Casey Briggs here doing what so many before have done. Talk about electoral dysfunction in the US. We can do…

Casey Briggs here doing what so many before have done. Talk about electoral dysfunction in the US. We can do a lot better at understanding this than trot out tired tropes about ‘polarisation’. /1 https://t.co/uSTXem8d68 https://t.co/PIi9JBKDDs

Of course America is polarised. They like most of the rest of us run a governance system that uses the exact same mechanism as Premier League football. Elections. A battle between teams, for victory. Just as football fans become ever more fanatical, so will politics. /2

How do we not see that running a country like a football league leads to rival teams becoming ever more passionately unhinged? When victory in the contest becomes the only metric? This is so easy to explain, historically. /3

Universal suffrage (i.e. not just wealthy and powerful men voting) was invented as a mechanism to select leaders. But because voting and elections are really indistinguishable from sports, that’s what government became. Sport. /4

The actual task that needed doing, running countries, solving practical problems of education and health and transport and communications etc., faded from view. Elections tapped into our deepest social behaviours, in disastrous ways. Our drive for status. In teams. /5

Suddenly what was a means, a mechanism to select leaders to do the boring practical work of running societies, became the ends. Everything is now the daily battles to win elections. We’d grafted sports and wider social life, onto politics. /6

Ask a local council area that has been put into administration, with all elected representatives sacked, just how much better their town suddenly ran. Without everything having to be re-routed through the popularity team sports of elections. /7

We don’t raise families using popularity. We don’t run businesses using it. Why do we not see that running countries using it destroys the countries? Why is that so hard to understand and see? /end