Is Culling Your Own Party a Smart Strategy?
- trustmustbeearned
- Jun 17, 2022
- 5 min read
A recent report in the BMJ medical journal provides an informative analysis of the differential impacts that geographic areas in the US and the alignment of those areas with political parties has on people’s life-span (health) in those areas, or to put it in a more click-bait worthy term: deaths. I heard these results while listening to a podcast and it prompted me to see this as an opportunity to compose an appropriate intelligence test related to the wisdom of a political strategy that operates in ways that produce what one can only hope would be unexpected consequences. I found the results of this analysis particularly interesting as I have looked at a similar aspect of politics and healthcare consequences.
This topic may be a little scary since if you are sufficiently intelligent to comprehend the topic, you might find it’s implications to you, your family, and even your political perspective not just unexpected but indicative of working against your own benefits. But we are all hopefully aware that there are many aspects of our lives where we act in what can only be described as “cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face”; for as some would say: stupidly.
Time to risk asking yourself about the rationality of your actions and attitudes.
Question 1: Would you view setting public policies that result in the deaths of one group of citizens at a different rate than another as “culling the herd”?
Question 2: How important is politics in determining the appropriate policy to be set for a healthcare issue?
Question 3: Given that for voters aligned with one party’s position (X) on a healthcare policy are more likely to die than voters aligned with the other party’s position (Y) on a healthcare policy, is it beneficial to a political candidate to support the X or the Y healthcare policy?
Question 4: How should a politician weigh the beneficial aspects that are derived from the deaths that result from supporting the healthcare policy which helps get votes from their party’s constituency versus the loss of those votes from that constituency that the healthcare policy produces?
Question 5: Who benefits from the different death rates between healthcare policy X and policy Y on each of the following: a political basis, economic basis, and on an evolutionary basis?
Answer to Question 1: Yes. However, it is a “politically incorrect” type of phrase to use, but it functionally results in a form of selective reduction in the number of one group at a higher rate than another. This is what ‘culling’ does. The question isn’t about the criteria used in directing or resulting in that differential process but that the probability of a member of one group dying is greater than that of a different group.
Answer to Question 2: In the US or a functioning democracy, politics ought to have no relevance to setting the ‘appropriate’ healthcare policy for the nation. Healthcare should be to serve the interests of the nation’s citizens not a political agenda.
Answer to Question 3: It depends upon the objective(s) of the politician. If the politician ranks their own interests above all other factors, then they would want to support the healthcare policy that the supporters of the political party for which they are a candidate. On this interest basis, whether more or less of the supporters you are seeking die is not the determining factor. If the politician is in a tight (swing-geographic area) race then they have a harder choice to make. If supporting the more lethal healthcare policy alters the number of living voters sufficiently then they are risking losing votes which could cost them their election. This makes the choice of healthcare policies that a politician must choose a potential dilemma. If you lose your supporters then you cannot be the candidate, if you lose enough voters you can’t win the election.
There’s an interesting facet of this dilemma, for the politician on the more lethal side the deaths are a problem. However, for the politician on the less lethal side the less lethal aspect of their healthcare position is beneficial to their electoral results. There is a kind of political benefit to this situation.
Answer to Question 4: Now there are more consequences to these competing healthcare policies than just which political party loses more voters than the other. Besides the political advantage or disadvantage depending on your particular healthcare policy there are other results that come from having two competing groups in the population following their respective ideological choice.
Since the deaths occur mostly among the older portion of the population, there are impacts on other programs that benefit their budgets. Social Security will have less demand upon its spending since there will be fewer individuals receiving payments for as long as there would have been. This will prolong the viability of Soc. Sec.’s funding. The same beneficial impact will occur for Medicare. Fewer people will be spending as much as they would have on medical needs because they won’t have lived as long. Medicare funding will last longer.
There’s an odd twist to these morbid benefits which is even harder to recognize than the benefits just mentioned. The benefits from the differential deaths will flow disproportionately to the other group’s members. Fewer of them die, so the money from those who do in the other group is redistributed to them more than the fewer members left in the other group.
The “culling” of each herd is a strange counter-productive strategy for one political party but inversely is a productive strategy for the other. It is surprising that one party hasn’t thought of this. It is not clear if the other party has since it is not clearly in their interest to point it out; at least not yet.
Answer to Question 5: This should be an easy set of answer.
Politically, the healthcare policy that is less deadly is a political advantage.
Economically, the healthcare policy that is less deadly benefits the survivors of both groups but disproportionately the members of the political party promoted the less deadly policy.
Evolutionarily, the healthcare policy that ‘culled’ fewer of its population group is the very definition of a “survival of the fittest” process.
If you found this test disturbing that is quite understandable. If it has occurred to you that no one has raised these aspects of the political divide which has persisted for over a year; well, that’s a product of our political environment. The people that we listen to or don’t listen to are politicians. Politicians are not great thinkers or critical analysts. Who would expect politicians to see these implications? It not like these consequences are not generally obvious to anyone who stops and thinks about the question of how should the decision on what national healthcare policy should be set and followed. Even the healthcare experts didn’t pursue the consequences which they understood about differential mortality rates between the two choices; but they didn’t extrapolate those implications beyond the self-evident.
If only someone had looked at the “Unexpected Consequences” of our COVID healthcare policies between the political parties.
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