Quasi-Nietzschean Politics
Hillary Clinton lied, lies and will keep lying about, among other things, her foreign policy credentials. I am not bothered by lies, which are consubstantial to electoral politics.
Lies in electoral races usually come in two forms, lies about the past (credentials), and lies about the future (promises). One type is harder than the other one to substantiate: using only good faith and facts, it is far easier to counter Clinton's strategy of showing that she already delivered than to attack Obama's strategy which aims at showing that he will deliver.
The past/future roles fit them nicely. What is more interesting, I tend to think, is the psychological mechanism behind each role.
Voting for Obama is an act of literal empowerment: it will bring to power someone who, at the moment, exerts a minor influence on important decisions, like reverting a society back to times where the lives of its constituents is brutal, nasty and short(ened).
Voting for Clinton is a different matter. Her political record has been framed to make her look already powerful in the past, without a national mandate to support it. Elected, her power would go from “high” to “very high”, which represents only a marginal improvement compared to the Obama vote.
I wonder if an analytical version of the will to power, from Nietzsche's Nazi-leaning sister, fits in the picture. The idea behind the Clinton voting rationale is that you should hand power to an experienced person, but I believe this is more than simply experience: there is also the idea that power should flow to the already powerful; that the absolute level of power P(c) created by voting for Clinton is superior than the level P(b) created by voting for Obama; and that this is also a desirable achievement: to create the biggest aggregate-sum of power.
There is something equivalent to this mechanism in the organisation of monarchy, which the average US voter consciously knows practically nothing about, but may be experiencing at an infra-conscious level. I wonder again if this can be set into a political psychology experiment.
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3rddesk) wrote,
