Skeptics Should Consider Becoming Floating Voters
We also need new NGOs to help floating voters evaluate parties based on their platforms
"Floating voter?" by ianduffy is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
Last week’s column looked at a raft of policies to build a society that would encourage permissionless innovation and sustainability. This approach is based around institutionalism and a laissez faire baseline, with some triangulation to pick the best policies from left and right, while also developing pragmatic solutions to knotty problems. It is also grounded in skepticism.
Sadly, voters rarely have the chance to vote for parties or politicians that offer platforms like this. Even when they do, they tend to be a sideshow. Instead, liberal democracies often offer voters a straight choice between left and right. Narcissistic leaders on both sides can be tempted to develop black-and-white narratives based on unattractive identity politics as a way of gaining power.
The right can be drawn to populist narratives based on tribal identities. This can lead to terrible policies like Brexit, storming the Capitol or Catalan independence. Meanwhile, the left can be led astray by a poor understanding of imperialism and a lack of due process as it sets new rules on what ordinary people can and can’t say. This might appear less harmful, but ask any Venezuelan exile whether left-wing economic populism is just a bit of fun.
What should skeptical pro-innovation institutionalists do when faced with an ugly choice? My feeling is that we should become floating voters. We should try and work out which side with a realistic chance of winning offers a more liberal platform and then give it our provisional support.
Power tends to corrupt, as we have seen, so if all else is equal, we should probably build an anti-incumbency bias into our calculations. This should be tempered with an anti-populist bias. Opposition leaders on left and right can be particularly tempted to buy into narratives about the real people as a way of beating incumbents.
In practice, choosing between two sides on the merits of their platforms can be a hard choice, particularly for those of us who were brought up with the idea that one should never, ever vote for a particular party. I think it would be interesting if some of the energy that is spent on developing third parties were instead devoted to helping floating voters organize and make informed choices.
Can you imagine a non-government organization (NGO) that has a formal methodology to check party manifestos? And then awards each main party marks for institutionalism, encouraging innovation (particularly cleantech) and pragmatic problem-solving? But also removes marks for incumbency, identity politics and populist narratives?
The NGO could build a massive following on social media between elections. If its recommendations began to sway close elections, politicians’ advisors would start looking closely at its checklist and trying to design policies that would tip the balance over the other guy. Wouldn’t that be positive? The comments are open. See you next week!
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Opinions expressed on Substack and Twitter are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.