Santorum's bible belt wins last night [although he rakes in only 3 more delegates than Romney did, who won Hawaii, at the end of the day][actually turns out Romney finished 6 delegates ahead of Santorum overall] reminds me of this Politco essay from yesterday - essentially an article about how stupid voters are - I like the quote from a guy who runs a polling company on how he has to explain to his clients over and over again, because they get so frustrated from the incoherent results, of how they gotta keep in mind that, ya know, voters are stupid.
Now, none of this is new - I of course like to joke that the problem with democracy is that people get to vote - and I've said all along that the reason this GOP primary has been so disturbing is because of the way it has thrown into sharp relief the fact of how ignorant or misinformed or delusional or enthralled to simplistic instincts the average voter is - and that's because all along it's been very clear there has only ever been one credible candidate, and yet the likes of Herman Cain - Herman Cain people! - have at times been enthusiastically embraced by the electorate. I mean, think about it, in yesterday's southern primaries over two thirds of votes cast were for candidates that are deeply flawed [and in Gingrich's case mentally unstable as far as I'm concerned] and so ideologically extreme or otherwise compromised as to be virtually unelectable in a campaign versus Obama [and in Paul's case absolutely unelectable]. Even in Hawaii, which Romney won handily, still over half the votes cast were for guys who are either farcically unfit to be president or have no chance of beating Obama or both. How can a reasonable person not be troubled by something like this?
Democracy, in its modern incarnation, has in general seemed to survive this vulnerability of ignorance, possibly because the dynamic of change and individual empowerment implicit in the idea of democracy adds such vigor and value to a society that it easily out weighs the downside of electoral mistakes. My question is are we reaching a point where this balancing of good and bad, which by and large has tilted in our favor, starts tilting the other way? I'm thinking specifically of a few factors which seem to be working against us here - increased competition from the wider, often non-democratic world; mass media that seems to feed partisanship which in turn feeds gridlock which in turn feeds an impulse towards the ignorance of populism - and also how this saturation of mass media may rob elites [or the elites that really matter] of a power they have always had to control events [to that point a story I read recently fascinates because of how it reveals polls in the 60s showed most Americans opposed the space program - which means the program went ahead because elites understood how important it was]; and finally how the complexity to the problems we now face makes the knowledge gap in the electorate seem like a much more disturbing vulnerability than it did before - well, not just seem, the knowledge shortfall is now undeniably I think, when measured against the complexity of the issues facing us, a very real concern.
[of course the problems the EU is going through right now would strongly suggest that 'elites', especially of the bureaucratic kind, are no better at distinguishing up from down, good from bad, wise from ill advised, than the putatively 'ignorant' chattel of the state]
[and then even if one is willing to concede that Western democracies have become in a sense too democratic and therefore we must migrate towards some kind of oligarchic hybrid, you still have the problem of insuperable ideological divides - possibly the answer is getting rid of political parties, or just making the executive branch a truly independent body that is not beholden to a specific ideological agenda]
[I'm seen picking on republicans here but the fact is it was Obama's election that got me thinking in these terms - the utterly irrational way not just the average person, but also elites justified their enthusiasm for the man was quite disturbing - to me it's obvious that Obama is president because the country was swept up in a wave of mass delusion fed by abject ignorance and naivety. The real scary part is that all the alternatives to him were equally problematic - Palin a heartbeat away from the presidency? Jesus. Hillary probably would have been a better CEO than Obama but I have not been impressed at all by her performance as secretary of state - but at least her nomination would have made some rational sense. Historians may very well look back on the election of 2008 and say that was the point democracy took a blind turn down a very ugly road]
