As has already been noted several times, the people who vote to sent Santos to Congress were not provided with the information necessary to make an informed decision and now overwhelmingly regret voting for the lying bastard.
Elections are only a good measure of the will of the people when the people have some idea of what they’re voting for. Imagine you poll your friends on what to have for lunch: Tito’s Tacos or Buddy’s Burgers. Then after a majority votes for Buddy’s you say “Psych! Buddy’s isn’t actually a burger place at all, I only told you it was! It’s actually a bait shop!” Would it then be accurate insist your friends voted to eat at a bait shop?
Mitt Romney isn’t saying “you don’t belong here because I personally think you’re a duplicitous bastard.” He’s saying “you don’t belong here because you never would have won your seat if you hadn’t grossly misrepresented yourself to your constituents.” And he’s absolutely right.
What if the local paper was screaming “Hey, hey everybody, you’re being lied to, Buddy’s is actually a bait shop!” the whole time people were making up their mind?
Like… the full depth and breadth of how much of a bait shop is going to be coming out for years but, like… at this point it seems like people seem to enjoy being lied to.
You keep framing this as a plain issue of democratic election. It’s more reasonable to frame it as a fraud. To say Santos belongs because he was elected is basically victim-blaming. The electorate were defrauded by his election because every single part of the man they voted for is a fabrication deliberately created to deceive voters.
We explicitly don’t blame victims of a con for falling for that con because it can happen to any of us.
Yeah the idea that voters should have been better informed about Santos than the media, the Democratic opposition or even Santos’ own financial backers is all kinds of ridiculous.
I’m not creating a strawman, here. It isn’t factual to say that none of this was out there.
PBS had a really interesting interview with the publisher of the North Shore Leader, Grant Lally.
The North Shore Leader is a local paper in Long Island that published several investigative stories about Santos prior to the election, and to their frustration they were completely ignored by both the political opposition to Santos and the greater mediasphere itself. New stories continue to come out every day, but there was far more than enough out there prior to the election to disqualify him, but it didn’t reach the people that needed to hear it. That includes both voters, and his party.
I’m not blaming the voters who were defrauded— but when we are trying to consider ways to prevent this from happening again, since fraudulent assholes will continue to exploit these weaknesses and be elected in our democracies, is to work to fix the systems that motivate people to live in the dark.
Screaming desperately for other outlets to take them seriously.
At a certain point this story is as much about media criticism as it is about democracy; here in Canada we see large outlets refuse to report on stories broken by smaller media outlets. Perhaps it’s professional pride, or egos, or something else entirely, but as large newsrooms cut budgets for investigation and reporting to the bone it is increasingly the small independents who break the stories.
There are lots of things that are “out there” that are not easily and readily accessible to everyone… That’s part of the problem of having so much information at one’s fingertips - there is so very much of it, that it’s difficult to sort through.
But sure… the voters should have KNOWN better than to vote for that guy! It’s all their fault really… /s
If the voters wanted to make an informed decision all the information they needed to know about Santos was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.”
We can’t have a system that depends on 100% perfect knowledge in any sphere, least of all democracy. The reality is that nobody has time and energy to become an expert on everything, as our modern world so often demands. We have to accept that stuff like Santos is gonna happen sometimes, so we need mechanisms to correct those mistakes. Those mechanisms are slowly playing out now for him, and it’s likely he’ll be out one way or another here pretty soon.
I think that point is buried in what you’re saying, but you’re leaning pretty hard on the “the voters got what they deserved” angle. That’s what everyone is reacting to.
The people that voted for him are neither the political opposition nor the greater mediasphere, who both had a duty to inform those voters.
I really don’t know how you’re extrapolating me saying that there was a multi-level failure of the systems in a democratic society to me blaming the people that were defrauded. That’s completely unfair.
And I have not leaned into, soft or hard, the voters are to blame. I am leaning hard into “this can and will happen in a democracy.”
It’s like I’m writing in one dialect of English, and folks here are reading another one. I’m not some weirdo crypto libertarian trolley, although it seems like folks are desperate to find one.
Well, I don’t think it’s completely unfair, because you opened with this:
…which sounds an awful lot like “the voters got what they deserved”. Then you kinda doubled down on that when challenged here. I think I know what you meant now, but it took a few miles of bad road to get there.
The problem is, you’ve been engaging in obvious goalpost shifting. Your first statement was effectively “he belongs there because he won a democratic election”. When you had no comeback to replies pointing out that he won through fraud, you shifted to blaming the voters in the election for not figuring out he was a fraud. When it was pointed out that the state GOP and the Dem opposition and the major news outlets all dropped the ball on exposing his lies, you’re now resting your argument on no-one paying attention to a small -circulation newspaper.
And we’re saying it’s a failure OF/FOR democracy, not actual democracy. I think that’s where things are being talked past here. There is obvious fraud, which, yes, you noted… but you also seem to think that this is still a “democratic” outcome, which is where you’re getting push back. We’re arguing it’s a failure of our democratic system.
We can do better, in other words, and we need to do better…
But Romney was STILL right here, and whatever his own failings, doesn’t make him less right on this particular thing.
