Political Memes

I get it… And if I lived there and had to vote I would absolutely do more thinking on it, but my view from afar is why can’t we just find people to run with these campaign platforms who don’t have Nazi tattoos? It isn’t that hard.

It really is. It's far, far harder than you're pretending. Do most people have tattoos that could be considered a Nazi symbol? No. But most people have some things in their background, some skeletons in their closet, that could violate one purity test or another and make them unelectable to you. Because you likely don't just have one purity test - you have hundreds.

The problem with purity tests is that paradoxically, your tests end up selecting for the absolutely most evil people in society. You're selecting for absolute power-hungry sociopaths - people who have lived their entire lives carefully controlling their public image. You get people with perfect social media profiles they've curated from childhood. You get disingenuous politicians that don't actually hold any real values and hold off from making any firm commitments.

Purity tests are precisely why we end up with milquetoast ineffectual Democrats that never fight for or believe in anything. Real people with real beliefs and real passions fuck up sometimes. And sometimes they hold some beliefs that go against today's social media zeitgeist.

And I'm not talking about forgiving truly unforgivable things like sexual harassment or assault. We don't need to carry water for rapists and actual criminals. But there is something incredibly dangerous about condemning people based on relatively minor mistakes from their past. It's unjust and it makes sure that you end up with the most evil people getting elected to office. Real human beings aren't saints. If you demand your politicians resemble saints, you won't get saints. You'll just get sociopaths pretending to be saints.