Policy Versus Personality

Kamala Harris has exactly one chance to defeat Trump and it will come on 10th September

Allan Milne Lees
4 min readSep 6, 2024
Image credit: Slate

Thanks to the fact we humans are trapped inside ape-brains we lack the capacity to consider policy proposals and their likely consequences, we prefer easy-to-chant vacuous soundbites and we focus on personalities because that’s what evolution has hardwired us to do.

Hillary Clinton, one of the two most qualified Presidential candidates in US history (the other being Adlai Stevenson), was defeated in 2016 by a blustering compulsively lying moron not because the orange creature had better policy ideas (he had zero) but because Clinton failed to understand what drives people to vote. Perhaps one percent of the US voting-age population has the intellectual capacity and the desire to consider policy; everyone else votes on the basis of subliminal perceptions about personality.

When the creature Trump stood on stage behind Clinton as she attempted to make a reasoned argument about policy, what ordinary people saw was her failure to turn around and confront Trump and thereby crush him. Trump supporters — the least cognitively active members of the population — saw “their guy” looming over Clinton and imagined this meant he was the dominant male.

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Allan Milne Lees
Allan Milne Lees

Written by Allan Milne Lees

Anyone who enjoys my articles here on Medium may be interested in my books Why Democracy Failed and The Praying Ape, both available from Amazon.

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