During 2024 (and likely earlier, too), I have repeatedly made statements about how to get a fair impression of the opinions, priorities, competence, or similar of a candidate/party/whatnot. Because these statements have usually been fragments of a whole or appeared in contexts with different priorities, the image painted might be incomplete or even contradictory.
This page attempts to give a more unified treatment of principles. (With a partial exception in an excursion, it does not treat details, e.g. what news sources might be suitable or what type of thinking might be beneficial.)
For simplicity:
I will use “candidate”, with the understanding that e.g. political parties can be treated in a similar manner and for similar reasons, while leaving the mental adjustments to the reader.
I will mostly speak only of a candidate and his opponents. However, others can play in too, e.g. in that close allies of a candidate might have something worthwhile to say (in which case, they typically land somewhere between the candidate and his opponents in insight, likely truthfulness, etc.) and that previous actions by close allies can tell us something about the candidate (to which it is important to keep in mind that close allies are not carbon copies of each other). Similar-but-weaker claims apply to more remote allies. Etc.
I will speak mostly in terms of “words” and “actions” (or equivalent formulations). Reality is, of course, much more complex and neither label need apply entirely in any given case.
For instance: It can be disputed whether a policy or an implementation error is an action in a stricter sense (but I use a very wide sense, including in this introduction). A book authored by a candidate can consist of words, while, it self, being an action. A failure to act when one should have acted sends a message and allows interpretation similar to an action.
To simultaneously give a nutshell overview and some explanation for the seeming contradictions:
One of my greatest targets, tiresome Leftist distortions, is a single big-picture issue, but it manifests in at least two different ways of relevance. (With the same applying to other groups, if and when they use a similar approach. The Left has dominated in such problems throughout my life-time, however.)
Firstly, the Left paints a misleading picture of its own agenda and/or ability to handle that agenda, which means that we should look at the actual past actions of the Left over the words of the Left. For instance, with an eye at the recent 2024 POTUS election, Kamala Harris tried to gain votes by railing against price increases and promising improvements (words), while the Biden regime’s track record had been horrible on exactly price increases (actions)—in fact, it was political mishandling of the COVID-countermeasure era, an expansion of the money supply, and a destructive energy and economic policy that brought on most or all of the price increases (in excess of what would have been normal for a similar time span).
Secondly, the Left paints a misleading picture of its opponents’ agenda and/or ability to handle that agenda, which makes it important to gain insight “from the horse’s own mouth”—not from the opponents of the horse. (In both cases, dealing with words.) For instance, the image painted of Donald Trump has almost throughout been extremely misleading in both party propaganda and in depictions in Left-dominated news sources, including on such basics as what he actually wants to achieve. It is, then, important to listen to what Trump says about Trump—not, or not only, what Harris et al. say about Trump.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Politicians are not only prone to rhetoric or, even, outright lies, but they can also be poorly informed or otherwise incompetent.
For instance, Harris’ main suggestion to solve the issue of price increases was price controls—something that has almost invariably done more, often far more, harm than good when it has been tried. Depending on her motivations, the explanation for her claims is then (almost certainly) that she either was ignorant enough to actually believe in this idea or that she made a “bad faith” claim in the hope of swaying sufficiently many voters.
Looking a step deeper, both the issue of price controls and the attempts to deflect political responsibility rests on the fiction of large-scale “price gouging”. Now, did Harris, herself, naively believe in this large-scale “price gouging”? Was she naive or was she trying to avoid her share of the blame?
Past actions and the success/failure of those actions, then, tell us more about what a candidate stands for, how likely he is to be successful with his suggestions, whether he would actually attempt to implement the suggestions once elected, and similar, than does his mere claims.
A caveat, however, is that even this is not foolproof. For instance, someone might have had a change in opinion, in which case later own words might be more important than past actions. For instance, an earlier failure might go back to circumstances that were outside his control but no longer apply. (How do we know that someone is telling the truth about e.g. a change of opinion? We cannot, which makes caution necessary.)
If we look at relevant-to-this-discussion words, they can usually be viewed as on a scale ranging from the specific to the general. For instance, a concrete suggestion of change to a voter-ID law is very specific, the claim that “I want a voter-ID requirement” is somewhat specific, and “I want safer elections” is quite general.
Here, more specific suggestions tells us more about a position than more general ones do, and we should prefer the more specific ones.
