[NOTE: I plan to put up a new post after the polls in the east close, one for Election Night.]

Here’s food for thought – “Stupid Voters Are the Biggest Threat to America”:

What worries me are voters. Sadly, many of them are stupid. And angry. …

We have millions of Americans heading to the polls who believe socialism will make their lives more affordable. That price controls and government takeover of private industry will ease inflation and cure what ails capitalism, so abhorrent to their central planning sensibilities. …

“If a majority of Americans think that socialism is the right path, well the American experiment is over in a sense. It would be very, very difficult to recover from that. That’s a multi-generational recovery kind of thing,” Charles Steele, director of the Center for Commerce and Freedom at Hillsdale College, told me on a recent episode of The Federalist Radio Hour.

Yes, of course there are plenty of stupid voters on the left. And there are also many stupid voters on the right – for example, a significant number of those who follow and admire Tucker Carlson and are bona fide isolationist Buchananite “conservatives.”

As I said, plenty of stupid voters – but there are also plenty of misguided voters (who tend to land on the left) who’ve been fed a steady diet of leftist propaganda all or much of their lives. They are not necessarily stupid at all. Some are actually very smart, and I know plenty of Democrats in the latter category.

The author of that piece I linked goes on to acknowledge this:

How did we get here? Ignorance. Willful ignorance.

From pre-K through grad school, America’s education system has failed America and the American Dream in many ways. None more so than in sweetening socialism and poisoning capitalism in the minds of the last few generations of voters. Marxist critical theory — oppressors vs. the oppressed — dogma has indoctrinated millions to believe that socialism can work if only done right, failure after failure notwithstanding.

The media and social media are right up there as agents in this, with some foreign players in the mix (for example those behind TikTok).

But are the stupid more susceptible to this sort of indoctrination? That’s not what I’m seeing out there. Orwell’s famous remark in his essay “Notes on Nationalism” was this:

One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.

It’s often been misquoted/paraphrased as something like “Some ideas are so stupid only an intellectual would believe them,” which captures more or less the same idea.

But remember something. Orwell was a brilliant man, and an insightful one. But to his dying day he was a socialist. I wrote about that phenomenon in this 2014 post. An excerpt:

Orwell was a brilliant man, and he struggled to reconcile his wish for a certain type of world with his knowledge that such a world could probably never come to be as he wished it. Much of his writing was devoted to the horrors of failed attempts to achieve that world. …

It is my opinion that Orwell came very close to understanding that his vision of a planned economy plus freedom could not come to pass, that the contradiction was basic, and that socialism would always sow the seeds of its own destruction. I just think he couldn’t fully face and embrace that knowledge because to do so would have meant renouncing a lifelong dream. So he clung to some notion of a kinder gentler socialism without the totalitarianism, while at the same time he wrote tirelessly about the evils of Communism.

Also, in this 2008 post of mine I quote Orwell in 1937’s The Road to Wigan Pier:

One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words “Socialism” and “Communism” draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker. nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England.

Was Orwell a time-traveler?

But yes, he remained a socialist anyway because the dream dies hard.