Trent
For the last few editorials, I’ve been playing around with ideas of politics, civility and psychology.
But time is about to run out. Before the next issue of Tumbler Ridgelines comes out, the writ will be dropped and the election will be called.
So it’s time to stop beating around the bush and say it straight up: behaving like an ass isn’t going to win you or your party any votes.
That’s not a subtle message directed at you Cracked Conservative supporters, though there’s been a lot of Trudeau bashing over on What the F***. And it’s not directed at the Loudmouth Liberal fan club, one of whom recently called Andrew Scheer … well, I shan’t repeat it, but it wasn’t very nice at all.
And that’s the trouble. The election hasn’t been called yet (at least, at the time of this writing), and my feed is already being filled with political cartoons, photos, stories and opinions.
Every day I see dozens of political posts in my Facebook feed. And, rather than promoting the strengths of the party the person agrees with, they are, nearly to a one, attack ads on the other candidates.
Rarely does a post make a positive claim, and in the rare case that one does, it is often pilloried—not with facts and figures refuting the claim, but in cries of “fake news” and “BS.”
And instead of being left with a sense of the strength of one party, I am left with the general attitude that all the parties are weak and ineffectual.
And I’m left, once again, not wanting to vote for any of the current options because none of the options are very palatable.
Social Scientists are still collecting the research around negative election advertising and whether it works or not. Currently the conclusion they’ve reached is “maybe…? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.”
Which isn’t a rousing vote of confidence in favour of attack advertising.
Thing is, the people in change of the campaigns think they work.
And, sometimes the ads do work. Or at least, they seem to, which is not the same thing.
Have you heard of the marshmallow test? It’s a fairly famous psychological test. You put a marshmallow in front of a child and say “you can eat that now, or, if you can wait five/ten/15 minutes without eating it, then you can have two.”
And they you leave the room. If the child is able to resist the temptation—if they have the sheer willpower to wait—then that’s a sign that, when they get older they will succeed in life.
There are schools that practice the Marshmallow tests to increase will power. To get kids ready for the cruel world ahead.
But last year, a new paper came out looking at the marshmallow test. The researchers ran the test again, and discovered that the kids with the “willpower” to resist the marshmallows? Were generally the kids of rich white parents. Their future success? Was based on their social status, not their willpower. Their ability to resist the marshmallow? Was because they knew there would always be a second marshmallows, while less well-off kids didn’t have that guarantee.
How does this relate to attack ads? Simply this: sometimes we look at something—say attack ads—and then look at the result—the person mounting the attack campaign winning—and draw a syllogistic correlation between the two. Candidate did THIS. Candidate got elected. Therefore, THIS worked.
But it’s not always that cut and dried. And, let’s face it, attack ads? Don’t always work.
In 1993, the Progressive Conservative party attacked Liberal Party leader Jean Chrétien, mocking the fact that he had Bell’s Palsy, which left his face partially paralyzed. They lost 154 seats that election, while the Liberals gained 96. (Of course, that was the election the PC party self destructed, but we’ll leave that for another time.
In 2006, the Liberals created an attack ad suggesting that Conservative leader Stephen Harper would use armed Canadian soldiers to police major cities. Though the ads were never aired, it was leaked, and the Conservatives gained 26 more seats from the deal.
Indeed, some have argued that the reason Justin Trudeau was elected was due in no small part as a reaction against the Conservative Party’s “Just Not Ready” campaign, and the Liberals took 148 more seats than they did the election before.
You catch that? The Conservatives painted Trudeau as a drooling idiot, unfit for leadership, and when he proved to be articulate and intelligent, the dissonance between who he was and who he was painted as being made him seem even more articulate. More intelligent.
Don’t get me wrong, I believe that if a politician leader does something stupid, (s)he should be called out on it. And parties should be held to account for their platform, for their actions and for the way they treat both the people that support them and the people that don’t.
But if all we do this election is focus on the negatives, focus on why this party or that party shouldn’t be in power, then all we are left with is reasons for not supporting any party or any leader.
Rather than pick the most beautiful flower of the bunch, we are forced to plug our noses and vote for the one that seems the least bad, according to our own definitions of what “bad” is.
So before you share that biting satire about how terrible Scheer/Singh/Trudeau is, ask is it worth it? Will this convince anyone of the rightness of my cause? Or will it just alienate people?
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again (copy and paste is a wonderful thing) but I’d rather elections be a little more beauty pageant, and a little less mud-wrestling.
True, the mud wrestling is fun to watch for a time, but after a while, all you’re left with is a kiddy pool filled with dirt and water and a big mess to clean up. Both are demeaning, but at least in the beauty pageant, you get a picture of what these people look like at their best, not their worst.
