A couple of unrelated things happened this week: President Bush’s approval rating hit 30% (yeah yeah, Zogby, caveat lector). And in Louisiana, Cool Cash Connoisseur William Jefferson got easily re-elected to another term to Congress, which he’ll be lucky to finish.
I once had a discussion with a clergyman about democracy, and he gamely proferred the Vox Populi, Vox Dei argument: Democracy offers the closest thing to the will of God. He was wrong: Individually or en masse, people are motivated by all kinds of things, good or bad. Sometimes we vote out of compassion, sometimes we vote out of bloodlust. Sometimes we vote out of courage, sometimes out of fear. Sometimes generosity, sometimes greed. Sometimes people rationalize the hell out of totally inexcusable behavior. Human nature is profoundly malleable.
We all try to use the polled popularity of an idea to bolster our arguments. Heck, I just did it the other day. And indeed, that’s what politics is all about. Now you hear folks on our side saying, You still support the Iraq war? You must think the American people are idiots! Go back four years, of course, and those clever American people, with all their good solid common sense, were tossing out Democrats on the mere suspicion that they might have enjoyed a croissant that morning, or deciding that losing three limbs in ‘Nam just wasn’t enough wartime cred.
The merit of an idea doesn’t have much to do with how many folks believe it. Galileo realized this in his heart of hearts: Eppur si muove — “And yet, it moves,” referring to the earth around the Sun. Of course, some bring up Galileo in a perverse attempt to use rejection of an idea as evidence of its merit; this is surprisingly common. (Hey, here’s more.)
George Will (a stopped clock is right twice a day, folks) relates a Babe Ruth story in his baseball book “Men at Work”:
Once when [umpire] Babe Pinelli called Babe Ruth out on strikes, Ruth made a populist argument. Ruth reasoned fallaciously (as populists do) from raw numbers to moral weight: “There’s 40,000 people here who know that last one was a ball, tomato head.” Pinelli replied with the measured stateliness of John Marshall: “Maybe so, but mine is the only opinion that counts.”
We don’t have an umpire in real life; we don’t have Walter Cronkite arbiting from the news desk anymore. And maybe that’s OK. But the atomized media world that we currently have lends itself awfully well to only hearing what you want to hear. The media “cocooned” itself in 2002 in the run-up to the Iraq War: Who wanted to hear from the skeptics? Honest skepticism was simply not a mainstream value. The best way to lose popular credibility was to be a sensible, moderate-minded person.
Sometimes the public opinion bandwagon hits a pothole, busts an axle and careens off the road. Sometimes we elect the wrong people. Sometimes we espouse beliefs that are ignorant, misguided, fantastical, or just nuts.
Sometimes, we’re idiots. We’re human. We can’t help it.
I’ve done a fair study of the Revolutionary War period. My conclusion is that the Founders agreed with you that The People can be unbelievably stupid. However, they also felt that The Elites were no less stupid.
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However, they believed that when push came to shove, and the going got tough, the best hope was that The People would eventually get a clue and do the right thing.
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In the end, they constructed a system of government that, they hoped would function during bad times to:
– stave off complete doom for a while until The People got a little smarts, and
– preserve the vote for The People so that they could effect changes, once they figured out what they should be.
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It worked well during the most recent depression – after flirting with extremism (e.g., the American Nazi Party, the KKK, and other similar groups became huge), the US turned to good basic Liberal ideals (i.e., FDR) and turned the country around.
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But the Founders were not hopeless optimists – they recognized the ever-present danger to their works. For example, I often think of this bit of Ben Franklin’s closing address to the Constitutional Convention:
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“In these sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”
In which case, the DUMBEST thing done here was to take civics away as a required course – bring back civics and model government…
The media doesn’t want a liberal skeptic. They’re more than happy to push conservative crap that no moderate or lefty would support in their right minds.
The really smart thing the Founding Fathers did was to make sure that the passions of the day did not rule — by creating lots of checks and balances — to protect us from ourselves. A republic form of government, with a bicameral legislature and an independent judiciary, was designed to do that and also as a great way to protect minorities from the abuses of the majority or the President. Look, in contrast, to California, where there is now government by referendum — essentially the plurality rules on important issues of the day. Voters get dozens of referendum questions at each election, often passing conflicting versions of the same laws as they respond to well-financed public advertising campaigns, and weakening the legislature and making it irrelevant in many respects.
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Sometimes the checks and balances result in gridlock, which can be really frustrating when timely action might be important, but that is a reasonable price to pay to deter us from hasty action and also to protect our underlying rights and liberties. Hey, that guy John Adams was really, really smart!
I’m hoping this statement wasn’t written after one too many transition meetings on civic engagement đŸ™‚
Charley, you should pick up a copy of Charles MacKay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds:
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“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”