Review: Politics is for Power
This book made me think about what it really means to participate in politics. Not for the ones in power, but for the rest of us.
Eitan Hersh establishes a difference between “political hobbyism” and doing real politics.
Political hobbyism is what most of us do. At cafés, dinner tables and online we have really long discussions about the latest political scandals or whether a certain policy suggested by a certain party really, really fits into the party’s ideology and how we really, really don’t like that ideology. The author affirms this isn’t really doing politics because, to sum up, it achieves absolutely nothing — which I agree with.
How many times have you changed the way you intended to vote because a friend made a passionate and knowledgeable speech about the party or candidate they support?
Real politics is about acquiring power. It’s about multiplying your vote. It’s about picking a party that you think will benefit everyone the most — even if you don’t agree with everything they do — and going door to door and making it a point to help your neighbors and, as such, garner their votes.
This is called “deep canvassing”. It, more or less, means establishing a more personal relationship with whoever you’re trying to convince to vote your way. This is done by making the conversation personal and asking the voter for the issues they’d like to have solved instead of reciting a party-approved text from memory. The point is to establish empathy and, therefore, convince the voter to vote your way without explicitly telling them to do so because they can see that you care. Weirdly, I can’t figure out if this is actually a better, more humane and useful way to garner votes or just straight up manipulation.
Even more controversial is the idea that “power is derived from serving others”. On itself, this seems like a an extraordinarily democratic motto. What is really means is that providing direct services to voters will make them support you. So, you’d make health counseling, financial clinics, kindergarten and other services available to voters and have them vote for you without explicitly telling them to as you’re improving their lives.
Once again — on one hand, this feels like a much better way of doing politics as you’d have party cash being funneled into real services being made available to people instead of political billboards, television ads and empty speeches. On the other hand, it almost feels like paying people for their vote. “Vote for the X party and have free kindergarten and a 20% gym discount coupon.”
Despite the heavy topic, I’d say the book is very easy to read and would recommend it to anyone interested in politics. While the book portrays US politics, I think it applies equally as well to any established democracy.