The modern school of political strategy which holds that, despite conventional belief to the contrary, very few elections are won by convincing supporters of other parties or candidates to support your candidate instead. Finkelthink doctrine holds that - in the modern world - voters' minds are already made up by the time an election begins. The
trick instead is /to discourage supporters of your opponent from voting at all/.
To do this, a candidate must
run a highly personalized negative campaign against the opponent: don’t demonize the party, demonize the candidate.
People can be made to
hate individuals more easily than institutions (and also with far more animus).
Facts matter
little in the Finkelthink
model. If some perceptual
flaw on an opponent's part can be readily identified, then it can also be magnified by suggestion to catastrophic proportions. Even a '
bad' candidate
may win a
race handily if - once the unthinking masses have been finkeled with -- his opponent appears prohibitively worse by comparison.
Core principles of Finkelthink:
(1) 80% of the public doesn’t care about the news
(
2) Perception, not content, is what matters most to mid-wit viewers
(3) The right 30-second soundbite can manipulate millions to your side (that is, away from the side of your opponent)
Carried out to a sufficient level, Finkelthink and its analogues can transform an apparent buffoon into the
next Leader of the Free World.
"Once the Trump campaign was
able to convincingly associate
Hillary and her staff with
corruption, Finkelthink took care of the rest."
