(Continued from Aug. 6, 2020)
SINCE democracy is supposed to be a two-way street, we could perhaps surmise that if the rank and file members of the political parties do not mind being bypassed or ignored, they may not care about practicing the democratic ideology at all.
For some reason, it seems that the selection of prospective candidates based on surveys is out of sequence.
As it is supposed to be, prospective candidates are supposed to increase in their survey ratings depending on their performance in the primaries. In the absence of primaries however, it seems that the alternative practice is to select prospective candidates based on survey ratings that are the results of advertising campaigns.
To be honest, I have mixed feelings about allowing advertising campaigns to boost the ratings of prospective candidates. On one hand, I think that these prospective candidates have the rights to free speech, in addition to having the freedom to bring out information about their advocacies. On the other hand however, it seems that the practice is undemocratic, because only the rich candidates could afford to spend for advertising campaigns, leaving out the others who could not afford the huge advertising budgets.
Assuming for the sake of argument that these huge advertising budgets are contributed by donors, there should still be a transparent accounting of these contributions as the law requires. Suffice it to say that the bigger the donations, the deeper these prospective candidates would be to their donors.
Assuming that these prospective candidates would win, we could guess that these donors would have a bigger voice than the rest of the ordinary citizens, and that by itself is undemocratic.
Hoping against hope, I wish that our political parties would mature, as the electorate would also mature. Sad to say, the preponderance of so many political butterflies is actually a sign that many of our politicians do not really believe in real party principles and perhaps vice-versa, our political parties really do not have real solid principles to offer to their members.
Another sign of the immaturity of our political parties is the way the meanings of political alliances and political coalitions are being interpreted. As it is supposed to be, a political alliance could be likened to going steady, and a political coalition could be likened to getting married. As it is supposed to be, individual political parties are supposed to lose their juridical personalities when they coalesce with other political parties, just like the way corporations lose their juridical personalities when they merge with other corporations.
As it is supposed to be, ideologies are supposed to breed political parties, and political parties are supposed to breed ideological leaders. In turn, these ideological leaders are supposed to be the ones who will present themselves as the prospective candidates in a selection process that starts with the primaries and ends with the conventions.
That is how it is supposed to be, even if the reality is too far from the theory.
By the way, I think it may be acceptable for an independent candidate to be adopted by a political party, but when official candidates of political parties are also adopted by many other political parties, we could already see it as a sign that there are really no ideological boundaries between and among political parties.
Of course, we know that some candidates are driven only by their own political interests and not by political ideologies, but that does not stop us from hoping that somehow, everything could still change towards the better./PN
