A Boring Dystopia

If you were to draw a Venn Diagram of the skill sets of salespeople and politicians, it wouldn't quite be a circle, but I suspect it'd be pretty close. Politicians exist to convince you that they are going to represent your interests in whatever level of government they are running for. Once there, they need to negotiate for their policy positions with the other elected representatives. The main difference is that the currency of politicians is votes, instead of money.

Sure, some of them might actually believe the bullshit coming out of their mouths. But, even then, they have to convince others to vote for them and then vote with them. That requires skills like negotiation, and persuasion, much the same as sales. Though, politicians probably have a greater emphasis on public speaking.

Nah, salesmen actually give you what they're selling

They're not salesmen per se, but they do need to be able to sell their ideas to the public.

Sales skills would definitely help.

It would be great if politicians could all be philosophers writing political theory.

But that's not what gets the votes. In a democracy, the most important skill of a politicians is being able to sell their ideas.

There's a reason populism is popular. Because people don't read theory, people read posts on X.

In general, yes. Especially at the national level, politicians are not reading and writing bills. They delegate that work to their staff, and/or take prepared drafts from various interest groups. The politician's job is to be the face of the operation and garner support for the bill or cause at hand. They also spend a ton of their time raising money for their next election campaign, or the campaigns of their friends and party members.

In a similar vein, political parties are essentially marketing organizations. The party's job is to get its members elected. Parties will change their platforms over time if they think it will give them an electoral advantage.

This is what consumer culture does to the brain. Yes, these people expect politicians to "sell" them on ideology. What they mean is they expect to be flattered and have all their thinking done for them, just like Tick Tock and Insta.

It's endemic on the right and common on the left for people to have this "customer service" attitude toward politics.

Of course very few people are actually persuaded by anything they didn't already believe, but it gives them agency of choice to imagine that they went with the side that was the best value proposition I guess.