More specific suggestions make it easier to judge the competence and intentions of the candidate, they give an indication of how much thought he has put into an issue, they make it easier to hold him accountable later, etc. (And the greater accountability makes it more likely that he is honest, as he is “putting his money where his mouth is” the more, the more accountability there is.)
Most importantly, maybe: As claims become more general, different humans can have increasingly different interpretations, even while agreeing with the general formulations, and/or very different priorities within a certain overall. For instance, formulations that involve “better”, “fairer”, and similar words, are likely to meet with wide-spread approval—but they tell us next to nothing. Some other words, e.g. “equality”, are not so bad by their nature, but have become distorted over time to be similarly pointless. (For instance, many Leftists see equality as a matter of equality-of-outcome, which is antithetical to equality-of-opportunity.)
At the same time, the candidate at hand is (a) far more likely than others to understand his own opinions, priorities, and whatnots, (b) usually has lesser incentives to deliberate distort them than his opponents. To (b), he does have an incentive in as far as being untruthful can increase his chances of being elected, but he also has a counter-incentive in that he, if elected, must later show his cards—and being proved a liar (beyond details) might backfire in the long run. To boot, if he genuinely believes in his own ideas, chances are that he also believes that the ideas as they are will be viewed positively by most voters, which reduces or removes the perceived benefits of being untruthful. (This while the net-incentives to speak dishonestly about the competition are considerably larger.)
But keep in mind that a lesser incentive is not an absent incentive. In particular, I do not claim that politicians would necessarily be truthful when they speak about their own positions—just that they are more likely to be truthful than when they speak about their opponents positions.
As occurs to me during writing, there could be at least one area where politicians are more likely to lie about themselves than about others, namely their CV (be it literally or metaphorically). For instance, very many seem to fudge their CV on items like prior job experiences and positions, military service/career, academic qualifications, and similar. (To boot, there are borderline cases, as when someone does have a doctorate, but this doctorate has been earned through plagiarism or other types of cheating. Note several German cases.)
The potential net-benefit seems higher when lying about oneself for at least two reasons: Firstly, an artificial own boost remains, regardless of the opposing candidate, while a defamation of the opponent will lose its value when the next opponent appears. Secondly, an opponent who is met with a false claim to his detriment is likely to fight back and can often do so with documentation about his own past—after which the accuser stands there with egg on his face. Artificial own boosts are also dangerous, especially, with prominent politicians, but the same type of near-automatic fact-check does not take place.
However, it still remains true that any given individual is more likely than others to know the truth about himself. This, especially, for times from before public prominence.
(While the above is very individual-centric and originally intended to be limited to individuals, some of it can apply to parties too. I note e.g. that the U.S. Democrat party has tried to paint it self as having a historical “CV” that it does not have, say, by making false claims of past accomplishments or past attitudes.)
The benefits of specifics over generalities follow as above, with some minor modifications, e.g. in that someone who lies about the specifics about an opponent is more likely to be called on it than someone who does so in generalities. (If in doubt, because claims become increasingly subjective and hard to disprove as the generality increases, which makes, say, a defamation suit less likely to find success.)
That the words of a candidate’s opponents are to be trusted less than his own words also follows from the above. However, it does not follow that they can always be ignored. In particular, opponents can often legitimately make corrections to the claims of the candidate and, especially, when they stick to the specifics and when they point to his actual actions. Likewise, when they call out distortions through abuse and manipulation of language (something very common with the Left). An example in the overlap is if a candidate speaks out in favor of election integrity or some other positive trait of elections, while, in the specifics, being set on removing voter-ID requirements or otherwise harming election integrity.
Apart from the above priorities, it is important to get information from different sources, to see different perspectives, etc. Echo chambers are real and they are dangerous—and, sadly, just reading the morning newspaper is not enough to escape them or to be considered well informed.
Not only is the quality of modern news reporting often depressingly low, and most journalists less-than-bright and less-than-well-informed, themselves, but there is a major issue with ideological slants. Even drawing on several news sources does not bring much additional value over the one, should they belong to the same echo chamber. Ditto e.g. other types of media.
Indeed, the non-mention of the press in the main discussion is in so far deliberate in that a morning newspaper (or whatnot) is likely to have a very strong, preconceived, and unobjective for-or-against position on various candidates. The press, then, does not currently merit separate treatment beyond what is implied by the above.
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