Jón Ólafsson

How can we distinguish good politics from bad politics? One could do it formally or procedurally and one could do it substantially or from the point of view of the content. The formal part is easy. One can most often determine whether or not some given formal requirements have been fulfilled or not, if they are clear and explicit at least. Parliamentary proceedings or the proper discussion of policy issues in terms of how long it was conducted, how and to what extent the discussion included those it was supposed to include and so on. The substantial part is less easy, but still not very difficult to determine, i.e. one can enumerate the issues discussed, how thoroughly each item was discussed and so on. But it is more difficult to identify rhetorical tricks, or whether or not non-sequiturs appear in a discussion, and generally to assess the logical quality of the discussion. But that one has to do in order to judge a discussion as bad politics or good politics. You have to judge the logical force of the arguments (as opposed to their rhetorical force). One may still recognize bad politics for what it is, it may not be difficult to make the distinction intuitively, one knows a flawed piece of argument when one hears it. But to claim that it is bad logic is a totally different story. It depends eventually on everyone’s being able to see the logical flaws. That’s simply unrealistic.