Politics stupefies.
In private you’ve an idea to benefit your community. In private everyone agrees it’s a good idea. Now you must bring the idea to the voters. One party wants credit for the idea, the other party wants to prevent that. Your idea gets politicized, that is, simplified, exaggerated, distorted, for either party’s advantage. The bigger the community, the more complex the idea, the less aware the electorate, the more your idea gets mangled in presentation.
Self-government works best in small jurisdictions with involved voters. There a trivial or non-existent issue cannot be inflated into a horror, because neighbors know better. The supposed issue of transgender kids in bathrooms, say. In the few communities where this quandary occurs, no one mistakes it for a game-changer. Knowing your neighbors, you’re likelier to care for them.
America’s Founders were alert to the risk of an ignorant electorate. They restricted the vote to white male property owners in part to benefit their own class, but more to forestall what they called “mob rule.” Democracy on this scale was a new idea and they wanted it to work. Gradually, the plebiscite was expanded to include pretty much everybody, the population multiplied, distractions proliferated, and issues grew more complex. To win elections, politicians simplified and distorted to a toddler’s comprehension level. Ambitious politicians could escalate DEIS and immigrant hordes into dire threats when anybody who knew anything knew they were no such thing.
Stupid voters are likelier to make stupid choices. Their stupidity makes them targets for charlatans. The less popular one’s program, the more one will be tempted to terrify voters with bogus bogeys to win elections. This is what happened to the Republicans over recent decades. The American majority do not favor more money for the wealthy, so the wealthy re-presented themselves as advocates for “the people.” The innocent Democrats trusted that this wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing subterfuge would never work: the voters weren’t that stupid! The Democrats were wrong.
Thinkers since Nietzsche have foreseen this “post-truth” crisis. Thirty years ago, Carl Sagan eloquently envisioned today. “Science is more than a body of knowledge,” he wrote,
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedit is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost their ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
In the present Civil War between democracy and tyranny, if freedom-lovers prevail, we must grapple with democracy’s short-comings. A democracy that selects the Nameless One as its leader – twice! – is hardly worth fighting for. How do we mitigate the inevitable stupefaction of politics, so we make creditable choices? How do we bend our politics toward truth, awareness, the common good, and away from vile misleaders?
This is an existential, not a partisan issue, and should be treated as such. Democrats aren’t smarter than Republicans, they’re just fed fewer lies. The incompetence of the Nameless One and his goons may prove freedom-lovers’ lucky break, persuading a thumping majority of their unfitness. If the tyrants prevail, questions about self-governance will be superfluous. Debate will be prohibited, only mindless obedience allowed.