See, I think modern politicians are very willing to change their policies. They just find it good marketing to appear steadfast in their current policies.

After all, if I want the support of gun rights/abortion rights voters, a clear statement of unwavering support will get it - whereas a wishy-washy "I could be convinced either way" will leave them looking for someone more steadfast.

But that doesn't stop me changing my positions in order to win votes. Plenty of politicians flipped their stances on rowdy protests between BLM and Jan 6th. Plenty flipped their stances on "my body, my choice" during the pandemic. And anyone with a 20+ year political career will have updated their stances in that time.

>After all, if I want the support of gun rights/abortion rights voters, a clear statement of unwavering support will get it

Coincidentally, zero donors to the Democratic party will be inconvenienced by this stance.

If you look at Medicare for all it's supported by 52% of Republican voters and 7/10 of voters in general. It's pretty much the definition of an electable policy.

Now, why do you think it might be such a fringe view in the Beltway? Why did Obama write it off as a non starter?

If a policy became super popular and no donor interests were threatened by it, yea, it has a decent chance of being promoted and passed.

There's actually research that supports this. Basically it doesn't matter what American voters want, they'll only get whatever the overlap between what big corporations want and what they want is.

It's heartening to me that 50-70% of American voters generally support every sensible policy you can name. Many of them are in no real danger of getting passed though.

Here's an article that covers the research and some critiques. The criticism seems a bit absurd to me, the bit about the rich being successful in convincing people of what they want only makes things worse, yet is presented as if it undermines the research.

> Why did Obama write it off as a non starter?

Joe Lieberman.

Many of these things can't be modeled from first principles, as nice as it would be to have a simple theory of everything for politics without involving individuals and second, third, etc order effects.

>> Why did Obama write it off as a non starter? >Joe Lieberman.

This... doesnt even begin to make any sense.

>If you look at Medicare for all it's supported by 52% of Republican voters and 7/10 of voters in general. It's pretty much the definition of an electable policy.

Only because no one can actually agree on what it means. Which goes to it actually not being passable.

"Medicare for all" has essentially turned into a marketing term.

Politicians would love to capitalize on it's popularity, but that would mean fighting over the meaning, and that would reveal that many people are actually very against certain aspects of it, like funding sources, covering controversial procedures, or even where to draw the line of what's "healthcare". Is OTC medicine? Exercise equipment? Healthy food? Housing?

Everytime you include or exclude any particular policy, you lose some support.

So it ends up being this catch 22 where politicians really want to cash in, but can't figure how to do it without causing the stock to crash.

>Only because no one can actually agree on what it means

Take the medicare bill. Strike the words "over 65". Provide funding.

It's not complicated. It can be MADE complicated, but intrinsically it is not.

>Politicians would love to capitalize on it's popularity

Yeah, provided they dont lose their campaign financing doing it - which they will.

I don't see how that is abnormal. "The level to which mainstream political parties obsess over marketing", as you put it, is certainly nauseating, however anybody who actively becomes involved with politics does so because he wants to "push" towards a specific direction.

If I decide to join the X party as opposed to the Y party, this is supposedly because my mind is already set, and X policies align more with my set of preferences than Y policies.

Failure to listen and adapt, if anything, tells more about how Western politicians are increasingly worse at being politicians, (i.e. at achieving tangible policy goals evaluated according to their own set of preferences).

I dont think thats true at all. Most politicians get into politics out of ambition and a desire for power and status.

Dedicated activists are kind of rare as politicians. I can think of a few but not many, and they normally become politicians precisely because they're fighting for a popular cause that mainstream elites are suppressing.

They aren't mutually exclusive. There exists a multitude of political organizations. All of them want power and status (there's nothing wrong with that; up to a point, egoism is a virtue), but not all of them want the same things.

So yeah, they want power and status because they are humans. They join party X as opposed to party Y because that's their preferred direction.

I wasnt saying that they were mutually exclusive. I dont think that theres anything necessarily wrong with this either.

I was saying that it's more common for ideology to be an afterthought for most high level politicians rather than the primary reason (as you previously asserted) they get into politics.

You'd expect that it would mean less intransigence about policy in the face of democratic pressures, but it doesnt. Probably because money is the real driver.

I personally know one politician who was part of a mainstream party politics for years and his ideology was... fluid at best. He ran for election and lost and was almost immediately shunted into a safe, well paid job at a corporate NGO where he rabbits on about sustainable investment.

After digging into the personal stories of many other people in this "left" party I realized that his story was completely normal. The candidate in my area was a black woman pulled from a public relations company linked to the party elites. She speaks with the veneer of ideology (vaguely and on "safe" topics) but it's obvious that it's ambition that drove her.

Also because power and status are how you push policy.