Election Day thoughts on stupid voters
[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.
I’ve always blamed the voters. The whole point of the construct of the Republic is to protect us from the normative behavior of the power-hungry and nefarious that is a natural part of the mankind. And once you allow for people to vote on issues that pertain to private property while they own none–all bets are off. In Monterey County, California there is an additional $4,000 added to the tax bill beyond the already high configured taxes. Hmmm. I don’t wonder how that gets approved.
They are not necessarily stupid at all. Some are actually very smart, and I know plenty of Democrats in the latter category.
Well . . . “stupid is as stupid does.”
And there are also many stupid voters on the right
Not as many as on the left. Not, I should think, by several orders of magnitude.
“Not as many as on the left. Not, I should think, by several orders of magnitude.”
IO,
You should see how they view us! To themselves, they are the epitome of intelligence and righteous compassion. I don’t think it has to do with intelligent; many of the leftys I know are not stupid. It comes down to a mindset that substitutes their political belief for religion and how they then view their own self worth.
While Orwell came to the realization that those on his side (“Loyalists”) in Spain had a fair share of thugs, he apparently never came to the realization that:
1. “Loyalist” thuggery predated the outbreak of the war
2. “Loyalist” thuggery during the war was not confined to the Soviets and their lackeys.
1. On July 12, Assault Guards—government policemen—and others on the left killed Jose Calvo Sotelo, perhaps the Right’s most prominent member in Parliament. Government police killing an opposition member of Parliament was unprecedented in Western Europe. Many on the Right concluded, in a paraphrase of historian Stanley Payne, that it was safer to revolt than to not revolt.
2. Within weeks of the outbreak of the war, Anarchists and others on the left killed about a quarter of Spain’s clerics. These killings increased middle-class support for Franco.
This is a real problem. I think I’ve talked about this before, but it bears repeating.
In politics, the electorate is NEVER wrong.
What I mean by that is that you never ever attack the voters, whether it’s calling them stupid or lazy or whatever, because you are either the prosecution or the defense, and they are the judge and the jury.
Imagine a trial where one counsel says aloud that the jurors are idiots if they don’t agree with him. Even if it’s objectively true, it’s still stupid to call the jurors stupid.
A movie maker who insults the audience for not liking the movie he made sets himself up for future failure, because people have a long memory for that kind of thing. Just ask LucasFilm under Kathleen Kennedy.
The Left has taken repeated hits over the years because they have trouble hiding the condescension and contempt for ordinary people. We don’t want to fall into the same habits.
The movie comparison works on another level. It’s not the responsibility of the audience to like and pay to see a filmmaker’s movie. It’s the filmmaker’s job to make a movie the audience will pay to see. If the movie flops, it is by definition the failure of the moviemaker, or sometimes some external factor like covid shutdowns, never the failure of the audience.
Electoral politics is like that. No matter how angry or disappointed or scared a player in that game is, you still don’t get to disrespect the voters. All tgat does is strengthen the other side.
Two years ago on this site, many people were mistaking one election for a permanent realignment, and talking about how deep a hole the Dems were in. Go back and look if you doubt me.
Now some of us are acting as if we’re doomed and how stupid the voters are and we haven’t even seen the result yet.
Maybe it will be a disaster for us, maybe not. Either way, both sides start preparing for 2028 tomorrow. Either way, blaming the voters is futile and worse than futile, because the voters who pass judgement today will still be the ones we have to convince for 2028.
A car in front of me this morning had stickers all over the back, most of them the usual weird ones, but this one struck me: “Artificial intelligence creates mass stupidity.”
— neo
Also because market economics and capitalism rub human beings wrong at a visceral level. They work, but they don’t feel right to caveman, hunter-gatherer instincts. So socialism rises again over and over, as Kipling observed in The Gods of Copybook Headings.
Plus the fact that a lot of what we call market economics is actually an increasingly corrupt and exclusive oligarchy/oligopoly, which lets the socialists mix in a certain amount of damning truth to the rhetoric. Adding 20% truth to a lie makes it 100% more convincing to a naif.