Just watched William Sloane Coffin on NOW.
Holy cow. I see why Dr. Dean admired him since Yale. If anyone wonders where Dean learned his unique oratory and reasoning, Coffin is a good touchstone for the beginning of the search.
Truly a patriot and a man of peace.
Anyway, here is the long promised diary on choices and elections. I am reading Barry Schwartz's Paradox of Choice. It's good.
I'll paraphrase one of his arguments, and apply it to elections rather than consumer choice.
Schwartz posits that we often regret our choices when we engage in counterfactual thinking, musing on the things that did not come to pass. So, we go off on vacation, enjoy ourselves, but come back and muse about the weather being nicer or there being more restaurants there or there being a movie theatre there. These musings help us in our next vacation choice, but dwelling on them detracts from our remembered satisfaction of the vacation. Regret creeps in.
When candidates have good points and bad points, we dwell on the opportunity costs of the choices we passed up. If only I had picked Candidate A, because he had better financing streams. If only I had picked Candidate B, because I agree with her about the Hate Amendment. These are important musings, to be sure.
But then the real danger comes in.
A) We dwell only on the lost positives and the gained negatives. We are blinded as to why we picked Candidate C in the first place, because he was closest to our views or was on the right side of the MOST important issue. We begin to confuse all the alternatives as equally bad.
B) We imagine a candidate that does not exist, which upon further consideration, is just a better version of ourselves. Dean encourages people to get past this by running for office, but that can't be the solution for everyone at all times. This phenomenon makes everyone seem REALLY bad.
Our enthusiasm wanes over time for most options, or for voting at all. This is where most citizens are at. We are susceptible to people who promise to be perfect, to unknown quantities, to superhuman media images. We become even more frustrated when these candidates are only human.
Our counterfactual thinking is good for thought experiments, for figuring out what kind of changes are valuable to you as a citizen.
But we must be aware that no candidate comes out looking good after these exercises. It is not picking the least of evils, but the best of options. Our satisfaction with voting and the power of our vote is diminished when the imagined perfect becomes the enemy of the real good.