Let’s talk about the creeping cancer of ignorance and stupidity….about 8 years ago I wrote about this cancerous growth on our society….
Sadly this disease has grown exponentially every since about 2009.
There are some that defend the ignorant voter….
Earlier this week I defended media horse-race coverage; this time I’m going to defend…ignorant, and even flat-out stupid, voters.
This comes up because we’re getting voter-on-the-street interviews – not to mention the regular New York Times focus groups – all of which reveals that many voters know very little about lots of things. And in the social media age, everyone gets to insult those voters; I saw one reaction that just said: ”Please just don’t vote.”
To which I’ll respond: Please do.
Not because I disagree about how uninformed voters can be. They certainly are.
So are informed voters, actually. No one in the US is a policy expert in all the things that their national, state, and various local elected officials will have to deal with, or all the policy positions candidates for all those offices hold. It’s simply not possible. There’s way, way too much. And that’s just candidate elections; there are also ballot measures. It’s a lot.
That we feel otherwise, and beat up on voters who don’t measure up, is an unfortunate consequence of US political culture, which values individualism rather than taking group cues. But democracy doesn’t depend on well-informed voters!
There are a couple of ways into this. One is that we expect too much of elections. After all, while we can’t be expert in every policy area, it doesn’t really matter because a vote is incapable of transmitting that much information anyway – all it really does is to say that we prefer this candidate to the other one(s). Not why. It’s true that various people including the candidates may interpret our votes as saying “end the war” or “implement my farm price support program” or “interact with constituents more than what the previous officeholder did,” but the vote itself is silent on that.
https://goodpoliticsbadpolitics.substack.com/p/what-about-stupid-ignorant-voters
For me there is no excuse for being an ignorant voter….but it does take time away from Instagram and god forbid that would ruin one’s day.
Sadly the uninformed make up a very large group of voters….they vote on emotional issues and not what is best for the nation….and thusly we have the era in which we live now.
This coming election will prove interesting in several ways….will the stupid win the day or will common sense win out?
Any thoughts?
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”