Don’t waste time talking about abortion, gun control, taxation, health care, military spending, drug laws, gay marriage, or any other contentious political issue, unless that issue is actually going to be on an upcoming ballot that you are going to vote on directly.
Isn’t that far too restrictive? If the office you’re electing has little or no influence on such matters, then sure. But if you’re electing a member of your Parliament who’s going to vote on national politics for the next several years—well, even if an issue isn’t being talked about right now, there’s a strong chance he’ll get to vote on it during his term, not to mention contributing to deciding whether it gets talked about at all.
If issue X is absolutely critical to you, to the exclusion of anything else, you’ll even want to vote and support a complete moron who agrees with you over any number of geniuses who disagree (assuming issue X is a value judgment, otherwise such a scenario should lead you to strongly question your position on X).
Now, this is basically the very point you’re making—that the more we prioritise issues the more we incentivise dumb parroting—but my counterpoint is that you can’t just dismiss value-based issues altogether, because people actually do care about them. In order to persuade someone to vote for smarter politicians they don’t agree with, I think you need to acknowledge that it is not a straight improvement, but a trade-off (of slightly improving the political class vs. losing a chance of getting those two or three policies you want), and then make your case for it being a positive trade-off.
Isn’t that far too restrictive? If the office you’re electing has little or no influence on such matters, then sure. But if you’re electing a member of your Parliament who’s going to vote on national politics for the next several years—well, even if an issue isn’t being talked about right now, there’s a strong chance he’ll get to vote on it during his term, not to mention contributing to deciding whether it gets talked about at all.
If issue X is absolutely critical to you, to the exclusion of anything else, you’ll even want to vote and support a complete moron who agrees with you over any number of geniuses who disagree (assuming issue X is a value judgment, otherwise such a scenario should lead you to strongly question your position on X).
Now, this is basically the very point you’re making—that the more we prioritise issues the more we incentivise dumb parroting—but my counterpoint is that you can’t just dismiss value-based issues altogether, because people actually do care about them. In order to persuade someone to vote for smarter politicians they don’t agree with, I think you need to acknowledge that it is not a straight improvement, but a trade-off (of slightly improving the political class vs. losing a chance of getting those two or three policies you want), and then make your case for it being a positive trade-off.