Politicians are (probably) not your neighbors, even when you think they are.
The human mind is set up to deal with social relationships up to a small community level. After that the mind loses track of the important people and relationships. Even in large cities, things get broken down into neighborhoods or blocks or suburbs so that there is an area that you are relatively familiar with and may know lots of people, and then you cross over a boundary and you may as well be on the other side of the world.
Politics, like many other human endeavors, actually piggybacks off of the human mind's ability to track relationships. This is why those people interested in politics are expected to know about certain key players (like "Who the President is" or "who your representative is"), but you are not expected to know the representatives of another state unless they are politically powerful (like Speaker of the House or something).
What strikes me as really odd about what happened in the 20th Century is that even though the population pretty much doubled from 1950-2000, and tripled from 1900-2000, the number of national politicians remained roughly static. So people should have felt much less connection to their leaders by the end of the century, as they were getting much less equal representation. But due to mass media, the opposite effect happened, and for alot of the population (especially those who watched TV or listened to their politicians on the radio), it was almost like they moved into their neighborhood.
The ability for leaders to communicate personally increased even more with the addition of the internet and email, where you could get a personal (or at least personalized) response from a leader in almost the same way you could from one of your friends; even though they really don't know who you are or anything about you. I know this same thing could be said about other celebrities, but the point is that 1) this illusion is almost enough for some leaders to get votes based solely on how quickly they pick up on the new media instead of being based on any kind of political viewpoint at all, and 2) there no longer has to be any kind of BS filter, which can be a bad thing if the politician is simply lying through their teeth or is putting out completely meaningless fluff messages and never bothers to take a stand on any issue at all.
I know I'm not the first (or the last) person to point this out. People have gone on to talk about an ideological echo chamber being put in place where no opposing ideas are even heard. What bothers me most about this however, isn't the quality of messages being sent from politician to voter, but the trap where, not only does a voter start to feel like the politician is someone living in their neighborhood that they have a connection to, but the politicians themselves actually start to feel that just by being on CNN, or putting out a Twitter message, and having people respond to it, and then getting an opinion poll put out that they suddenly have interacted with a million (or more) voters on a meaningful level.
It's getting to the point where our entire policy, foreign and domestic, is being mediated through whatever can fit on a TV or a computer screen, and where opinion polls and messages from the relatively small number of people who care and have the time to respond to a single issue are the only form of communication between the leadership and the people in our country. Accurate polls can be an important tool, but they only ask certain questions: questions that the person doing the polling care about.
But it's the unasked poll questions that turn into tomorrows big problem. Our political landscape is becoming hyperfocused on a small number of issues. Our leaders (not just political, but business as well) are being spoon fed information through a small set of mediated devices or by their subordinates who have their own filters that depend often on defense from political attack or on defusing blame.
The answer is not always online
Psychology has told us time and again that the majority of interpersonal communication is non-verbal. Most important Scientific discoveries focus on gradual changes over time that are dependent upon having people on the ground taking regular observations and reporting their findings. Political and business institutions have become increasingly non-personal. Media and business cycles have become shorter and shorter, and yet leaders are given a greater illusion of control because they can literally make decisions from anywhere, at any time of day, and have this massive amounts of leveraged information at their fingertips. Moreover, the people under them feel more connected than ever because of this same technology.
I am not saying that the connections people make online are meaningless. There are people I have talked to on a regular basis over the internet that I feel are much closer to me than some of the people in my neighborhood whom I have never met. The problem is that this connection can override other important messages and I don't think it used to before the technology was available.
Take the Afghanistan war for example. The person making decisions about the war can give a speech about it, and have it show up on CNN. They can go on the web and update their Facebook or Twitter telling the voter even more about how they feel or think on the topic. And the voters can read this and feel connected to the politician in a way they couldn't during, say World War I. They can even give a reply over the internet and the politician may even read it and feel connected to some of their voters in a way that leaders in the 1910s couldn't have felt.
But the person over there getting shot at or killing other people isn't involved in the loop at all. For that matter, with the use of these flying drones, even the person shooting at other people isn't directly on the ground dealing with the consequences of the war. In 1911, a person may read a news story about the war, but that would be given less weight than what letters back home would have to say. For that matter, the sense of real life community was stronger, and the numbers of people who are non-military that were still involved in the war was much greater, so you may have a neighbor or relative who was over there, or who had a son over there fighting. And their opinions would also weigh much more heavily than that of a story in a newspaper, or a stump speech by a political supporter of the President.
Because of this feeling that the President, or any other media personality, is somehow a part of our neighborhood, they're suddenly given equal weight with people who actually are in our community. It may knit us together as a nation, but I think it is blinding us to the fact that a large amount of our people and energy is being spent on something that we have no actual real life connection to anymore. We're turning into a blind elephant charging around and trying to find our way. The entire process is becoming something impersonal and therefore inhuman, and it's being glossed over by this market mentality where "have a nice day" and "screw you" can be uttered in the same impersonal corporate memo-speak that can keep the actual message from registering if you're not paying attention.
Amateur versus Professional Politicos
And in many ways, this is getting worse as so many of our demagogues are giving government service a bad name while at the same time pushing more of the tasks that government is doing for us onto mercenaries, contractors, and other proxies. I think our country needs more of its citizens out there acting in the real world, and bringing their personal experiences back into the community. We need less professionals and more volunteers and amateurs or we're going to get blinded by mass media and Big Corporate interests that don't align with the people who are paying the actual costs in war, or in any other large government endeavor.
What bothers me even more, and I'm a middle class computer professional, is this trend towards middle manager computerized views of problem solving. You can even see it on TV where "the answer" suddenly comes from some computer or lab or special effect somewhere and we just plug it in and it's all solved in time for the commercial break at the top of the hour. Real life solutions are often messy. They often involve getting dirty and doing some actual, dare I say it, hard work, and yet the people who are making the decisions, and the people reporting on the decisions, and the people voting on the decisions often have a desk job, and a college degree, and probably don't know how to drive a forklift, or a jack hammer, or know the business end of a shovel or an M-16. Even though we as a country have gained alot of wealth and power, we're losing something important.
And I know it has always been that way to some extent, but now there's so much money involved that there's no way even an actual middle class (or even, less than middle class) person can get elected to national office. If you don't have 6 figures in your bank account, and haven't made friends with lots of people who are lawyers and who also have at least that many figures in their bank account, you can't even buy a seat at the table. I know there're people who are reading this and thinking "my politician/cherished media celebrity is different" and that's complete BS. Maybe some of them learned about hard work a long time ago, but by the time they've made enough money to buy their way into politics, they've long since left that behind. It's almost become a feature of our political system where the only people who can get elected are those who are doing something in the interests of people with lots and lots of money.
And I'm not talking about socialism or communism or any other "-ism." I'm talking about how any important decision that affects the lives of ordinary people has to be greased by payoffs to the interests of one group or another with a big pile of money. We're being dominated by a market mentality. America is being run by people who are insulated from any of the negative consequences of any decision we make, and we have to pay them to make even the smallest of changes in our political system. There is something very wrong with this.
