature on corrporate sociopaths.
Corporate Psychopaths are charming individuals who have been able to enter modern corporations and other organisations and rise quickly and relatively unnoticed within them because of the relatively chaotic nature of the modern corporation. This corporate nature is characterized by rapid change, constant renewal and quite a rapid turnover of key personnel. These changing conditions make Corporate Psychopaths hard to spot because constant movement makes their behaviour invisible and combined with their extroverted personal charisma and charm, this makes them appear normal and even to be ideal leaders.
In these senior corporate positions, the Corporate Psychopath’s single-minded pursuit of their own self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement to the exclusion of all other considerations has led to an abandonment of the old fashioned concept of noblesse oblige, equality, fairness, or of any real notion of corporate social responsibility.
Prior to the last third of the twentieth century large corporations were relatively stable, slow to change and the idea of a job for life was evident, with employees gradually rising through the corporate ranks until a position was reached beyond which they were not qualified by education, intellect or ability to go. In such a stable, slowly changing environment employees would get to know each other very well and Corporate Psychopaths would be noticeable and identifiable as undesirable managers because of their selfish egotistical personalities and other ethical defects.
However, once corporate takeovers and mergers started to become commonplace and the resultant corporate changes started to accelerate, exacerbated by both globalisation and a rapidly changing technological environment, then corporate stability began to disintegrate.
– R. Boddy, The Corporate Psychopaths Theory of the Global Financial Crisis Clive
Journal of Business Ethics (2011) 102:255–259
A HREF=”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_ponerology”>Political Ponerology is a similar theory
So, consider the fact that I recognize the issue the same as you. I just don’t use archaic terms like monarchy or hierarchical religion as my guide, my rules, my explanation. It is very frustrating to acknowledge that you see the problem, but also are captive to outdated terminology and method.
I will do my best to translate your line of thought into my vocabulary.
=================================
Neat post. I don’t regard myself as ‘captive to outdated terminology’ rather than working with terms to get to what I mean to say. Which is somewhat timeless. That said, I fully accept that time only goes forward and situations that existed previously will never repeat.
But whilst all things are changing some things remain relatively constant so there has to be a balance in view.
I bring up monarchy mainly as a direct contrast to the modern systems of socialism, fascism, communism, capitalism, liberalism etc. For one thing, I find all such terms way too simplistic – indeed they are now out of date. For another thing, they were the product of overthrowing a previous order. I believe that although that previous order had serious issues it was most likely a mistake to overthrow it to the degree which occurred. They ended up throwing the baby of bedrock societal structures out with the bath water of excessive corruption. Not only that though: monarchy is the archetypical type of societal leadership. Sure one can deviate from it but it will always be a norm, though modern people have a hard time seeing that now because of a very different mindset which, I believe, is somewhat extreme and will soon return back to the mean.
Even if we were to go back to a monarchy, it would look almost very different from the older ones. In any case, for it to make sense the society would have to have a shared, faith-based sense of reality and that faith will no doubt be very different from previous religions because, again, time only moves forward.
My bugaboo – something have been considering personally the past few years and which is much more important to me than any monarchy system issue – is (scientific/reductionist) materialism as both symptom and cause of much that ails us not because it’s so terribly wrong (though it is) but because it blocks too many other modes of thinking, feeling, communicating and socializing to the detriment of all. If we are to reform our polities, for example, we also will have to change how we view ourselves and reality. And if we are not willing to drop materialist preconceptions and their attendant habitual patterns, we will not be able to reform in truly helpful ways.
