People can’t learn to swim without first getting in the water. Whether they are thrown, pushed, guided or persuaded – learning to swim means changing from dry land and air to getting into the wet stuff where they do not want to go. Enter the ill-informed voter, which in all honesty, is the typical American voter, regardless of party.
To learn in a way that influences a person’s beliefs, not just multiplication tables, requires change (which 95% of all people dislike) and getting into the unknown as well as the uncomfortable. How do we get the stereotypical “ill-informed voter” into the water and away from their comfort zone? How do you get a Democrat to listen to a Republican and vice versa?
That’s the hard part.
This is on both sides of the party lines. Democrats and Republicans alike, people in this country are far too apathetic and “down the line” on the way they vote. All a country needs to do is get people to care enough to take the time to try and see through all the smoke and mirrors of American politics…. somehow.
The extremes of both majority parties have worked very hard the last decade to increase the electricity what is causing the political polarization. The more polarized the belief system, the more difficult it is to get people off of the shore and into the water. For many the water is, quite literally, riddled with monsters lurking under the surface that will kill them if they even dip a toe into the other side.
Given that level of polarized beliefs between political parties, how does a country work to educate voters on things like policy, truth, and long-term civil goals? How does a country blow away all the smoke of talking points and hate mongering against “the other side”?
Beliefs don’t change overnight, and “beliefs” are into what politicians have manipulated simple things like “should the US pay its debts” and “should we fix a broken bridge”. What used to be simple matters of policy are now truncated with the larger umbrella of partisan politics. The average ill-informed voter, then, doesn’t even know the policy, procedures, or operational necessities of the country… all they know is “they are bad, we are good” everything else gets drowned in the river.
When you are trying to teach a child (that’s not meant to be condescending, but simply something everyone can relate to), there are certain tactics and requirements. First, children need to be comfortable. They need to like their teacher, and they need to trust their teacher. When a child doesn’t want to learn, you make the lesson fun; you make it a game that “tricks” children into learning something. Children also learn from their peers, and they never learn from their enemies.
To start the process: the ill-informed voter MUST get their toes in the water to discover that they won’t be eaten by the political Loch Ness Monster.
When a child is scared and fully convinced that there is a monster in the closet or hidden in the lake, their parents open the closet and get in the water to prove to them that’s everything is OK. Someone a voter trusts needs to literally demonstrate that there is no monster. There are inklings: Dick Cheney supports gay marriage, for example… the world didn’t end… that didn’t magically turn him into a raging liberal who hugs trees on the weekend… he’s still Dick Cheney… still a very conservative hawk… but that particular monster didn’t jump from the water and swallow him whole.
What about educating people on policy?
When you have both sides of the aisle swearing up and down that their opponents policies will destroy the country as we know it… what does a country do to sort through the mess and get to the truth, not just for those who care, but for those who DON’T care and are safely on the bank of the beliefs? The Internet on its own doesn’t work. It’s too free to be a reliable source of information. For every right answer there’s probably a thousand politically motivated wrong answers… or simply well intended wrong answers. This problem walks with our hate problem in the United States.
Both sides basically hate one another. Republicans hate Obama, hate big government, and “liberal elites”, while Democrats hate bigots, racists, and people who care only about money. Round and round it goes, each using language that they know will piss off the other side even more to strengthen the divide. If the cycle can get interrupted somehow, however, then there’s a chance to sneak in a little unbiased information into that cycle.
You also have to pick the right topic. Teaching a kid to swim at a water park might be easier than in a murky lake surrounded by spooky trees.
The depressing part about this exploration thus far is that it clearly is a slow process. There is no dramatic paradigm shift in belief. Mississippi isn’t going to wake up one day and go on a date with California. Small steps by the right people. What we hope for is that the people who have the influence stand up and decide in larger and larger numbers that they prefer to put out fires rather than start them.
If we had a chance, to teach every ill-informed voter one thing, what would it be?
For me… a true understanding of the money behind the machine. People preach about how money has destroyed the US political system, but it remains a detached argument with which very few people connect, or make connections. Even the Jack Abramoff scandal, while well covered in news media, went unnoticed in behavior… money in politics has gotten even worse since then, really. If we could help a nation-wide epiphany about how big money influence politicians and how they create policy that benefits the massive campaign donors that gives a lot of depth to what political parties really value, who they serve, and show how broken the system really is. Stop the hate and follow the money, I’m sure both sides would learn a lot.
