A Lesson on Politics from the 2024 US Election
The Caricature of an Election
A rational mind, unencumbered by self-interest, is likely to be bewildered by how the 2024 US election shows as an extremely close fight in all polls. While Kamala Harris is not a perfect candidate and has some significant political vulnerabilities, she comes across as having a sharp mind, projects an optimism for the future, offers some explicit policy goals, commits to working for all Americans, has no major ethical violations in her history, is reasonable without being unduly deceitful in her speeches, expresses respect for democracy and rule of law, and has acquitted herself well in hostile interviews. In contrast, Donald Trump has been accurately described by one media outlet as “the most repellent figure in modern US history — a pathological liar, unabashed racist, convicted criminal, and adjudicated sexual assaulter who incited a violent insurrection against the United States.” In addition, he has ducked hostile interviews where he will be fact checked, explicitly threatened to use the military against political opponents, spews hate and divisiveness, and delivers long and meandering speeches that show signs of cognitive decline and brain fog with substantial time given to personal grievances and irrelevant matters (including talking about a dead golfer’s genitalia and fictional characters described as though they were real).
How could this comparison yield a close election? As David Sedaris put it, this election is like being on a plane where the flight attendant serving the meal asks, “Which would you prefer — the shit with bits of broken glass in it or the chicken?” and half the people ask, “How is the chicken cooked?” It is precisely because this comparison is such a caricature that it offers clear lessons on how a democratic election works, particularly in demolishing three false myths we tend to hold that lead us to assume the result of an election represents the collective wisdom of the people.
False Myth 1: Democratic Elections Are Decided by Majority Opinion.
In analysing how mathematical understanding can change one’s reading of news, John Allen Paolos argues that democracy is not affected by the relative weight of a majority versus a minority as much as how each breaks down within itself. He cites the example of gun control in the United States (and I must emphasise I use this as an example to make a point and do not wish to get into any discussion of gun control). Many opinion polls show that as much as 80% of the American public support gun control in some form, yet this majority support is insufficient to convince politicians, bar a few, to adopt it as a cause. That is because of the 20% who oppose gun control (members of the National Rifle Association and others of a similar mind), three-quarters of them hold such fanatical beliefs on the issue that they are likely to make a voting choice based on this single issue. Three-quarters of 20% is 15% of the electorate. Of the 80% who support gun control, they do so among a spectrum of other issues and only 5% of them (who may have personally encountered gun violence) will make this a single cause voting choice. 5% of 80% represents 4% of the electorate. The 11% differential between 15% on one hand and 4% on the other is often enough to swing an election. The politicians know that and are therefore reluctant to embrace the cause.
Democratic politics finds fanatical minorities more reliable than liberal majorities, so often adopts a strategy of generic promises to attract a diffuse base and then courts the strong loyalty of fanatical minorities as swing votes. The Trump campaign is ideologically better suited to this strategy than the Harris campaign. It has attracted a support base that is large and loyal enough to force the Republican Party to align with it, including those who have strongly criticised Trump earlier and now support him to avoid jeopardising their political careers. The Harris campaign has sought to mobilise specific constituencies, such as over the issue of women’s reproductive rights, but has had mixed results partly because the desire to appear balanced has led to mixing any message with others felt to be significant, whereas Trump’s absence of any desire to appear rational allows his appeal to fanaticism to dominate his messaging.
False Myth 2: Political Choices Are Always Carefully Evaluated.
In his book Thinking Fast and Slow that describes a great deal of his Nobel Prize winning research, Daniel Kahneman describes two systems of thinking we deploy. System 1 is fast, automatic, intuitive, operating with little or no effort and allows quick judgment based on established patterns and experiences. System 2 is slow, deliberate, carefully gathers and evaluates evidence, and requires considerable effort.
In some cases, errors can result from a failure to deploy System 2 thinking. An example often cited to prove this point is a cancer screening program where 10,000 women in their 40’s are given mammograms. They are told that the mammogram is a test that has an accuracy of 95%, errors from the test are only 5%. A woman receives a positive result from her mammogram, and having heard about this accuracy rate uses System 1 thinking to immediately conclude there is a 95% probability that she has cancer.
This is far from the truth. For women in their 40’s, the incidence of breast cancer is about 1%. If 10,000 are screened, only 100 will have cancer. Since the test is 95% accurate, 95 of these women will receive a true positive report and 5 will receive a false negative report. But one must also account for the fact that 9,900 women do not have cancer, and of these 5%, that is 495, will receive false positive reports. The true probability of a positive mammogram result being accurate is determined by the number of true positives divided by the total number of positives, that is 95/(95+495), which yields a result of 16.1%. The System 1 conclusion of 95% certainty of cancer is revealed by System 2 analysis to be only a 16.1% probability. A sensible doctor will never make a cancer diagnosis solely on a mammogram test and will include other diagnostic and clinical data in the evaluation.
This does not mean that people who do not deploy System 2 thinking are stupid or uneducated. A long evolutionary history has made us into beings who must use both types of thinking. When we were hunter gatherers out to find food and saw a sabre-tooth tiger on the prowl, we did not pause to deploy System 2 thinking to carefully evaluate data on the behavioural patterns of big cats — we employed quick rules of thumb like “I had better climb a tree quickly.” While such physical dangers may not threaten many of us in the modern area, we all must deploy a judicious mix of System 1 and System 2 thinking to keep our brains and bodies from suffering systemic overload.