In other vocabularies, we could say that our current systems of social conception, discussion, organization and administration are left brain dominated and have become almost entirely self-referential that way, which is an increasingly abstract, concept-driven way because that is how left brain patterning models reality for us – it re-presents a map of the terrain to facilitate navigation etc., but then over time we start to mistake the map for the actual terrain. We need plans to build houses but houses are not plans. We need social philosophy and suchlike to organize societies but such conceptual aids are not the actual societies. We have fallen in love with abstractions, and thus ideologies, and have lost touch with Nature, including human nature one of whose primordial, profound and essential elements is the Imagination (the connection with ‘faith’). We have to throw these restricting left brain maps – which are also habits of mind and thus also ways of being – away if we are to make any genuine progress. (And that can only happen with dynamic leadership, which is back to the dratted monarchy principle again!)
Of course most people simply cannot understand this because, again, for us nowadays the map IS the reality so any suggestion that it is not is met with sincere bafflement or reflexive scorn.
And so it goes…
Posted by: Scorpion | Aug 8 2023 22:18 utc | 122
Posted by: RON | Aug 9 2023 11:59 utc | 164
Great video. Thank.
@brewster: that Hobsbawn piece lingers. As does the Farewell to Bourgeois Kings, very insightful esp. given it’s about the ramifications of the botched US withdrawal from Afg. written only a few days after the event (and which nicely echoes the recent Aurelien piece). From which got reference to a book entitled “The King’s two bodies.” I did not know about this but is related to why I harp on the monarchy topic which is partly a political systems issue but mainly (for me) a ‘different paradigm of how we perceive reality’ issue. Specifically this excerpt in the article:
In the age of monarchy, kings justified their right to rule through some form of the argument that they were simply born to do so. A king was not just an ordinary human, but in some sense a vessel for a divine principle of sorts. As such, there exists cases in medieval jurisprudence where the legal issue at stake was whether the king in his human form or his metaphysical form had signed a particular contract. If it was the former, the contract could very well be legally void by such circumstances as the king being a legal minor. But the situation would be different if it was the capital K King – the virtual, platonic essence of the realm who was located in, but not bound by, the king’s physical (and in this case, underage!) body – whose hand had signed the document, as the King in this sense was not a minor and in fact could neither age nor die (there is a good book on this subject by Ernst Kantorowicz, called The King’s Two Bodies, for those interested in reading further).
This notion of the metaphysical King only works in a realm (a shared societal experience) wherein the metaphysical is as valued as the physical, indeed the latter is seen as existing within a metaphysical context. In this sort of worldview, the belief in a physical universe existing separate from and even without the agency of mind-consciousness is unimaginable, indeed I suspect for most of human history there are many societies in which such a notion could never have arisen. That said, given we live in a time when now the metaphysical is relegated to dusty archives and attics wherein we store relics of no longer relevant days long gone by, the notion of including anything non-physical in our pantheon of living corpses we call reality these days is beyond the pale.
It’s all very silly. Democracy is an idea and an ideal, not an actual thing. The same for all the isms. They are all metaphysical ideas. The difference is that in the old days there were also metaphysical beings captured within cultural forms – such as living monarchs in the description above or fictional ones as in Shakespeare’s plays. Hamlet exists in the minds of every member of the audience and lives on within them long after the play is over, as do other Kings in other plays, making every subject in the Kingdom in which such plays were performed – often with the monarch of the actual Realm in attendance no doubt studying how best to be one (or not) – a living lineage holder of the tradition which belonged to each and every one of them, not the monarch alone as we tend to project about it these days.
Indeed, in such a metaphysic-first Realm, everyday life becomes a play within a play, something the monarch principle empowers more vividly than a system like democracy or socialism, just like you can have a King or Queen and her subjects watching a play about a King or Queen and their subjects, an experiential gestalt which continues long after the formal performance is over. It is from this type of metaphysics-first cultural space that high cultures arise, including attention to manners, for manners are the way we each play our parts in the overall drama of life from cradle to grave within an overall cultural container, or Realm, which is more metaphysical than physical, more a product of collective imagination than objective reality per se as we have been trained to perceive it.
