Stupid Voters

I was listening to Dan Carlin's latest Common Sense episode 203 about "Upgrading the Electorate". He talked about the way most people are ignorant of public affairs and current events and how this makes us very poor voters. We do not feel in the least bit hesitant in voting on subjects that we know absolutely nothing about.

He sited an author in the podcast, Rick Shenkman, who wrote the book Just How Stupid Are We?: Facing the Truth About the American Voter. He summarized the types of ignorance as follows:

1. Sheer Ignorance - no knowledge of the facts
2. Negligence - disinclination to seek facts
3. Wooden Headedness - people that want to believe only what they already believe
4. Short Sightedness - inability to see long term consequences of current events
5. Bone Headedness - simplicity and gullibility, biases

It's interesting because it runs the gambit from inattention, through people being manipulated or pre-disposed in certain ways, to people actively selecting their own viewpoints despite any outside influence or information. Dan Carlin says he thinks that it's not a matter of people being stupid, as in incapable of learning, as it is that they are not interested. My thought is that there is a portion of those not interested because it's too much work to figure things out. This is the appeal of Talk Radio. People figure things out for you.

I was also watching the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and he showed a summary of Republican speakers who felt quite comfortable vilifying liberals in one voice and playing themselves off as the victims in the next. It seemed odd to have someone simultaneously bullying and browbeating their enemy while claiming they were being taken advantage of or being treated unfairly. This kind of speech strikes me as strange because is it self apparent that it is inconsistent and cannot be correct, yet this does not stop people from spewing nonsense and expecting everyone to lap it up as the gospel.

Our Founding Fathers believed that the average person should not be allowed to vote, only the educated elite (this was a phrase that was so much more applicable in that era than today, yet you hear it so much today). Back around the time of the American Revolution, being well read was much more common in the upper classes. People of means took great pains to educated their children, most particularly their eldest sons, in order to prepare them to manage estates or take their place in the leadership of society. While the printing press was spreading literacy and information at a much greater rate than in times past throughout history, there were still practical bars to acquiring the reasoning and analytical skills to discern the facts from the sea of raw information. Books were expensive, and newspapers were prone to opinion and exaggeration. Many of the laboring class were illiterate and uninterested in changing that status. Women were considered beneath consideration, too, and not expected to be interested in reading and literature. The Founding Fathers were well-steeped in a Classical Education that included Latin and Greek and the history of the great Roman and Greek civilizations that spawned all higher theories on science and society. The Founding Fathers were concerned, too, that the passions of the crowd could sway the people and move them to enact laws that were not well reasoned for the long term, or select leaders that were not deliberate thinkers, but passionate and poorly directed hot-heads.

The Republican primaries are in full swing now, so the brand of idealism that we see being shared most extensively right now is Conservatism. I am biased on that score, because I am prone to paint conservatives as Religious people that see the science of evolution and geology as an enemy, or greedy people that see the science of climate change as a barrier to making money the old fashion way and not worrying about what the impact on the planet is. Michelle Bachman in particular strikes me as a candidate that is willfully ignorant of a great deal of reality, yet strikes a chord in some people that gives gravitas to her ridiculous statements like the idea that the HPV vaccine can cause mental retardation because some voter in a meet and greet line told her this (and because she already believed that nasty things happen to people that get vaccines).

It is easy to start thinking that we almost need people to take a test that proves that they are at least paying attention to current events before they vote, and better yet to take a test on basic government functions and U.S. history before they are eligible to vote. I've often wondered how many U.S. citizens would be unable to pass a U.S. citizenship/naturalization test (see http://www.sporcle.com/games/lilchocdonut/uscitz to see if you could pass the test). The reason we don't do this is because our countries laws reflect the belief that everyone is entitled to a vote. Never mind that this was never true in history, all the way back to Greek and Roman times, the Democracies that we were supposed to be emulating. Originally, military service or property ownership was the minimum requirement for voter eligibility. We've been expanding those rights for some time, until now we have universal suffrage and an 18 year old voting age. Tests to qualify voters have a bad history, from post Civil War times when they were used to exclude black voters, so there is justified resistance to such a system. There is also a sense that rich or influential people might mass power in our system, but if we are to be truly democratic, a majority of the voters can assert their rights or displace a powerful usurper.

In any case, it feels as if this inattention of voters is not a good thing. It corrodes democracy by making it easier for elected officials to take over power and make changes to society against the popular will simply because people are not paying attention or not understanding what happens. While I myself have been guilty from time to time of thinking, "people that don't know what is going on should not be allowed to vote!" I think it is more fair to say that I wish more people understood what is going on.