We need to be trained to discern how and when to deploy System 2 thinking. Paolo Freire, the Brazilian philosopher and activist, argues that this is not what mainstream education trains us to do. It is built on what Freire calls “the banking model of education,” where the teacher enters the classroom as the expert who holds the knowledge, the students are treated as empty vessels, and like a bank transfer the teacher transfers knowledge to the student. This model works well for standardised testing, which is what most formal education aims at. It treats knowledge as external and relatively static, breeding conformity to the status quo rather than inculcating the student with an internal critical consciousness that empowers the construction of new knowledge. This system inherently trains us to gravitate toward System 1 thinking and, when we deploy System 2 thinking, it tends to be aimed at intellectual abstractions rather than everyday dilemmas that shape how ordinary people pursue a good life.
Kahneman argues that this pushes us to selectively interpret and use evidence to confirm established bias rather than open our eyes to assess the evidence for what it truly represents. The Trump campaign is inherently better poised to appeal to established bias.
False Myth 3: Democracy Inherently Contains the Political and Social Infrastructure for Informed and Rational Choice.
We will have informed and rational democratic choice only when every voter is a free participant with an internalised capacity for critical discernment. This does not tend to happen. As the economist Majid Rehnema pointed out, every society tends to breed creeds that produce, from the bottom up, inwardly self-constrained and biased persons. If we lack the capacity to critically construct our own anchors in the world, we are evolutionally conditioned to seek security by aligning with a herd. When the creeds we align with mobilise to become political actors, we are driven to believe that our biases are not only the foundations of our freedom but also the vehicles of greater freedom to come.
Freire argues for a value he calls conscientização, often translated as ‘conscientisation’ (and that is the term I shall use here), the development of a critical consciousness of one’s social and political reality through dialogue, reflection, and action. This does not naturally evolve in society and must be deliberately pursued. Pre-democratic peasant societies tend to be imbued with a naïve conscientisation, where they may be aware of their problems but believe their causes to be inevitable or natural, resulting in a response that is passive or resigned. The introduction of democratic choice does not break this impasse completely, only introducing a semi-conscientisation where people now recognise their social reality is shaped by larger forces, but their understanding is incomplete. They begin to critique their situation but rely on myths or partial external truths to explain their situation, often placing agency for change in external forces. A true democracy occurs only where there is a critical conscientisation where people achieve a deep understanding of how social, political, and economic structures perpetuate inequality and oppression and recognise their own agency in transforming their reality through collective action.
Like most democracies the world over, the US polity is still in the stage of semi-conscientisation. Both Trump and Harris claim agency for economic and political change, and the people look at them expecting that agency from them. Nowhere in the broader political discourse is there even consideration of the possibility that agency can be liberated within the general population so that people can become active participants in shaping a political and economic future. Politics is left to the politicians and people are assumed to only pursue self-interest. Put that together with the capacity for fanaticism to swing elections and the tendency of people to confirm their biases rather than dispassionately evaluate evidence and reason, and we find cause for the state of democracy in the world: the closeness of the fight in a caricature of a comparison in the US presidential election of 2024, and a growing phenomenon of right-wing populism being able to leverage conditions of uncertainty to gain power through democratic means.
The Democracy Project
In November 1948, B.R. Ambedkar, the chair of the committee tasked with drafting a constitution for the newly independent nation of India, made a speech while presenting the first draft of the constitution to the Constituent Assembly, where he pointed out that a constitution alone is insufficient to protect a democracy for “it is perfectly possible to pervert the Constitution without changing its form by merely changing the form of the administration and to make it inconsistent and opposed to the spirit of the Constitution.” Citing the historian George Grote, Ambedkar said that democracy can sustain only when the people are saturated with a value called ‘constitutional morality’ — a way of life that submits to a moral self-restraint dedicated to preserving constitutional values that benefit all. Ambedkar argued that constitutional morality must be deliberately cultivated for it does not rise on its own as the result of having a constitution. He urged us to keep in mind that the drafting of a constitution and the consequent formation of a republic is an attempt to graft democracy onto a soil that is essentially undemocratic.
This value of constitutional morality resonates closely with Freire’s call to conscientisation. Freire’s focus was on the role of education in catalysing change, arguing for a rejection of the banking model and replacing it with a ‘problem-posing model’ where a pedagogic core of debating real-world problems transforms the classroom from a space for transferring knowledge to one for making knowledge. But a classroom discourse can, at best, be hypothetical. While the problem-posing model of education is sorely needed, it must be supplemented by a public and participatory political sphere, accessible to all, where these debates take place with deliberations feeding into the political process.
This is a transformation that is complex and nuanced and far beyond the scope of this essay. But until we embark on this quest, democracy will always be an unfinished project that can potentially self-destruct by creating space for anti-democratic forces. It is unlikely that the political class will lead us down this path of change for it has learned to game the status quo and is comfortable with it. It is we the people who must unequivocally apply our heads, hands, and hearts to the task.