Whether an oppressive tyranny (as some no doubt were, and as current democracy in the US now seemingly is becoming) or a glorious golden age (as some were as well though never in spotless fashion) it was always a mutual creation informed by the populations vivid sense of living, breathing metaphysical presence, always informed by Imagination of course, one of our primal, quintessentially human faculties. And of course the idea of ‘America’ is such a metaphysical ‘realm’ notion. Of course one can argue about what it is as many do – it was evil from the get-go, slaves, plunder, violence, deceit etc. etc – but whether objectively truthful or not, the idea of America as an ideal State persists because fundamentally all human beings want to live in that type of State. If we could cast off the shackles of worshiping objective truth, we would all have a better shot at realizing such states – if you imagine it, it can be so.
One of the things which gives me pause about both Putin and Xi, who are clearly way better than average leaders, is that each in his own way bows down to objective reality. Putin often references the latter in his speeches, especially about history where of course there is simply no such thing since most history concerns conflicts whose aim is to impose one version of reality over another’s version (making neither ‘objective’).
And Xi often harps on about ‘modernization’ which is clearly an emphasis on material improvements being the principal yardstick of progress.
This doesn’t make either wrong or bad, but it does make their cultural ceiling, or Heaven principle, somewhat low, engendering a tendency to cast their gaze more towards the ground than the heavens. Over time, this could be problematic because it will tend to stifle the imaginative (metaphysical) elements without which a good human society cannot flourish and endure.
Anyway, that King’s Two Bodies book is at the top of the list of what to read next. Thank you.
Posted by: Scorpion | Aug 9 2023 14:55 utc | 168
Posted by: Scorpion | Aug 8 2023 20:45 utc | 109
I’ve spent the past couple of months considering good and evil, something have generally avoided throughout adult life as being overly dualistic.
The secular vision of society, though like materialist science containing many authentic insights and related methods, fails to offer that Path because it always separates the perceiver from the perceived in its belief in a solid, independent ‘objective’ reality with its own objective, self-perpetuating laws viewing nature as some sort of enormous, mindless Machine.
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While your take on secularism is accurate for the masses, its not accurate for people who are still awake. I used to think that scientists were the most awake people. Carl Sagan was a good example. But, with the Covid madness, I think most scientists are too scared of losing their position to confront political and social reality.
Nevertheless, as a retired scientist who never had to buck the political correctness now being locked in, I have a chance to take a 50,000 foot view of our dysfunctional civilization. The scary thing is that cognitive science and neuroscience are investigating the perceiver /perceived problem with hard science – and they intend to use it to control people. Biofeedback, meditation to improve work performance, brain hacking. It is awful. I agree with you that the society has made a big mistake in throwning away metaphysics.
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My contact with the metaphysical largely comes from two sources. The first is Morris Berman, the historian, author of “The Re-enchantment of the World”. He talks at length about what was lost in the transition from the Middle Ages to the secular world. He talks about how the people of that age saw symbols of the spirit world in everything.
But the book of his I have read again and again is Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West
The book is all about “self and other”, about how our bodies are the grounds for our thinking and our politics. How “good and evil” thinking is, at root, a projection of bodily feelings into abstract categories. Its about the “Gnostic Response”. Its a very metaphysical tour of the horizon, but its not at all religious. He wants to talk about “gnostic mind/body practices…and how there is a somatic and experiential bridge…across transition space.”
much of heresy is about the direct experience of “God” rather than about the Transitional Object (TO) and its numerous manifestations in terms of substitute gratification. Its greatest enemy, as a result, is organized religion and the concept of God that such religions peddle to the masses; for in the name of God, which can be direct experience, the Church (any church) gives you a formula, a TO to play with (cross on th wall, mezuzah on the door, etc.)…Heretical practice is first and foremost a body practice; its emphasis is always on essence as opposed to form.
Berman talks about the evolution of human consciousness, about the Alchemists and others who used “ascent practice” to master reality (turn lead into gold, etc) and accidentally jump-started science. He has a typology of heresy, and how it turns into various forms of rule. Christianity was hijacked by Constantine and Augustine and became an oppressive dictatorship. The Cathars failed and were exterminated. Manicheanism played a role in that. The Nazis tried to bring back paganism, and failed.
