I understand the 85% of Republicans who feel that way. But the 38% of Democrats? Fucking morons, we are.
I think the answer is stop treating the majority of voters as completely rational, and completely independent, entities. We need to think in terms of Rhetoric in the classical sense, of someone directing the passions of the crowd, and not dispassionately choosing X instead of Y because of their perfectly mathematically sound utilitarian behaviors.
Recent study that explains alot:
It’s pretty debatable that Democracy main feature is even choosing the right path forward, but rather having a transfer of power that’s much more civilized that most alternatives, and buy-in, it’s one thing if the unelected tyrant decides to do something, it’s another when it’s the leader that the people chose.
In any case, Democracy as it exists doesn’t really prioritize having intelligent, informed electors, but rather people who vote on your team, whatever your team is. Choosing people for a Parliament like structure in a random way (preferably with some rules, you’ll need some education) would probably produce better results than voting them in, or at least, not any worse.
My faith tradition tells me I must love these voters. The Devil on my shoulder says we should convince them that Election Day is Wednesday, November 9th.
👹
Election fraud exposé/“documentary” film by Catherine Engelbrecht (of “True the Vote”) and Dinesh’s D’Souza isn’t breaking new ground.
Karen demonstrates how the essential root of the “ELECTION WAS STOLEN” myth persists:
there must have been cheating, because no rational person could possibly vote for Biden
Democracy is a system for apportioning power, nothing more or less. It is very well aligned with some goals, not so much with others. If your over-arching social goal is stability, adherence to some definition of “right” or “rational,” or any specific policy or viewpoint, democracy is not the best system. Some form of authoritarian rule would be much more likely to achieve your desired results. Democracy is the best system if you value process over results; if it is more important that people have a say in things, than in what that say actually is, democracy is better than authoritarian rule. It’s all about what you prioritize.
That being said, democracy in America only worked because the Founders deliberately limited the range of people who could participate, initially. They knew damn well that left to their own devices the bulk of any population would turn into a self-serving mob and turn democratic systems into chaos. So they built a system where a good portion of the people they didn’t trust–Native Americans, the enslaved, often free Black people, women, sometimes the poor or uneducated–were excluded. And even among their own kind, as it were, properties white Christian men, they had to write the Constitution broadly enough to allow for things like slavery in order to get a common denominator wide enough to ensure that disagreements would be more matters of degree than of kind.
It worked until they became victims of their own success. The republic they built, even when rather exclusionist, hinted at a much broader, more egalitarian society than they most likely envisioned. People picked up that idea and ran with it, broadening the polity over the years. The problem was the system, the democratic parts of it, was never designed to mediate between extremes, only between relatively narrowly separated positions. And a good portion of the country spent an enormous amount of effort making sure that the local polity did not become educated or informed, even to the point of getting them to support social and economic systems that were directly hostile to their own well-being.
Today we have a reflection of the same thing, only not quite as geographically gated. The GOP has taken on the mantle of the southern planters, and has used every trick in the book to keep the (vastly expanded) electorate distracted, misinformed, ignorant, and angry, in order to block off avenues of dissent and expression inimical to the interests of the party leaders. The problem isn’t really that people are ignorant, it’s that they have no interest in the sort of goals and outcomes many of us have, because they have already defined those goals and outcomes as radically different from and opposed to their own. No amount of education, information, or fact checking will make a bit of difference when you have people who are fundamentally opposed to basic ideological frameworks.
tl;dr, the nation long ago ceased to be homogenous enough to make the original system work. It now only functions on a fragmented, regional basis at best.
The Senatorial Sorting Hat has spoken. (disclaimer: clickbaity socmedia junk)
https://twitter.com/AshleyRParker/status/1557502638379487241
Historians privately warn Biden that America’s democracy is teetering
When Biden met with historians last week at the White House, they compared the threat facing America to the pre-Civil War era and to pro-fascist movements before World War II
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/10/biden-us-historians-democracy-threat/
This is interesting, I am glad he is trying to learn from the past when assessing the seriousness of the climate and likely outcomes of decisions.
But why does the tweet and article say it was a Socratic dialogue? Did Biden ask the historians questions in a way that will actually teach the academics about history? Or did the historians ask the President questions for 2 hours so that he can teach himself through his answers?
Congrats, you just learned from a Socratic headline.
I lolled, well done.