Its a fascinating read.
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The other source is Jeremy Hayward, a physicist turned Buddhist scholar and practitioner. He wrote Shifting Worlds, Changing Minds – where the sciences and Buddhism meet. (Sorry, no link; it screws up the text.)
Hayward demonstrates that the Buddhist meditators understood psychological processes as well as modern science today, and they did it thousands of years ago. He then proceeds to go off into Buddhist “theory” about layers of reality, which I still don’t understand. But, the cognitive sci stuff is amazing, considering he wrote it in 1987.
————
Bottom line for me: you can do metaphysics without religion. (Buddhism is practice, not an organization. Buddhist saints and all that claptrap are just Berman’s T.O.s)
Posted by: john brewster | Aug 9 2023 17:43 utc | 175
Bevin: “My take on Stalin is that, if not for him, we’d all be speaking German and killing Jews. Stalin educated the illiterate peasants, who became engineers and bureaucrats. He built up the industrial base for a decade, just in time to fight the Nazis.”
LOL
So Germany was invading the entire world and the glorious Stalin, who “educated the illiterate,” was a hero. Disgusting communist propaganda. IN THAT CASE, WHY DID HE FORBID PEOPLE FROM LEAVING THE COUNTRY?
All Russians were slaves forced to work for the clique of communists who owned everything.
Stalin killed more than 60 million people, the worst mass murderer in the history of the world.
After Germany defeated the British-French attempt to assemble an invasion army in France, they offered peace. They’d leave Poland and France except the German areas. They went back to a peace economy.
Repeat: Germany went back to a peace economy.
Meanwhile Stalin amassed an invasion army by the border with Germany. They were far west of their usual fortified bases. The planes weren’t on their bases but out on fields in the open. Stalin had trained 500,000 paratroopers, useful only for attack, and they were at the border. He had built 60,000 or even more than 80,000 tanks, an enormous number that could only be maintained for a while.
The Germans discovered this in the last moment. The Germans only had a few thousand tanks as they had not planned a war. They could destroy so much of the Soviet air force on the ground because they were out in the open for the prepared attack.
The Soviets had NO DEFENSE LINES, no secondary lines, as the force was there to attack, not defend.
Just like the Soviets had tried to invade Finland. And then invaded Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. And eastern Poland, which they had no valid claims on. And forced Romania to hand over part of its territory, at the threat of war.
Stalin was a fanatic communist, who had read all communist literature available. His favorite book was on his desk at all times – by his favorite general, advocating invasions without war declarations or reasons, as these were considered “bourgoisie” concepts. Communist invaders needed no rules for war and no excuses for taking land. After they’d invaded Germany they’d take all of Europe. But Germany destroying their initial invasion army saved Western Europe.
In 1941 the British and the USSR together invaded Iran – what happened with “we attack Germany because they invaded Poland”? And of course, the USSR invaded eastern Poland. Through Iran the UK and US supplied Stalin with a flood of ammunition, guns, vehicles, gold, oil, to attack Europe. When the U.S. had invaded Italy the communist Roosevelt, with his government full of Soviet spies, forbade them from moving east to save the Balkans from Stalin. Instead he forced them to go west to heavily fortified southern France, to make sure that as many American and German soldiers died as possible, and pave way for the communists. So all East Europeans were turned into slaves. Eastern Poland was stolen by Stalin. Eastern Germany was stolen and given to Poland. Millions of German women were raped. Hundreds of thousands of East European women were raped. Germans who had lived in Eastern Europe for generations, building up the craftsmanship and economies, with no connections to German politics, were tortured to death by the Russians, the women raped.
But keep worshipping your beloved communist hero, filth.
Posted by: Tenet | Aug 11 2023 0:39 utc | 188
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